I gotta tell you guys that as a non-American, this whole election is probably one of the more interesting things to follow on TV these days.
My first exposure to John McCain was when he guested on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart a few years back. At the time, I found him to be a very reasonable, articulate and decent man and was kinda shocked to learn he was on the Republican side (8 years of Dubya sorta soured a lot of people against that particular party).
But the John McCain I've seen since his nomination is radically different, from my perspective. I suspect that he's allowing the Karl Roves and/or other Republican strategists to dictate the nature of his campaign, from the negative attacks to the appointment of Sarah Palin as his VP nominee (obviously trying to curry favour with all the Dems who supported Hillary Clinton), and is just now realizing that he should have run his own campaign, rather than towing the party line. Unfortunately for him, it appears to be too little, too late (again, from the perspective of a non-citizen).
As for the townhall meetings, some of the blame definitely rests on the media bias that seems to be more blatant than ever before. Seriously, how can some of these anchors sleep at night, especially after spouting such outright lies (the "terrorist fist bump" comes instantly to mind)? If anything, I blame the media for "feeding the bears", so to speak, and creating this us-versus-them mentality that results in shouts of "kill him" and "terrorist" from the rhetoric-challenged.
It's really too bad, as in pretty much any other election I think he'd have been a shoe-in. I kinda feel sorry for the guy.
