Will McCain or the Monster be at the Debate Tonight?

They created a monster. Whether John McCainJohn McCain agreed to the transformation or was forced into it after winning the primaries will probably not be known unless McCain decides to write a book about it, but there's no denying the change now. It's not surprising that much like Mary Shelly's famous monster, the "maverick" beast with McCain's face and Palin's brain has gotten out of the control. And the Dr. Frankensteins of the campaign can't seem to do much about it.

I'm sure, like the scientist from the old tale, the creators of this monstrosity had only the best intentions, at least for their party. "It'll be perfect!" they surely said to themselves, "We'll use McCain's reputation as a maverick to sway the independents, and we'll use Palin's ideas to consolidate the base!" "We'll say how we want to run a clean campaign, then go negative anyway!" "And we'll blame Obama for being negative whenever he tries to defend himself!" Surely they foresaw the way such double-speak would play in the "liberal" media, but they counted on their own cable news network and McCain's relationship with the press to help cover that up.

For awhile it looked like it was going to work too, the monster stepped strongly in the days following the "It's alive!" scream of the Republican National Convention. The polls tightened, the double talk was mostly ignored, and the monster had Obama in it's grasp, ready to toss him out of the race. But then it all fell apart. Palin's interviews made people begin to doubt the monster's intelligence. The economy began to fall down around it, and before they could stop it the monster roared "ECONOMY STRONG!" as it tried to stumble away in fear. All the spin in the world couldn't repair the damage done as the monster rampaged through the 'crisis' press conferences, the David LettermanDavid Letterman show, and the debates that followed.

The poll numbers against them, the independent voters frightened by the monster now, there was only one course the campaign could take...make Obama a more feared monster. Yet even that has floundered, as the man inside the monster seemed to recoil from seeing the monster in his own followers.

So what will show up at the debate tonight? Will it be John McCain, the candidate who most of America looked at favorably a year ago, or will it be the monster that Steve Schmidt, Karl RoveKarl Rove's disciple, brought to life in August?