Circular Firing Squad Update 3--GOP Drags Down McCain

A Beltway elite, Anne Applebaum, explains how the Grand Old Party to which McCain belongs repulses her and makes it impossible for her to vote for him:

The larger point, though, is that if I'm not voting for McCain -- and, after a long struggle, I've realized that I can't -- maybe it's worth explaining why, for I suspect there are other independent voters who feel the same. Particularly because it's not his campaign, disjointed though that has been, that finally repulses me: It's his rapidly deteriorating, increasingly anti-intellectual, no longer even recognizably conservative Republican Party. His problems are not technical; they do not have to do with ads, fundraising or tactics, as some have suggested. They are institutional; they have to do with his colleagues, advisers and supporters.

Andrew Sullivan concurs that the Party put an indelible mark on the candidate and campaign:

This is an election about change. The only way McCain could have reversed this dynamic was attacking Bush as a disaster from Day One. But he couldn't do that with the party he heads up and his 90 percent pro-Bush voting record. Failing that, he could have picked Lieberman as his veep, and cast his ticket as a bi-partisan, experienced change agent. But his party could not have tolerated that either. No social and cultural moderate can be a Republican presidential ticket in the era of Rove. So McCain was left with the party that brung him - and we now know what motivates that party: fear of the other and religious fanaticism. Hence his appalling fall campaign - among the most disgusting and hollow I can remember.

So, the GOP repulses voters. We'll see. I look at the poll porn constantly, yet I still sleep pretty poorly.