John McCain’s campaign bus, the Straight Talk Express, has officially become a rolling punch line to the joke of the GOP presidential primaries.

There has simply never been a primary for either major party as ridiculous as the 2008 GOP effort. Mitt Romney, who would easily have won the Phil Gramm award for financial futility had not Rudy Giuliani spent $50 million to earn a single delegate, is now considering reentering the race in the wake of damaging revelations about John McCain’s sluttish relationships with lobbyists and his efforts to game the public election financing system. Fred Thompson, widely viewed on the right as a man of unquestionably presidential timber, left the race amid the impression that he never actually entered it. Ron Paul, the lone anti-Iraq occupation candidate on the GOP side, couldn’t even grab a majority of anti-occupation Republicans. California Congressman Duncan Hunter sank without a ripple. Of all the failed Republican candidates, Coloradan Tom Tancredo was probably the most successful: he didn’t get any delegates, but he did manage to instill a Pavlovian foaming of the mouth in the other candidates whenever the subject of undocumented immigrants came up.

Unless/until Romney jumps back in, we’re left with theocrat Mike Huckabee and the gawrsh-honest McCain. McCain’s fragile candidacy rests on having been blown from the sky over Vietnam and his undeserved reputation as a straight-shooting maverick. The New York Times story about McCain’s efforts on behalf of a television industry lobbyist with whom he may or may not have had a romantic relationship prompted a damage control campaign from the Senator that quickly disintegrated into a tangle of evasions and lies that directly undermines his myth: it turns out that his campaign bus doubles as a branch office for one of Washington’s most powerful lobbying shops.

And that’s why he’s toast.

He doesn’t know it yet, although clearly he’s uneasy. The political press, who remain in love with him, don’t seem to know it yet. But the revelation that he spent much of his last presidential campaign cozying up to a lobbyist and her client, and his lies in response to the mini-scandal, have broken the spell. His lovers in the press will not respect him in the morning. The tortured justifications they concoct for his repeated failures to stand up on the issues he has made central to his political personna are about to fall flat. The press have been his lone unshakable base for a decade; even if they don’t turn on him in the manner of the cruelly disappointed smitten, their support will wax anemic and anemic support from the base is fatal.

And the worst is yet to come, through the vehicle of McCain’s attempt to opt out of public financing after he used his eligibility to secure a campaign loan and to gain ballot spots in states where he would otherwise have had to spend money to gather the necessary signatures. Campaign finance reform is a critical plank in his honest iconclast platform, yet here he is violating at least the spirit of the issue and quite possibly the law of it as well.

Early on in the GOP contest it seemed impossible that any of the candidates could actually win. Only four of them—McCain, Giuliani, Romney and Fred Thompson—seemed to have a real shot, and each of them carried loads of baggage: McCain’s image as a renegade Republican left him roundly despised by the right, with only the press, some delusional Democrats and a good chunk of independents in his corner; Giuliani’s one-liner 9/11 campaign couldn’t overcome his gay-friendly, anti-gun, adulterous past; Romney was a flip-flopper whose religion inspired distrust among right-wing Christians; Thompson was never taken seriously by anyone other than a few pathetically needy establishment Republicans. Huckabee, counted out early but now running a solid if hopeless second to McCain, inspires astonishing vitriol from almost everyone in the GOP but conservative evangelical Christians. None of them had the chops to make it to the general election for the inevitable spanking.

Nevertheless, McCain backed and filled into the lead. He may stay there, but his lobbying and election finance shenanigans will remain news up through the GOP convention in September. It seems increasingly possible that he’ll be such damaged goods by then that he’ll be forced to withdraw, and there really won’t have been any winner of the Republican primaries.

Even if he does survive, he now has no platform other than eternal war. This general election was always due to be among the most vicious of modern times, but McCain’s collapse guarantees an exclusively negative approach from the Republicans. Mark Halperin, one of McCain’s long-time paramours in the political press, helpfully published an outline of the racist, xenophobic approach McCain, or whoever, can take against Barack Obama, should he prevail over Clinton. He allows as how that approach would be disgusting coming from Clinton, but merely “savvy” coming from Republicans in general and McCain specifically.

Halperin, though, is an extreme case, and it’s unlikely that his brethren in the press will dutifully choke down with a smile the GOP bile coming our way. Even allowing for the best voter suppression efforts money can buy, McCain, or whoever, is headed for an epic loss. The consequences may not be much more significant than a fleeting afterglow for Democrats, but it will be a superlative moment while it lasts.

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