With the end of the interminable campaign finally in sight and their team hopelessly behind, the McCain-Palin camp is finally hauling out the heavy artillery. All their Hail Marys have been caught by the trombone player, all their scurrilous robocalls answered by Marlee Matlin, all their slime-slinging landing in joyless Mudville.

You can choose your own metaphor for life. You may view it as a holiday, as in a stroll down Primrose Lane, or it can be Forrest Gumps mothers box of chocolates. It can be a river, a struggle, a journey, a battle, a classroom, a rollercoaster, a kaleidoscope.

So its come to this. McCaint is forced to defend his opponent and gets booed for doing it. The chickens have come home to roost, and he has nobody to blame but himself. When he turned his campaign over to Roves top two hatchet men, Steven Schmidt and Rick Davis, we could see it coming a mile away.

Am I missing something here? Of the thousands of questions asked of the 15 or so candidates during this interminable presidential campaign, there is one that has not, to my knowledge, been asked. If I were one of the ones doing the asking, it would have been near the top of my list.

Anytime anyone has a grand idea, the first question asked is invariably, How much? And rightly so, provided its not just a way of being a contrarian who opposes, doubts and critiques everything that he didnt think of himself. There are such unfortunates, and some of them live in Greensboro.

While I would heartily endorse all those ideas, Im not sure that a fulltime farmers market, in and of itself, will be enough of a draw to make the ballpark the gathering place it needs to be. In fact, no single attraction will be enough, even if the downtown lines are redrawn all the way out to Yanceyville Street.

I never know from week to week which hat I’ll be wearing come column-writing time. It vacillates from pessimist to cynic to provocateur to realist to satirist to visionary to wiseass at the… well, drop of a hat. But one hat you’ll rarely see me wear is that of optimist.

Dear Sen. McCain: I am deeply honored that you would choose me above all the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other Republicans who are more qualified than I to be your running mate. It is obviously the opportunity of a lifetime, a moment that I will cherish forever.

I may not have been a mile high after watching Sen. Barack Obama’s extraordinary speech last Thursday, but I swear there was a moment in there when I felt I was getting ready to levitate. I was among the hysterically happy throng at the former Mile High Stadium, if only vicariously.

Anybody who’s lived in the Triad more than a couple of days knows that High Point has an inferiority complex.