McCain in trouble

From the St Petersburg Times yesterday:

Once the consensus 2008 nominee, McCain trails Giuliani in most polls, and lacks the deep pockets of Romney or the enthusiasm of Fred Thompson's supporters. A recent Quinnipiac poll asked voters who they would chose if McCain dropped out of the race, something he has said he will not do. His name recognition isn't the problem, said Brett Doster, a Republican strategist who says he is not supporting any candidate. "The tough issue for McCain is that everybody knows who he is, and he's still losing traction, " Doster said. "When you're a former front-runner, the day people start asking are you going to drop out, it's certainly not a good development. "It's hard to come back from that."

McCain's been polling in the single digits in Iowa. And a recent New Hampshire poll shows him loosing to Romney. As Sound Politics wrote yesterday:

McCain's crippled campaign is re-tooling its efforts into an almost exclusive focus on Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. How that works after gutting his Iowa staff is difficult to conceptualize. And it's not like the independents he relied on in 2000 for a victory in New Hampshire are clamoring to rejoin the Straight Talk Express thanks to Iraq.

What's happening is the exact opposite of the "strategy memo" (really pablum for the masses) his team put out in May. Larry Sabato's quote is, "The campaign is dying." It's dying because McCain was the heir apparent, and like Hillary, needed to capture the aura of inevitability for the campaign to work. Hillary's pulled it off so far. But these two candidates can't stage some kind of comeback, when its not a matter of name-recognition or anything like that.