NYT Endorsement Kiss of Death for John McCain?

In the final round of last night’s debate, Rudy Giuliani laid a haymaker on John “Rambo” McCain in a way that seemed (almost) unintentional. Responding to a question about why the New York Times endorsed McCain and not local-boy Rudy, Rudy retorted that no conservative gets endorsed by the Times.  Same goes for the NEA’s endorsement of Mike Huckabee. Real conservatives just don’t get endorsed by the NYT or the NEA. Nuff said?

Not quite, it appears. Rambo is not amused:

I like McCain a lot,” Stallone said in an interview that aired Thursday. “Things may change along the way, but there’s something about matching the character with the script, and right now the script is being written and reality is pretty brutal and hard edge [sic] and like a rough action film, you need somebody who’s been in that to deal with it.

These big screen stars have such a way with words.

Last night, the press was in fine form. Before the GOP debate, that venerable liberal sot, the New York Times, announced its endorsements of Hillary Clinton and John McCain, nicely tying the two together in the same virtual headline. Nice of the Times to offer such moral clarity just before Floridians go to the polls.

Later, during the debate, Tim Russert, showed why so many view Tim as a bore and an a-s. His questions about Romney’s religion (can we get off that, finally?) and how much Romney has spent of his personal funds in Florida were irrelevant and nasty.

After mostly disposing of the religion issue, Romney needs to go after the money thing more aggressively. It’s obvious that the media, especially Russert, wants to use class envy against him. Russert isn’t content being a journalist. Nope. He has to affect the outcome. But given what insiders know about Mitt and Anne Romney — they are remarkably down-to-earth despite the $$ — they ought to be able to dismiss the “Mitt has too much money to be President” argument fairly easily.

To his credit, Russert caught McCain in a lie, asking him about McCain’s comment, originally published in the Boston Globe:

The issue of economics is not something I’ve understood as well as I should. I’ve got Greenspan’s book.

McCain’s denial was anything but “straight talk.” Fact is that he doesn’t know anything about economics and shouldn’t pretend to. While we’re talking McCain, can I just say that his laugh evokes Tom Cruise. Very unsettling.

Romney scored big on one of the dumbest Russert questions of the evening (and that’s saying something) about whether the Iraq war has been worth all the blood and treasure spent on it. Romney picked up the question after the others had meandered all over it to little effect. His response was brilliant: without diminishing the sacrifices made by our honored dead, the focus today should be on how to make permanent progress Iraq. Blood and treasure spent in the past are sunk costs.

Interesting dynamics emerged between the media and the GOP field and among the field.

First, the media were evidently impressed by the overall quality of the repartee even though, for the most part, the candidates avoided beating each other up. (Well, OK, somebody needs to beam up Ron Paul.) Point is that the media are seeing the GOP primary as an entertaining horse race. They can have fun and make money from it. As a result they’re newly engaged. Nice contrast from what has now boiled down, on the Dem side, to a two-way contest over who can most effectively brand the other a racist. The contrast won’t help the Dems in November. It may turn out, contrary to established political doctrine, that the longer the GOP primary continues to be competitive, the better they’ll do in the fall.

Second, I got the impression that the GOP candidates recognized last night that their mean-spirited attacks on Romney weren’t producing the desired results. Romney’s position as Florida front-runner may have something to do with that. Another factor may be the recognition that the meanness, no matter who’s in the lead, is a turnoff to most voters.

What I saw last night was a 4-player prisoner’s dilemma game with a few, carefully chosen defections. The defections, however, were predictable. McCain and Huckabee continued the alliance struck in South Carolina. Huckabee was first to defect with a 2nd Amendment jab at Romney.

On the other side were Romney and Giuliani. Romney apparently recognized that building up Giuliani takes down McCain which works for Romney because he doesn’t have to go negative to boost his chances. Giuliani senses that he’s unlikely to pull votes from Romney and is better off going after McCain’s. Hence, apparently, Rudy’s last-minute haymaker.

Did I mention that, at Intrade, Romney-to-win Florida is now trading at 60 with McCain at 30? At 5 pm last night, they were 52-40, respectively. This graph captures the action:

Not sure who gets the most credit for McCain’s free-fall since last night — McCain, the Times or Rambo. I wonder about that NYT endorsement. What strategy, if any, did the NYT have in mind?