Over at National Review's The Corner, there was distress and disappointment that Sen. John McCain didn't raise the scurillious guilt-by-association attacks that his campaign recently recycled.

One lamented, "Obama comes off as just your average Center-Left politician ... You helped portray Obama as a clearly qualified presidential candidate who would fight terrorists."

Here's their problem. Obama is a clearly qualified, mainstream "center-left" politician who would fight terrorists.

Anyone who watched Obama during the primaries would know that any attempt to portray Obama as a radical subversive was bound to fail.

Once the majority of the voting public tuned into the debates, it was utterly predictable that Obama would not do anything that would feed such a caricature -- the way Gore's minor flubs could be spun into being a serial exaggerator, or Kerry's windsurfing was spun into being an elitist. In turn,the attacks would seem completely out of sync.

Furthermore, it should have been expected in a major "town hall" debate with questions screened by a moderator that no smears would be embedded in any question. And there would be little opportunity to bring up any smears directly without it backfiring miserably. Starting a smear campaign two days before such a debate was foolish.

But that's a side point. Fundamentally, the strategy was silly. If there was any doubt, the positive reaction to Obama in the first debate should have dispelled it.

McCain can't get back in this race by running against a fictional character. He has to run against Obama, and make a case that he has a better strategy than Obama for getting the economy back on track.

But that would require having a strategy. And he's running out of time to come up with one.