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Hillary Clinton offered her not-quite-officially-a-concession speech on Saturday, and the McCain campaign is finally leveling its sights on Obama in earnest. The opening volley isn’t going so well.

McCain’s speech before the yucky green background was weirdly artificial, almost alien, with unnatural chuckles at the wrong times, a plastic grimace nailed to his face, and a rambling, directionless train of thought. It ran past its scheduled finish, causing what was meant to be a pre-emption of Obama’s announcement that he has won the election to backfire: news stations simply cut McCain’s speech off and turned the cameras to the charismatic young guy striding to victory in his party. Even FOX had to raise doubting eyebrows at their boy’s speech; the rest of the country, which lives outside the right-wing fantasy bubble, universally turned thumbs down.

Grappling with the Bush legacy, McCain responded to Obama’s accusation that McCain is running for Bush’s third term with the sure-fire comeback that Obama is running for Jimmy Carter’s second term. What? I’ll be officially middle-aged in just over a month; I’ll be forty when election day arrives. And I was only eight when Carter ran for the presidency. A third of the nation asked “Jimmy who?” The rest wondered about its relevance, or, worse, remembered that Carter called for measures to fight the energy crisis and reduce the long-term dependence on (and cost of) oil, before being swept aside by Reagan with an assured smile and promises that nobody would ever have to worry about conservation or alternative energy sources. You know, the oil that’s over $120 a barrel now, with gasoline prices to match? It was a badly timed, confusing, and largely irrelevant counter-punch serving primarily to remind us that McCain is a little on the old side. He might as well have called up the memory of Adlai Stevenson.

This promises to be a microcosm of things to come. McCain, never known for running an organized campaign, could look positively clownish next to Obama, who if nothing else, has proven fast on his feet and a dynamo at campaign organization.

The Republican machine, which as recently as 2005 seemed well-oiled and invincible, to the point where neocons were boasting of a permanent majority, is failing McCain. In part, this is due to his untenable position. The country is angry at the current administration, and looking to take that anger out on anyone who appears too much a part of the establishment. McCain, despite his reputation as a maverick, has a very conservative record, and may be regretting his public embrasure of Bush, a move many on both sides of the aisle perceived as selling his soul to stay within the good graces of the unstoppable Republican machine. And yet, because moderate voters are predisposed against anything labeled “Republican,” with or without photos of a big ol’ hug for Bush, McCain needs the crazy 27% to win, the notional party base so crazy as to think everything’s going well, and that any move towards compromise would be a betrayal of the party.

Straddling that divide would be nigh impossible for a slick operator, which McCain is not. Propping him up across that yawning gulf would be tricky for even the legendary Republican discipline, which has fallen into disarray over the same dilemma McCain faces, written small in state and even local elections. A lot of Republicans are suddenly trying to pretend they were never that big on Bush: “Uh…not really. That is, his policies were good, but he didn’t execute them properly, uh…yeah. And I never would have backed some of the more disastrous plans—that is, the less successful plans if I’d only been better informed, yeah, that’s it, my voting record and public statements lining up behind Bush lockstep were the result of being misled. Not that I was uninformed! No, no, uh…just ill-informed. By the least popular members of Bush’s staff. Yeah, that’s it.” Split by that sword of Damocles, the party seems unable to offer its presidential candidate the kind of disciplined ranks of voters that they’ve turned out since Reagan. The party put forward such poor candidates in the primary this year because, in valuing loyalty above principle and competence, they’ve driven the decent, competent candidates away.

Or maybe not. Call me cynical, but a new hypothesis is forming in my mind, and it’s hard to disprove, even if it’s equally hard to prove.

I’m beginning to suspect that McCain isn’t getting the support other Republican presidential candidates have largely because the party expects him to fail, even wants him to. Some very big chickens are coming home to roost, now and in the next few years—short-term problems brought on by an unchecked Bush presidency and long-term problems we can no longer cover up with ever-more-desperate borrowing, because we’re broke and the world knows it. I think the Republican leadership is looking for a fall guy while the guilty make a quick and quiet exit. If McCain loses the presidential race, they can blame him and his unorthodoxy, seeking to deflect the blame and attention from their own clearly broken policies, salvaging the right-wing core’s devotion. If he actually wins, they can safely let him flounder in the problems they’ve made, while counting on him to be just right-wing enough to protect their legal vulnerabilities. Hey, the party that places loyalty above all doesn’t owe a maverick any favors.