Last night John McCain appeared on Saturday Night Live. He follows his running mate’s inexplicably lame guest shot on the program two weeks ago. The best that can be said is that he didn’t bomb as thoroughly as Sarah Palin. At least he participated in the sketches and had a few punch lines.

Still, it is a bit surprising that the jokes primarily centered on his being a cash-strapped also ran. That is generally not a theme that a candidate wants to present two days before an election. Neither is it advisable to reveal your campaign’s closing strategy, which McCain did when discussing the matter on the Weekend Update segment. Asked what he would do if his present strategy were to fail, he offered a couple of notable alternatives:

• The Reverse Maverick: That’s where I do whatever anybody tells me.
• The Double Maverick: I’d just go totally berserk and freak everybody out.

In reality, he has already resorted to both of these tactics.

He began his campaign two years ago with the Reverse Maverick as he abandoned many of his long-held positions to suck up to the Bush loyalists and the Christian right. Examples include advocating the Bush tax cuts that he had voted against in the Senate, adopting the Bush position on torture that he had previously opposed, and embracing evangelicals like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell who he once called “agents of intolerance.”

He rushed headlong into the Double Maverick with his selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate. That certainly freaked everybody out. In addition, his behavior in response to the Wall Street meltdown when he promised to suspend his campaign and postpone a debate (neither of which he did), was nothing if not berserk.

A third strategy mentioned on SNL was “The Sad Grandpa.” I can’t say that we’ve witnessed bona fide examples of that, but we have seen verified examples of a close off-shoot, “The Grandpa Simpson.”