To take a quick break from Dem diary candidates.

Is this a good thing for McCain

I guess that it adds to the inevitability thing, but after the Romney endorsement and his delegates, doesn't this just increase it from 99.98% to 99.99%.

Plus, I would have thought that 41 wing of the party is already backing McCain.  So how does a public endorsement help there. What he needs to win over the conservatives... Don't they hate 41?  What is the upside to this, I would think this would only make the Pat Buchanan wing distrust him more.  

There is the argument that Buchanan wing sitting it out fatally wounded Bush's re-election chances... and the repeated Limbaugh/Coulter threat is that they will do the same.  This endorsement just seems to re-enforce that theme.

The only other thing I can think of is that this a GE endorsement, and that the failures of W have just made the elder look better and better to the general public (I think we saw that with the Iraq study group and people falling overthemselves to praise James Baker)

Any other ideas?

Note: Jumping off a comment on someone else diary attacking Patrick.  I have always been lukewarm about Obama, but Patrick is a different story... He got me re-engaged in local politics, got elected to the state party convention... Reilly had been the appointed candidate, but the Patrick campaign out organized him, got his people elected city by city, street by street and we overwhelmed the state party at the convention and now have the amazing Mr. Walsh as our party chair.  I use blue mass group liberally to make my arguments, great web site it is on the state blogroll on this site.

Deval Patrick and Obama are two different people... Yes, they are both black, give amazing speeches, and inspire people to check back into the political process.. but I welcome the comparison...  Deval Patrick won a historic election in Massachusetts by mobilizing the grass roots.

However, One thing people need to remember about Mass is we have a liberal congressional delegation, but a much more conservative state legislature... The speaker has a tremendous amount of power  

Well, we know that due to the Democratic super-majority and extremely tight discipline, the Speaker of the House has vast power, possibly even more than the governor.

  We have been left with a budget disaster... Our bipartisan culture of GOP governors and Finneran democrats, known as

the Big Dig culture of Beacon Hill -- which has been a bipartisan failure, over a long period of time

has let the infrastructure of our state crumble  Roads, Public Transportation, Education, etc