Maligning and whining Hollywood style

It is a campaign straight out of a Capra film. A decent guy takes on the system, and the brutes who run the system move in to destroy the upstart. They paint the populist hero as crazy or deceitful. After a bout of self-pity, he rallies with some sentimental hooey about US ideals and routs the ruling-class bullies.

"Why, your type's as old as history," John Doe tells his tormentors. "If you can't lay your dirty fingers on a decent idea and twist it and squeeze it and stuff it into your own pockets, you slap it down. Like dogs, if you can't eat something, you bury it!"

With the help of moderates and without the religious right smothering him, Mr McCain won in Michigan, so he can continue to dog the son of the establishment.

What's remarkable about the Republican race is that the arcs of the two campaigns mirror the arcs of the candidates' life stories.

Mr Bush started in New Hampshire as a slacker. As in his life, he relied on his name and powerful friends to keep him afloat in his campaign until he decided to apply himself late in the game. "This is a process of steeling me to become your president," he told Newsweek on the eve of the South Carolina primary.

Usually, people get their steel before they run for president. Anyhow, Mr Bush probably should have spelled it "steal". He purloined everything he could lay his hands on from the McCain campaign - the populist bus, the reformer message, the one-on-one town halls, even the design of the website.

Mr McCain, who spent his life getting in trouble for his impulsiveness and thin skin, let his emotions get away from him in the last couple of weeks. If there was one thing that was obvious, it was that the Bush team, humiliated in New Hampshire, was going to be ruthless and vicious in that most conservative and wired state for the Bushes, South Carolina.

But when it began to happen, Mr McCain reacted viscerally rather than cerebrally. He was furious about Mr Bush trotting out a discredited veteran to trash him; he was enraged that a boy scout got a push-polling call branding him "a liar"; and he overreached in a television commercial. He capped a bad week by using a self-defeating caustic tone in his South Carolina concession speech.

So far, we've learned that one candidate drifts and the other gets wound up. So now we know what we already knew. New York Times