Fascinating development today, and I give McCain a little credit for it: he dared to tell a crowd, right up against their own strenuous objection, that while he believes he'd be a vastly better President than Obama, that he also believes Obama to be fundamentally decent and that the nation need not be terrified of an Obama Presidency.
McCain can be a bit tone deaf emotionally, and he might have said this earlier, because any clips I see of his rallies show crowds that keep turning uglier and uglier in their flat hatred of Obama. I think this just goes to show that we keep claiming "Woe is us, that we have to put up with all these negative ads" -- when the fact is that untold millions of us just can't seem to get enough of them, or the so-called "red meat" of some gut-slashing alleged duel of good versus evil.
McCain has got to be feeling conflicted in all kinds of ways. We're in a crisis that does not neatly fit his Bushie economic dogma. He must be aware on some inner level on how he has allowed himself to become a wholly different McCain from the one we could respect up until circa 2004. And he can probably see the writing on the wall, and has got to be thinking "Once all this is done, there's got to be immediate peace, this hate can't keep galloping along on its own momentum."
McCain may even be realizing that there are plenty of psycho idiots who would assassinate Obama just on "principle," and that he's got to say something for the record casting him light-years distant from that sort of attitude.
I thank him for it -- cynically, with a proverbial tablespoon of salt, but I thank him.