I think you can stick a fork in the presidential dreams of John McCain - his campaign is sinking so spectacularly that they can see the shipreck from Canada.
After waiting eight years for a second chance at the Republican presidential nomination, McCain and his famed Straight Talk Express - the moniker given his campaign bus - have officially hit the ditch.
A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll this week showed McCain, the presumptive Republican front-runner as recently as January, languishing with just 14 per cent support, 15 points behind the front-runner, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. According to the nationwide poll, Romney had pulled even with McCain, despite lacking McCain's name recognition.
Worse yet for the 70-year-old senator, he trails Republican actor and lawyer Fred Thompson, a candidate who has still not formally entered the Republican field. "McCain is sinking," says Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia.
The apparent collapse of McCain's campaign has stunned longtime Republican fundraisers and activists, who only last year scrambled to donate money and sign on as political advisers.
How did it go so wrong? The most obvious reasons for McCain's woes, say analysts, are his unswerving support for the war in Iraq and President George W. Bush's recent troop surge. McCain's unpopular stand has driven away independent voters and moderate Republicans who supported his insurgent campaign against Bush in 2000.
Never popular with Republican conservatives, McCain has recently alienated them further with his outspoken defence of controversial legislation that would give 12 million undocumented immigrants a path to American citizenship.
"He is crosswise to conservatives on immigration, and the people who were most excited about him in 2000 - the moderate Republicans - are mad at him on Iraq," observes Cal Jillson, a presidential historian at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. "The political base is just not there for him in nearly the same way it was in 2000, and he's eight years older."
McCain's stand on the war actually would have helped him with most Republicans, but there are other strong candidates in the field in that regard and none of them are trying to ram an unpopular amnesty for illegals down the throats of the American people.
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