Did you catch the senator from Arizona’s valedictory remarks on SNL last night? Parodying himself, as Tina Fey stood beside him and parodied Sarah Palin, McCain acted as if his candidacy was washed up and he had to resort to selling “Fine Gold” and other campaign mementoes on QVC. (Using his Stepford wife Cindy as the hand model was a stroke of genius.) This was meant to remind us that he has a sense of humor — and I hope that these are the images of JMC that I’m left with — even as the jokes reminded us of how ill-fitting the GOP mantle has been on this candidate.

“I’m a true maverick,” he said, “a Republican without money.” It reminded me of a day long ago, when I was in college and a friend of mine saw a book I was reading for class, Michael Gold’s Lower-East-Side saga, Jews Without Money.  

“There’s something you don’t see very often,” he cracked — a remark he could get away because he was Jewish and (unlike almost everyone else I knew) had money. But when McCain makes a joke about the stereotype of rich Republicans he reminds us both that a) he is one and b) his party’s appeal to the working class is, at times, a rather cynical one. The popularity of the GOP since Reagan has been based in part on poor people who wanted to get rich (like Reagan, like Trump). But now that even the richest are facing the prospect of becoming poor (or at least middle-class), while the poor are facing the prospect of bubkes, the promise of fine gold rings hollow. As hollow as that stuff they hawk on QVC. 

Of course it’s a modern tradition for the candidates to make fun of themselves in the run-up to the election. The humor-challenged Richard Nixon helped clinch the ’68 election by appearing on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In (his opponent, Hubert Humphrey, declined) and playing off the square he was (“Sock it to me?“) But McCain has a sense of humor, one that has been notably absent in the debates and many of his speeches in recent months.  

But I don’t buy this business about the “real McCain” — you know, the decent honorable guy that his friends are all awaiting the return of. As long as we’re talking TV here, it occurred to me watching the season finale of Mad Men last week that what linked this show to the last one Matthew Weiner labored on, The Sopranos, was that its characters were defined by their actions. They could talk funny or cynical or earnest or awful but it was how they acted when everything was on the line that mattered. 

No one made John McCain choose Sarah Palin. No one forced him to bring up such non-starters as William Ayers & Acorn, hoping to scare voters. No one told him to question Obama’s patriotism. And I’m sure no one dragged him back to Rockefeller Center either; his better angel has a sense of humor but has to be put in the line-up with all those demons when the time comes to weigh him as a presidential pick. Sock it to him.

After casting about for a new identity in the wake of the tanking financial markets, John McCain seems to have hit on a role he plans on sticking with, for a few days at least: magical thinker. Even as the darkening clouds are making many wonder about the very solvency of the government itself, the Arizona senator told the New York Times and CNBC today that he was going ahead with his tax cut plans. “Contrary to the warnings of fiscal analysts, he said he believed he could do so and balance the federal budget, which was falling deeper into deficit even before the financial crisis, by the end of his first term,” said the Times. 

Analysts! Analyze this, baby. In McCain’s world view there are a limited number of forces that really matter: The Surge, of course, the doubling-down of troops in Iraq that he alone championed last year, and that now promises to allow us to stay there long after anyone dreamed we would need to; and congressional earmarks, which are little bits of secret spending that senators and representatives attach to otherwise decent bills in order to get their constituents more of your money. 

The fact that your money is their money — that you are, in essence, them — should not confuse you. It doesn’t confuse McCain! He stood there while some Vietnamese guard drew a cross in the dirt and totally got what the guy was trying to say because JMC, not that egghead Obama with his longterm solutions, is more than a man of action. He is an action painter. You know, like Jackson Pollock. His coherency is in his movement and today he is a tax-cutting guy who also wants to balance the budget and hold Wall Street greedheads accountable for destroying your 401-K. Contradictions? Contradictions are for squares. 

In the crazy mixed-up world we have inherited this political season, this kind of whirling dervish routine might just carry him over the finish line if it weren’t for the party that he is tied to. Sure, he stirred up the base with his choice of Sarah Palin (who is in NY, meeting a dozen world leaders, AND Bono, all in one day — talk about action!) but those people bring the votes, not the bread. The moneybags in the Republican Party really don’t want to hear him do his Huey Long impression. While he and his rival are both skeptical of the government’s proposal to give the Treasury Secretary a blank check, and no one to answer to, Obama sounds more prudent and determined to help craft the right compromise to get us out of this mess and keep the ship of state afloat. McCain’s tossing paint, man — and the red ink might just fall on us.