Hail Mary McCain

In many ways, the McCain campaign has been on the ropes since last summer. He’s thrown a number of Hail Mary passes since then (backing the surge, Sarah Palin, “suspending” the campaign), and only the last one seems to have failed to connect. With less than a month before the election, and with the state-by-state polls looking as bad as they do right now, is he thinking of throwing another one?

Alan Dowd has an idea what that final Hail Mary might be:

For a country with a terminally short attention span, a proclivity to tire of ideas and people far too quickly, and a recent history of less-than-popular second-term presidents, a one-and-done promise may be just the thing to propel McCain across the electoral finish line. At the very least, it would put Barack Obama’s campaign back on its heels.

But there would be more than simple political calculation at play in promising a one-term presidency. There would be a sense of duty fulfilled, of self-restraint, of doing less than the letter of the law allows—and in doing so, perhaps living up to the spirit of the law.

It’s not as zany as it may sound. There’s a fair bit of historical precedent for term-limitation. Read the whole thing.