“Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.”
– Mark Twain

Mark Twain, as usual, was right and now, in the final weeks of his failing campaign for the presidency, John McCain is suffering the assault from his descent into the ridiculous. The results on November 4th will prove the ultimate truth of Twain’s axiom.

Undecideds Laughing At, Not With, McCain

Amy Sullivan
TIME’s Swampland blog
October 17, 2008

In politics it is generally not considered a good sign when voters are laughing at you, not with you. And by the end of the third and last presidential debate, the undecided voters who had gathered in Denver for Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg’s focus group were “audibly snickering” at John McCain’s grimaces, eye-bulging, and repeated references to “Joe the Plumber.”

The group of 50 uncommitted voters should have at least been receptive to McCain – Republicans and Independents outnumbered Democrats in the group by almost 4 to 1, and they started the evening with much warmer responses to McCain than to his Democratic opponent, Barack Obama. But by the time it was all over, so few of them had declared their support for McCain that there weren’t enough for Greenberg to separate them into a post-debate focus group. Meanwhile, the Obama supporters had to assemble in two different rooms to keep their discussion groups manageable.

Read the rest here.