John McCain won two more huge campaign victories yesterday. In Kentucky he won with a total of 80% of the vote! Congratulations Mr. McCain. Mike Huckabee (8%) and Ron Paul (7%) barely beat out Uncommitted (5%) in the Kentucky balloting. (A friend of mine, a Minister, calls it the Lube State, but I’m not going there.) In Oregon Mr. McCain did even better, winning with 85% of the vote over the 15% Ron Paul polled.

I wonder what excuse the McCain folks have for this miserable performance. Let’s face it, John McCain has been the party’s nominee for a long, long time now. Huckabee dropped out of the race, and other than the pesky single digits that Ron Paul should be getting, McCain should be storming to victory. The real startling numbers here are the 8% for Huckabee in Kentucky. Mike Huckabee dropped from the race long ago. Could it be that this poscket of 8% represents Christian conservatives who still don’t trust John McCain? They sit there with those 5% uncommitted votes. There are Republicans, for Christ’s sake. They always vote how the party brass tells them to, and for there to be this many uncommitted in Republican territory such as Kentucky is not good news for John McCain.

46,000 people in Oregon did not vote for John McCain Tuesday. Perhaps they were a bit tired after attending that huge Obama rally? Another 40,000 people did not vote for McCain in Kentucky. Note also there’s a huge difference in turnout between the parties in those states. Well over three times the number of Democrats turned out compared to Republicans in Kentucky (686,000 to 182,000). Nobody knows who those Republicans who decided not to turn out will vote for in the Fall, nor how strongly they feel about John McCain. The Democratic total after 88% of the vote was counted in Oregon was not quite twice the Republican total (567,000-310,000). I’m betting that turnout benefited from a strong libertarian streak in Oregon that pushed the Ron Paul vote. It remains to be sen if Ron Paul voters will vote for McCain in the Fall, or whether they’ll vote for Bob Barr.

It’s the McCain vote, or lack of it, that’s the real news today, not the Democratic totals in those states. Hey, look here! McCain has even lost his Senate friend Chuck Hagel, who is criticizing him openly now. From Huffpo:

The Republican Senator from Nebraska was a political thorn in McCain’s side on Tuesday night, repeatedly lavishing praise on the presumptive Democratic candidate and levying major foreign policy criticisms at the GOP nominee and the Republican Party as a whole. At one point, Hagel even urged the Arizona Republican to elevate his campaign discourse to a higher, more honest level.

“We know from past campaigns that presidential candidates will say many things,” Hagel said of some of McCain’s recent rhetoric, namely his policy on talking to Iran. “But once they have the responsibility to govern the country and lead the world, that difference between what they said and what responsibilities they have to fulfill are vastly different. I’m very upset with John with some of the things he’s been saying. And I can’t get into the psychoanalysis of it. But I believe that John is smarter than some of the things he is saying. He is, he understands it more. John is a man who reads a lot, he’s been around the world. I want him to get above that and maybe when he gets into the general election, and becomes the general election candidate he will have a higher-level discourse on these things.”

That’s strong criticism. Hagel is basically saying McCain has lost his moral way, has sold himself out to the Republican establishment. Of course, we’ve known McCain has been pandering and flip flopping for a while now. Good to see that Chuck Hagel has gotten on his case as well.

Sad state of affairs for McCain, I’d say. He won two elections yesterday, but those wins seem awfully weak when we look at the numbers.