We know how much talk there’s been in the last few days about backbiting and finger-pointing inside the McCain campaign. I have a new story up today — it’s the cover of the current issue of NRODT — that puts all that in a different perspective. In running this campaign, McCain is going up against obstacles that no presidential candidate has faced in decades. The difficulty of succeeding a two-term incumbent of your own party whose approval rating is 25 percent; historically bad right-track/wrong track numbers; the enthusiasm gap; the economic crisis; the lingering war in Iraq — in the article I began thinking that I would discuss three such obstacles, then decided on five, and ultimately wrote about ten:

It’s difficult to imagine a more daunting set of circumstances. Inside the campaign, McCain has displayed his well-known stoicism, mixed with a dose of black humor, in the face of each new obstacle. Among his staff, it has become something of a mantra to say that whatever has to be done, no matter what it is, will have to be done the hard way. “You could think of this as trying to summit a mountain,” one senior aide, who asked not to be named, told me. “Both campaigns have to summit the mountain. In most elections, one campaign has some kind of advantage over the other — maybe they get a ten-minute or a half-hour head start — but both sides have to climb the same face of the mountain. In this election, we’re not climbing the same face of the mountain. They’re climbing the side of the mountain with boardwalks and latte stands and playgrounds for the kids, and we’re climbing the side of the mountain with axes and ice picks, and one slip and you’re dead.”