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Sen. John McCain is cooked. His second run for the Republican Party's presidential nomination, once considered promising, has flamed out.

McCain coulda, woulda, shoulda.

The senator's campaign is bleeding money, top personnel and more money. No matter how straight McCain can talk, he can't win the nomination without cash and people who do the day-to-day work.

And he has no one to blame but himself.

The no-nonsense, outsider McCain of 2000 who appealed to a broad cross-section gave way to the McCain of 2007, an insider pol who took the wrong positions with the wrong constituencies.

He supports an unpopular war initiated by an unpopular Republican president. Yet he joined with two leading Senate Democrats in support of comprehensive immigration reform and campaign-finance reform.

While McCain positioned himself as a leader of a blue-red country, Republican activists seethed red and turned blue with anger. McCain wasn't about to win his party's nomination without the support of bedrock Republicans. McCain is considered a traitor to some Republicans.

Although his Vietnam War prisoner-of-war ordeal made for a good book and television show, his more strident Republican critics didn't buy it.

Even those Democrats who found him palatable when McCain gave George W. Bush a run for his oil-soaked millions, distrust him now because of his alignment with Bush on the war.

Ironically while Arizona's senior senator tried to appeal to as many people as possible, his appeal became narrower.

But McCain claims he's still a viable candidate. Maybe he's right.

Maybe he stays in the race and waits for the other leading GOP contenders to crack and sink. Maybe he continues to speak for principles he believes in and Republican voters realize he's the better candidate.

That's one maybe too many, but this is American politics. The improbable has happened before just as recently as 2000.

Bush became president.

Opinion by