Watching the disorganized and backstabbing McCain campaign suffer through its final throes this week will be unsurprising and in every way fair retribution for his party’s disgusting behavior. The entire Republican platform has been filthy, maybe the dirtiest pool ever played in presidential politics. But if the young staffers working on the McCain campaign leave with any lesson except "this party is a complete disaster, top to bottom," those in the GOP who have maintained some semblance of sanity should get ready to french kiss what remains of the GOP goodbye.

These young staffers, McCain’s cursed class of ’08, have spent the past year or more breaking their backs for a campaign built around the most primal and sick kind of politics. If this endless election season ends in anything but a landslide, there’s a better-than-good chance they leave the campaign with a belief that if they just had more time or had pushed the whole terrorist-Muslim-commie-traitor-Obama angle a bit harder, they just might have won.

For years, playing dirty was a winning game plan for the GOP. While other politicians would drag their opponents’ names through the mud, Karl Rove drug Bush adversaries — McCain included — into the fucking La Brea Tar Pits and stomped their heads below the surface. Looking at the Republican platform over the past month, it’s obvious the Bush cronies who have been forced to toil away on the lost-at-sea McCain campaign believed the Obama brand would tarnish just as easily as John Kerry’s four years earlier.

But the world has changed since then. The country is mired in two endless and expensive wars, jobs are extinct, and so on. During times of crisis, people vote for stability, for intelligence, for people with a plan and a single, steady voice. Voters want people who talk about something, and the Republicans right now can’t do that.

Then, there is the larger, almost meta-problem: For, what, two decades, the GOP has been more organized, more consistent, and more able to impose their will on a world of rushed and gullible reporters with no real resistance. What they said appeared in newspapers and on televisions and computer screens unfettered. If the Republican machine said war hero John Kerry was a traitorous liar who made up shit to get his Purple Hearts, so be it. No one raised their voice until Kerry’s ill-prepared campaign finally decided to deny the charges, weeks later, and by then it was too late.

But not anymore. A network of Democratic bloggers and think tanks and rapid-response outfits have changed that. Now, the Democrats’ messages travel just as far just as quickly as the Republican machine’s. The world changed, but the Republicans haven’t — cursed to bounce from smear to smear and wonder why none of them are working.

John McCain’s class of 2008 will live with this curse, the same way Democrats lived with their massive organizational gap for years. The class of 2008 — which includes every McCain staffer young and impressionable enough to take away some message from his doomed campaign — will go home with some half-cocked and dangerous concept of how a campaign should be run. Avoid the issues. Stoke fear. Play to your base’s weaknesses — namely a viral dislike for the unfamiliar, the frightening, the exotic.

These staffers, should they continue trudging through the dark world of right-wing politics, will implement these lessons in their city halls, their state representatives’ offices, their congressional districts. And their map to running a campaign will feature only one road: the lowest one possible.

In some places, these tactics may scare up enough votes from the Republicans’ new insane base to succeed. But in most places — even those in historically Republican areas — people will look long at their shuttered factories, their underperforming schools, hell, their freaking checkbooks — and consider that perhaps the high road is the one that will lead to better times.

Unfortunately, McCain’s genius plan to take the White House by convincing some winning fraction of Americans that Barack Obama is an commie terrorist bent on stealing your paychecks and handing them out to the homeless has permeated far beyond his own campaign. Politicians around the country running their own reelection campaigns — with their own class of ’08 staffers — have mirrored his failing message.

That means even more young staffers who understand politics only as a series of borderline-racist smears and innuendo. It’s hard to imagine this is the kind of campaign McCain wanted to run. But now, the messages the right wing of the party has chosen to propagate are out of his control. The party may take generations to recover from them.

So, sane GOPer, start asking whatever god it is you pray to for a Democratic landslide, the kind of loss that can only result in a total re-evaluation of your party and its direction. If not, oh lord help us all, the class of ’08 just might leave the McCain campaign believing that lowbrow, Sarah Palin politics might yet save the GOP.

Ron Knox