Of all the insults that get hurled at a U.S. presidential candidate during the course of a long campaign season, few sting worse than attacks motivated more by pity than anger.
Just ask John McCain.
When the Republican senator from Arizona this week accused GOP rival Mitt Romney of flip-flopping on the abortion issue, the former Massachusetts governor brushed McCain off like an elephant swatting its tail at a nettlesome mosquito.
"The McCain campaign's motives are obviously born of desperation," Romney's press secretary said in a statement. "Their actions are both sad and unfortunate."
That any leading Republican candidate would blithely dismiss McCain seemed improbable just five months ago. But hardly a soul in the party batted an eye this time because Romney's remarks rang so true.
After waiting eight years for a second chance at the Republican presidential nomination, McCain and his famed Straight Talk Express - the moniker given his campaign bus - have officially hit the ditch.
A Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll this week showed McCain, the presumptive Republican front-runner as recently as January, languishing with just 14 per cent support, 15 points behind the front-runner, former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. According to the nationwide poll, Romney had pulled even with McCain, despite lacking McCain's name recognition.
Worse yet for the 70-year-old senator, he trails Republican actor and lawyer Fred Thompson, a candidate who has still not formally entered the Republican field.
"McCain is sinking," says Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia.
The apparent collapse of McCain's campaign has stunned longtime Republican fundraisers and activists, who only last year scrambled to donate money and sign on as political advisers......
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