Uh, because he has absolutely nothing positive to offer?

To quote Atrios: This has been another installment of simple answers to stupid questions.

Why McCain is going so negative - Yahoo! News

It’s hard to imagine a more unlikely perch for John McCain to be shamed for his increasingly hard-edged and truth-stretching campaign than the middle seat on “The View.”

Yet on Friday morning, there sat the Republican nominee — a politician who has built an all but saintly reputation for “straight talk” over the years — caught in a vise between Joy Behar and Barbara Walters and getting a lecture from each on honesty.

“They’re lies,” Behar said of two recent lines of attack from the McCain campaign.

“By the way, you yourself said the same thing about putting lipstick on a pig,” Walters interjected as a defensive McCain struggled to respond.

The two daytime talk show hosts are hardly alone.

McCain’s tactics are drawing the scorn of many in the media and organizations tasked with fact-checking the truthfulness of campaigns. In recent weeks, Team McCain has been described as dishonorable, disingenuous and downright cynical.

A series of ads — including accusations that Barack Obama backed teaching sex education to Illinois kindergartners and charges that Obama called Sarah Palin a lipstick-wearing pig — have provoked a cascade of criticism of McCain’s tactics.

The furor presents a breathtaking contrast to McCain’s image as a kind of anti-politician who plays fair, disdains politics as usual and has never forgotten how his 2000 presidential campaign was incinerated by a series of loathsome dirty tricks in the South Carolina primary.

The simple explanation for all this is that John McCain's image as a straight-talking maverick was always more imagined than real, a product of media wishful thinking happily reinforced by McCain through back-slapping and barbecues. He thought his sway with the press would help him whup Dubya in 2000; he was wrong. So he's abandoned that tactic and gone full-native Rethug, going so far as to hire the very operatives who smeared him unmercifully just two elections ago. He's a dishonest, arrogant hothead and always has been.

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