Now this is an interesting item from my local paper. Only a few days ago Marshall Wittmann was John McCain’s director of communications. Today, Wittmann said he is endorsing the Kerry-Edwards ticket and accused the bush-cheney team of waging “an unprecedentedly cynical and divisive campaign.”

“I am an independent McCainiac who hopes to revive the Bull Moose tradition of Theodore Roosevelt, and I support the Kerry-Edwards agenda,” Wittmann writes.

“This unreconstructed Bull Moose will run with the donkey in November.”

Wittmann had been McCain’s director of communications for the past two years. He left Wednesday to become a senior fellow at the DLC, a centrist or right-of-center Democratic group….

Wittmann said the point he is making is that the Bush administration has “betrayed” efforts to create a new politics of national greatness and unity in the aftermath of 9/11 through its divisive tax policies and the war in Iraq.

Bush did not invent our enemies, Wittmann writes. “But, despite all his bravado and swagger, he has made it more difficult to build a domestic and international political coalition to ultimately prevail against our terrorist adversaries. He has bred distrust by driving a cynical partisan agenda that seeks to reward the wealthy, while branding his political adversaries as vaguely unpatriotic.”

”….But there is no remaining shred of doubt that another four years of a Bush presidency would have a toxic effect on American politics. If George W. Bush is re-elected, unlimited corporate power, cynicism and division will ride high in the saddle.”

Wow. Of course, McCain’s saying this doesn’t reflect his own viewpoint, blah blah blah. But I’d bet my soul that it really does. Tragic, that politics won’t allow him to say so himself.