Bush speechwriter/Leading Neocon: It's over for McCain. He's lost and the rest of the Republicans are in big trouble.

David Frum, who was a speechwriter for George Bush and now works at the right wing American Enterprise Institute wrote an op-ed for today's Washington Post. It's a great read. Frum concedes that McCain is going to lose the election. He goes on to offer advice to the rest of the GOP to save itself, but I'm not going to bother with any of that. The best part of the column is Frum's trashing of McCain and Palin and what their campaign has done to the down-ticket races. They're all screwed:

After months and months of wan enthusiasm among Republicans, these last weeks have at last energized the core of the party. But there's a downside: The very same campaign strategy that has belatedly mobilized the Republican core has alienated and offended the great national middle, which was the only place where the 2008 election could have been won.

I could pile up the poll numbers here, but frankly . . . it's too depressing. You have to go back to the Watergate era to see numbers quite so horrible for the GOP.

McCain's awful campaign is having awful consequences down the ballot. I spoke a little while ago to a senior Republican House member. "There is not a safe Republican seat in the country," he warned. "I don't mean that we're going to lose all of them. But we could lose any of them."

In the Senate, things look, if possible, even worse.

The themes and messages that are galvanizing the crowds for Palin are bleeding Sens. John Sununu in New Hampshire, Gordon Smith in Oregon, Norm Coleman in Minnesota and Susan Collins in Maine. The Palin approach might have been expected to work better in more traditionally conservative states such as Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia, but they have not worked well enough to compensate for the weak Republican economic message at a moment of global financial crisis. Result: the certain loss of John Warner's Senate seat in Virginia, the probable loss of Elizabeth Dole's in North Carolina, an unexpectedly tough fight for Saxby Chambliss's in Georgia -- and an apparent GOP surrender in Colorado, where it looks as if the National Republican Senatorial Committee has already pulled its ads from the air.

Now, I don't think the poll numbers are depressing at all.

Frum puts most of the blame on McCain -- and Palin. But, all those Republicans have George Bush draped around their necks, too. It's a triple whammy.

As a top guy at AEI, this is Frum sending the message that the Neocon crowd thinks the presidential races is over. That crowd never liked McCain and they're throwing him over the cliff.