Slate:
To get a sense of what John McCain is going through on the eve of the last presidential debate with 20 days before Election Day and Barack Obama leading in the polls, I decided to put some pressure on myself: I delayed working on this story until 45 minutes before my deadline. To approximate the string of people in McCain's ear offering advice, I turned on Fox News and Rush Limbaugh. Be the happy warrior! Attack! Talk about Ayers! Don't mention Ayers! Fire your campaign staff! ACORN! I then put Wagner on my iTunes.
I'm finding it very hard to concentrate. If we're all lucky, I may just give up and end this piece right here.
He doesn't. He goes on to write 1024 words. In 45 minutes. And it's not some nonsense stream-of-consciousness thing, it's solid analysis. I'm glad Dickerson did it, because I'd sure hate to. I'm also sure the post would suck -- "John McCain have to do good in debate tonight... Probably do bad. Poor John McCain." Then I'd read it back, realize it was way too short and add "Poor, poor, poor, poor John McCain," like a kid padding his word count in an essay. As it is, I'll take it easy and, apparently retarded by comparison, struggle with sentence structure and that one guy's name... What the hell is that one guy's name? Praise the Google. It's been my salvation more than once. In my defense, I type out all my HTML -- all that <a href="http://somelink.com" target="_BLANK"> stuff? All me.
Dickerson's bit of journalistic flash is pretty straight forward; going into tonight's debate, John McCain is pretty screwed. He titles his piece "McCain's Mission? Impossible." They aren't passing it around at McCain HQ today. He writes that "Wednesday's debate comes with a degree of difficulty perhaps beyond the capacity of human achievement" for McCain. Do or die tonight and probably die...
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