The terms for the 2008 presidential election have been set: Barack Obama sets the agenda, determines the themes and introduces the vocabulary and John McCain responds by awkwardly and disingenuously parroting Obama’s agenda, themes and vocabulary. The most obvious and desperate example of this is the McCain campaign’s adoption of the “change” theme in the past few weeks. Remember when McCain used to ceaselessly tout “experience” as his alternative to Obama’s proposition of “change”? Well, no more. The McCain camp has (rightly) perceived that their candidate is playing defense and so they have switched tactics and are attempting to co-opt the message of their opponent.

In one way, McCain can very honestly say that he is an agent of change: he has consistently changed his identity throughout the course of this election. In this sense, even Obama can’t say that he has embraced change as thoroughly as McCain has. McCain has embraced change so profoundly that he has committed egocide, he has murdered his former personality and changed into a new one. The former “John McCain” (R.I.P.) was devastated by Karl Rove’s reprehensible attacks against him in the 2000 presidential primaries. The newly reformed “John McCain” has hired members of Karl Rove’s team and now uses the tactics he once deplored – tactics that were once beneath him – against his democratic rival. The old “John McCain” rode around the nation on the Straight Talk Express. The new “John McCain” rides around the nation on the Double Talk Golf Cart. The deceased “John McCain” was a maverick. The resurrected “John McCain” is, let’s face it, a poseur.

Posing, posturing and parroting are characteristics of McCain’s new personality. He has recently begun to lift direct quotes from Obama’s and Joe Biden’s stump speeches and use them in his own speeches and commercials. A McCain television ad repeated a phrase from a Biden speech verbatim - “That’s not change, that’s more of the same” – throwing it back at the Democrats like a kid who can’t think of a comeback and resorts to saying, “I’m stupid? No, YOU’RE stupid!” In a recent speech McCain lifted Obama’s emotive catchphrase “enough is enough,” but left out the emotion, sounding like an old man trying to use the language that the young people are using… wait, that’s not a simile, that’s exactly what he was doing. And, most cynically of all, a recent commercial ended with the voiceover proclaiming: “McCain/Palin: Real Change.” Ha! As if saying the word “real” is supposed to automatically make something (tah-dah!) real, especially something that is openly imitative and fake, like McCain’s disingenuous promise of change.

The fact that the McCain campaign has resorted to imitating the Obama campaign is deeply revealing: even the McCain camp knows that Obama is saying what the American people want to hear. And so here comes McCain, saying exactly what Obama says, trying his best to tap the same deep veins that Obama has successfully mined.

If the GOP were a relevant party capable of governing, if it were a party with viable solutions to the global-scale problems the next president will face, if it were the party of ideas in this election, then it would not be necessary for the GOP to desperately imitate the Democrats. But the GOP in its current manifestation is not relevant, it is not capable of governing (obviously: look at the world!), it is not presenting viable solutions to global problems and it has run out of ideas. And, thus, “McCain/Palin: Real Change.”

John McCain deserves to lose – and he will.