Casey Stengel’s famous quip about the ’62 Mets about sums up the 2008 election cycle for conservatives: It’s been two years of cluelessness.

As I watch even usually astute conservatives completely miss the point, I am left with cascading frustration. Guys, something you need to understand: Not much of anyone gives a rip about Bill Ayers. Not that Ayers’s relationship with Obama is irrelevant, or illegitimate for debate, just that it falls way down anybody’s list of voting issues and is a waste of time. No amount of effort or money could make it otherwise.

McCain will pay a steep political price if voters think he’s fiddling while Rome burns. Among the reasons the Republican brand is in such disrepair is because voters don’t believe the party is focused on issues that matter. It was true in 2006. It remains true today.

This isn’t 1996 or 2000, when voters were feeling pretty good about things and minor issues could quickly capture attention. America is at war, and the economy is in deep trouble. Only 8 percent of the country thinks we’re on the right track.

At a time when Americans are darn-near panicked about their jobs, their savings, the value of their houses, the value of their retirement plans, the constant squeeze on their pocketbooks, they are naturally focused on the biggest of big issues. This is an election where the old stand-bys — abortion, gay marriage, guns, et al. — are not going to matter as much.

Some on the Right wonder why Republican politicians aren’t talking about the usual issues. Easy: Voters aren’t talking about them. They aren’t talking about liberal staples like education or the environment either. Voters are talking about the fundamentals.

In 1980, Ronald Reagan wasn’t campaigning on Billy Carter or the killer rabbit. With the misery index through the roof and the Soviets on the march, he was campaigning on the economy and a strong America. He knew intuitively what Americans were concerned about; he knew what needed to be done and he focused on it incessantly. And he won in a landslide.

The problem with Republican candidates today is that they seem dangerously out of touch. All this talk of bipartisanship and bringing people together is insane. Bring whom together to do what? The current crowd in Washington with their bottom-feeding approval ratings? People don’t want them “brought together”; they want them run out of town on a rail. They want someone to be held accountable for the scandalous incompetence that has brought us to where we are today.

Bipartisanship is what brought us Fannie Mae, $700 billion bailouts,15,000 earmarks, No Child Left Behind, the farm bill, the highway bill, and the whole shameful litany that has put the Republican party on the verge of annihilation. Not to mention the looming financial cataclysm that is Social Security and Medicare.

To paraphrase Michael Dukakis, this election is about two things: competence and ideology. Barack Obama would be perhaps the least-prepared, least-qualified person ever to hold the White House. He is four years removed from the Illinois state senate and his 129 present votes. He served two years in the minority in the Senate before he abandoned that job to run for president. He chairs the important Senate Subcommittee on Foreign Affairs but hasn’t held a single substantive policy hearing. He calls to mind Marion Barry’s famous line on Jesse Jackson: He’s never run anything but his mouth.

On the ideology front, Obama’s economic program would devastate the already-beleaguered economy. His tax, regulatory, spending, and union schemes will send us over the edge. His welfare expansion designed as “tax credits” would take us in an egregiously wrong direction.

An Obama presidency, combined with Pelosi’s House and Reid’s Senate, would leave America with the most left-wing government of any major Western democracy. But where is the driver of the Straight Talk Express to point this out?

McCain’s Achilles heel remains his inability to lay out a clear, principled vision for the economy, one that contrasts with Obama. Too much of McCain’s rhetoric falls into the category of “I hate greedy oil companies too. You have a crappy mortgage, Uncle Sucker will buy it.” Again, is anyone really worried about oil-company profits when their job is at risk, their house is worth 20 percent less than it was a year ago, and their 401k is tanking?

Bottom line: John McCain is down to his final two weeks, and he needs to find his voice on the economy and on Barack Obama’s lack of basic qualifications. The lousy mail piece we received last week on climate change, funding for stem-cell research, and regulating oil companies will not cut it.

Obama is running as the second coming of FDR, and McCain’s campaign as the reincarnation of TR is falling flat. What McCain needs is a heavier dose of Reaganism: bold vision, optimism, clarity of purpose, a steady hand on the tiller in times of trouble. Does he have it in him to offer the bold, robust, free-market program America so desperately needs? So far, he’s taken only baby steps in the right direction.

The next decade is going to be incredibly challenging; the entitlement tidal wave that looms will make the current mess seem like a sun shower. We need a president who knows what he’s doing. Competence and ideology. The opening is there. But Sen. McCain won’t rise from the ashes one more time if he’s talking Bill Ayers.

– Pat Shortridge is president of New Majority Project.