No, I’m not talking about the fine piece by Jennifer Egan about manic-depressive children in last Sunday’s Times magazine. I am talking here of John McCain, a man who is changing positions so fast that he must be giving himself whiplash. Does he look at himself at night and say, “Who am I this time?”

This isn’t about the sleazy ads but rather the tactics he once despised. The New Republic reports today that Republicans are using the kind of push polls that Rove & co. used to slander JMC in South Carolina in 2000. Those were about a black child he fathered out of wedlock. (The fact that there was no such child, and the child in question was his daughter adopted from Bangladesh, didn’t stop the racists from running from him.) The polls they are using against Obama ask Jewish voters if it would bother them to learn Hamas supported Obama, and other “statements of fact” sure to put off a few Jews. Though the group behind the polling does not work for McCain, that is the way these groups play. I can already hear JMC defending them as factually accurate, as he did the ad accusing Obama of wanting to teach sex ed to kindergarden kids. 

And now the longtime regulation foe is out there trying to reinvent himself as a regulator in disguise. He’s a tough guy, he claims in a new ad, ready to “clean up Wall Street,” when only two days ago he was telling reporters more regulation just meant more bureaucrats, and you know how they are. 

Will it play? How stupid are voters? The last eight years might lead you to think: pretty stupid. But even as my Democratic friends on both coasts are wringing their hands and pointing at comets in the sky, a number of conservatives are saying it’s Obama’s election to lose. David Brooks and Rich Lowry were deeply unimpressed with Sarah Palin’s performance on ABC last week, and Carl Cannon (who keeps his political affiliation well hidden) just wrote a bracing blog on the Readers Digest site saying, in essence, the polls are missing the youth of today. And the youth will decide this thing for the Dems. 

And that was before this weekend, when Wall Street imploded and the Dow began to tank. Suddenly the  Palin pick looks a little less like genius; after hearing her make fun of people with a “big fat resume,” a lot of shaken voters would like some reassurance from people who have been saying for a while that the government needs to be more involved in the financial markets. Now resumes look good, especially if they point to politicians who didn’t look the other way when the bus was headed for the cliff.