So this is McCain’s VP nominee? Not exactly. That he’s in the mix is actually a sign of McCain’s weakness.

Via comments threads, email and even offline conversation, I’m hearing considerable worry currently that Obama is (a) dumping his progressive positions faster than a Blue Dog who’s been huffing Metamucil and (b) his poll slippage and relatively calm and measured responses to McCain attacks means yet another election is being allowed to slip away via complacence.

So I turned to a reasonably well-known political skeptic whose cynicism about progressive prospects extends back twenty years. The guy who said, in January 2003 that a war with Iraq would see atrocities on both sides, including murder, torture and tragic levels of civilian casualties. The guy who said, one day after Bob Dole lost in 1996, that the GOP had already prepared a prince-in-waiting for his royal succession, in the form of George W. Bush. The guy who predicted an unknown from New Hampshire would prove a challenge to John Kerry because of his war opposition. The guy who predicted in the summer of 2004 that Ohio would be the decisive state in the 2004 election, and lost confidence in Kerry’s chances when he abandoned Missouri as he entered the final month of his campaign. And the guy who, in 2006, was predicting a housing bubble and collapse would impact the 2008 elections and that gasoline prices - then around $2.50 - would break above $4/gallon and might see the edge of $5/gallon within the same period.

To be fair, his record as a prognosticator isn’t perfect. In early 2007, he said the Democratic nomination was “Hillary’s to lose”, before conceding, on February 19th of this year, that she had, indeed, not only lost the race, but had been bested by a superior campaign team. But the last time he’d misjudged a primary campaign or election outcome before that was in August 1988 when he predicted a Dukakis win that he watched Dukakis squander away with two major missteps afterward.

And what does this ‘expert’ foresee in the next 13 weeks and cite for evidence to back his predictions?

1) John McCain is running a reactive, defensive campaign that only goes on the offensive like a guerrilla squad does, infrequently, when conditions permit. He cannot find traction with a sustained frontal assault. And will concentrate his resources for the final eight weeks for that.

2) In fact, McCain is so worried about his chances that he’ll have two VP candidates completely vetted and ready to run. But he won’t make his final choice for another 25 days. Both the internal polling done in the week before the GOP convention and Obama’s VP selection will be considered before McCain makes his move.

Eric Cantor’s a stiff who makes Mitt Romney seem charismatic by comparison. Choosing him would only be done if McCain considers VA in danger of being lost and absolutely vital for his shot at a victory. Without national name recognition and having never won a statewide race, it’s not even a certainty he could deliver Virginia. All he would do is reassure McCain’s GOP base. And if McCain still feels he needs to do that, he’s clearly in serious straits.

3) The two other names most commonly floated are Tim Pawlenty and Mitt Romney. Both make more sense from a conventional perspective. Pawlenty would hold his own against any Obama VP nominee at debate time, but then, that traditionally has minimal impact on an election outcome. Consider how Bentsen decimated Quayle, for example. But could Pawlenty carry his home state of Minnesota? The polling there suggests that state remains out of McCain’s reach, so he remains a longshot, unless McCain’s feeling confident.

Romney might have the pull to swing Michigan, however, if the polling there stays close. He adds extra funding gravitas, something McCain will clearly need. Rob Portman of Ohio could be called on to try and anchor that state for McCain. Based on the polling to date, VA and OH are way more within McCain’s reach than even Michigan.

Of the four, Portman’s the most likely choice because he has higher ambitions himself, has won a significant swath of Ohio in his Congressional campaigns, has greater name recognition than anyone but Romney, and may be backed by Bush. Though the latter might be a negative in a suffering economy, the Bush brand’s not as damaged in half of Ohio as it is in the more industrial north of the state.

Choosing Pawlenty would be a sign of supreme confidence by McCain. Choosing Cantor would be a sign of extreme worry. Choosing Portman would indicate he’s trying hard to win Ohio - another sign of worry - but as a sign of continuation of Bushonomics, it’s balanced by a small measure of confidence that Ohioans will be okay with that.

And the amateur prognosticator believes Portman and Cantor are the two McCain will choose from, just before the GOP convention. The problem for McCain then, is how to hang on to both states because he’s likely going to need both to secure a victory. If he wins Florida plus only one of the two, he’d also need to sweep other states that Bush won - CO, NV, MT, ND - to win. And he doesn’t have a lock on any of those four as yet. Nor, for that matter, can he count on Florida.

All traces of McCain the independent maverick have completely disappeared. He has adopted in its entirety the Rovian campaign strategies of personal attacks, flung in rapid succession, and will likely bear down with any that show some signs of sticking. At the same time, behind the scenes, the microtargeting Rove was famous for developing will also be employed. So will the race card, though more subdued to grant him room for deniability.

And it will all be for naught.

It will also be for naught that Bush will likely begin withdrawing US troops from Iraq. Iraq was an issue for the primaries but will be less so for November. McCain will lose not because of Iraq and not because Obama’s a solid motivational speaker, though both those facts add a little more weight against him.

Of the two great reasons McCain won’t win, one’s pretty obvious: the economy.

If it hasn’t reached its pre-election low, it will this month. But when the Congressional recess is over, Republican legislators will be motivated to pass another economic stimulus package, to boost the GOP’s odds for November. (Note to progressives: this may be the best opportunity for progressive economic legislation to occur as part of that package for two or three years, so what do we have that can be advanced now? That’s where our focus should be, not on the presidential race)

The economy should level out some, likely rising a little in September and October, but hardly enough to bring great rebounds over the serious concerns that accompany it today. With higher income Americans as worried as they were from 1990-93, that’s a pretty bad portent for McCain. It cost an incumbent re-election in 1992 and McCain lacks the advantage of incumbency. He also lags the drag that Ross Perot created for Bush, so the economy, alone, is not sufficient by itself to make the outcome predictable.

Everything discussed thus far just points to a near deadlock, another in a line of close popular vote and electoral vote totals. No prognosticator could call this race before the final two weeks based on all that.

The final piece of the puzzle comes from team Obama. First, he’s mastered the online technology, refining the strategies first pioneered by Howard Dean, and done it so successfully that he’s erased the historical funding advantages the GOP formerly held. Second, drawing on the organizational methods from pioneers of the 1960s Civil Rights movement (first gained by Obama via contacts he made while attending Harvard) and other organizational methods he used as a community organizer and melded together successfully in his primary campaign, Obama will also utilize the microtargeting databases the national party has been building as it played catch-up with the GOP tactics Rove so successfully exploited.

All those things, added together, means Team Obama’s ground campaign of hundreds of paid organizers have already caught up to the GOP’s and surpassed it. By miles.

It’s now McCain who has the unenviable task of trying to play catch-up and the time left to accomplish that is just too short. That’s why McCain has had to completely abandon everything he ever claimed to stand for and now is forced to employ every dirty trick that Rove & Co are feeding him behind the scenes.

There should be no doubt: this race will see every form of dirty trick formerly employed and then some. And sure, that will need to be fought every step of the way. But it does not require fighting from a point of frenetic chicken little-ism. What the recent barrage of mocking ads indicates is how desperate the odds are arrayed against McCain. He can no longer run on any substantive issues, so he’ll be talking smack and mumbo-jumbo trying to baffle undecided voters with bullshit.

The greater focus of his campaign will be on the politics of personal destruction, but that’s something Team Obama’s already proven to be deft at handling. The very few big missteps Obama made during the primaries have further refined his capacities to avoid further troubles in that regard. The principal aid the democratic blogosphere can provide is in factchecking and correcting the worst of the corporate media so its more responsible members will put the brakes on the the dishonest memes the GOP will try to exploit.

I’m not suggesting progressives can be so arrogant that we can ignore the campaign and leave it all to Team Obama. I’m just saying that the mood should be more confident, sufficient to spend substantive effort working on downticket campaigns while also pushing more progressive issues to the fore.

I’ve said all along that Obama will be far better on foreign policy than Bush was. That can’t be completely defined because foreign events cannot be fully predicted. Pragmatism there is as close to progressive as it gets. I also have indicated that Obama always has been pretty centrist on most economic issues. His most progressive stances have been in human rights and education, with a modicum of social welfare.

I maintain he must be pushed, continuously, to shore up our Constitutional protections, to develop truly progressive energy and environmental policies. If, for example, we permit the national debate to be centered on oil drilling and nuclear power or not, we won’t like the outcome. We must be yelling solar power, wind power, tidal power, hydrogen fuel cells and more. That way the starting point of the debate gets shifted leftward, which means the endpoint will be more progressive, too.

If we refrain from that push out of fear of harming Obama’s chances, we are shirking our duties as citizens and as the protectors of future generations. And with the odds so heavily against McCain, there certainly is room for Obama to shift to the left. Even if that doesn’t get amplified much by Obama in the next 94 days, the fruits of that effort should show up post-election.

That ‘expert’ prognosticator developed his skills at calling election races and political probabilities by doing two things throughout. He does a ton of background research. And he gets away from the punditry and activists online and off and talks to people about the issues they care about. Immersed in progressive activism, it can be easy to overlook what the general public’s thinking and feeling, where many are not caught up in the cult of personality or any ideology beyond “how’re you and the family doing?”

And they were seeking change before Obama adopted that as his campaign theme. So much chasnge, in fact, that I fully expect to see one or two surprise outcomes in Congressional races across the country, where incumbent Dems will be defeated. They’re that fed up.

(Certainly, that prognosticator, like any, could be wrong. In fact, I’ve known him well enough to say he can really be an annoying and self-righteous sumbitch who pisses me off at times. But he’s pretty decent at calculating election stuff. A bit of an egotist, he is. Because he is me.)

Addendum: TBogg, on the other hand, disposes of Rep. Cantor with some added background and humor, in less words… because he can.