Liddy Dole's Troubles

Salon has a great new article on Dole and McCain's problems in North Carolina. Here's an extract that paints a pretty clear picture as to why Dole is in trouble.

As for the incumbent, Dole seems to be running a much more somnambulant campaign. She dodged five proposed debates, passive-aggressively failing to commit to them rather than outright refusing. Voters are seeing her on her terms, not theirs — her campaign Web site doesn’t have a public calendar of events, and her Senate calendar is three and a half years out of date. While she was at the race Saturday, aides limited her to banal small talk with Salon — after she spoke with a local Associated Press reporter at the NASCAR media center, they hustled her off to the suites to mingle with the race’s sponsors and other donor types and said she’d try to call me later, which she didn’t. (They blamed the AP guy for taking too much of her time, but he said they actually gave him 10 minutes less than they promised him.)

Even at the race, though, Dole wasn’t as visible as Cindy McCain (even if she was nicely outfitted in a Bank of America 500 warm-up jacket). While McCain toured the pits and schmoozed with fans, Dole hung back and prayed with drivers before the race started. (There was a lot of prayer. “Thank you for allowing us to live in the greatest country on the face of the earth,” went the prayer read over the P.A. system just before the engines started. “We thank you for what you did 2,000 years ago on Calvary’s cross.”)