I don’t suspect McCain’s plan to try and drink Clinton’s milkshake by appealing to frustrated supporters in the wake of her concession is going to work out so great for him. The 22% of Clinton supporters who claim that they’re going to vote for him right now are probably going to slide to half by November, outreach be damned.

The big failure from McCain on this seems to be a fundamental mis-read of the situation. Clinton’s supporters were, by and large, passionate Democrats. People whose passions were so strong that they took her lose personally, which is fueling the backlash against Obama. But it’s a backlash. If you want that support, you don’t get it by trying to convince them that you’re more like Clinton than Obama is. These people aren’t retards.

If he really wants the Clinton supporters on-board, he has to fan the flames of the backlash. He has to go on television and declare that a vote for John McCain is a vote to say fuck you to Barack Obama.

It sounds weird, I know, but I am a strategic genius. Trust me.

Not only does he have to do that, but he has to appeal to their sense of frustration and unfairness within the process. He has to talk about how he stole the nomination from her by being all uppity, and how black men had the right to vote way before women and this is just that all over again, just another example of black men climbing ahead by stepping over white women. Every ugly thought Geraldine Ferraro never quite voiced explicitly, McCain needs to say in an historic speech on gender and race. And he needs to keep hammering that theme like a drum from now until November.

Okay, this analogy is maybe gonna come off as a little bit sexist, but it’d be accurate even if we weren’t talking about a female candidate’s supporters. Say you’re a guy whose friend just broke up with his girlfriend in a kinda shitty way. If you run into her somewhere and you want to sleep with her, you don’t try to convince her that you and she are so much alike and would make a good match, because she’s not looking for a good match and if she were, she knows better than to look for one in you. You talk to her about what an asshole your friend is and how he never deserved her. A little bit of flattery while you stoke her resentment, and you’re not trying to convince her to sleep with you, you’re trying to convince her to sleep with vengeance.

But this mccain and clinton have a lot in common talk is silliness. McCain’s an anti-abortion candidate who wants to keep Americans in Iraq indefinitely and doesn’t have a health care plan that addresses the concerns of Clinton’s supporters. If you try to make the case that they should be voting on him for the issues, all you do is remind them how much they have in common with Obama, instead.

There is only one hope for John McCain if he wants to score the support of the Clinton bloc. He must become a fervent and vocal speaker on systemic misogyny in American society. It is terrible and true.