Oct. 6 (Bloomberg) -- John McCain needs a game-changer to win the U.S. presidential election. He's not going to provide it himself, and Barack Obama won't give it to him.

The Arizona Republican's best chance for a turnaround is a national security crisis over the next four weeks that somehow persuades swing voters that his experience and credentials are essential.

McCain, a man with a fondness for gambling, tried to create two big events that bombed. One was his selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate, which a month ago seemed to shake up the electoral contest. The Alaska governor may have stopped her political hemorrhaging at last Thursday's debate, although her performance has been largely forgotten four days later and will be an irrelevancy four weeks from now.

The other was McCain's theatrical attempt to appear in command during the financial crisis. Instead, he appeared uninformed and politically impotent.

Some Republicans cling to the hope that an untested Obama will make a big mistake. Ain't gonna happen.

For 20 months, he has run against the Clinton and the Republican attack machines, and his only gaffes have been minor. His worst moment was a private San Francisco fund-raiser where he said rural and small-town Americans were ``bitter'' about being left behind economically and thus ``cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them.''

This is a very smart politician who is conversant with difficult issues. His campaign team is first rate. Many Democrats complain about what they see as his excessive caution; that's also a safeguard against a major misstep.

Red Meat

The McCain camp has signaled it will escalate personal attacks on Obama, including his tenuous ties to one-time radical William Ayers and links to his former pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. It is not McCain's instinct to play the race card, which is at the core of the Wright issue. It would be red meat, however, for some of the Karl Rove acolytes populating the Republican presidential-campaign team.

A case in point: The recent television commercial linking former Fannie Mae Chairman Frank Raines to Obama. It's totally bogus; Raines has played no role in the campaign. He is, however, black, and the visual of two African-Americans on the screen with implications of seedy conduct was not subtle.

Still, most of the closet-bigot vote is already settled. Obama isn't a radical, either in temperament or ideology. Going back to his Harvard Law School days, he has worked to bridge racial divides.

Some Scenarios

That leaves little except a national security crisis that might do for McCain what the financial crisis did for the Democrats. The scenarios include:

-- Pakistan's new government is toppled. Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, with supportive elements in Pakistani intelligence and the military, get a stronger foothold in the nuclear-armed nation.

-- India, which already accuses Pakistan of complicity with terrorist attacks on the country, launches a cross-border attack on its longtime enemy. The Afghanistan regime of Hamid Karzai becomes even shakier. Chaos reigns in one of the most dangerous places on the planet.

-- The Israelis, using new intelligence that Iran's nuclear program is more developed than expected, make preemptive strikes against some of those facilities. A weak American president is unable, or unwilling, to stop it.

America at War

The Iranians are convinced this is an American-Israeli plot. Using their Hezbollah allies, they plot asymmetrical retaliations against the U.S. anywhere they see an advantage. America is at war with Sunnis and Shiites.

-- Terrorists strike at the U.S. Eight years after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, al-Qaeda struck on 9/11. These diabolical minds could figure that after the financial crisis, another attack would be devastating psychologically.

It's not far-fetched to think terrorists like to hit on the eve of an election. The 2004 attack in Madrid was three days before the Spanish elections. Former CIA Director George Tenet said in his memoir that in 2004 the intelligence agency went on higher alert: ``We believed that bin Laden has himself assessed that a logical time to attack the United States was just before the U.S. election.''

It would take something of this magnitude. Mere rantings by Kim Jong-il or Hugo Chavez or even Vladimir Putin have been discounted.

McCain's Terrain

While neither McCain nor his advisers desire any of these scenarios, this is the candidate's terrain, and he'd comfortably seize upon it, stressing his experience, knowledge and toughness.

In 2004, he thought his friend, John Kerry, wasn't sufficiently tough on national security; today he feels this even more intensely about Obama, whom he doesn't like.

If it happens, it may not work. The Arizona senator has lost leadership credibility with his earlier efforts at game- changers, starting with the Palin choice.

And he has steadily lost support since the financial crisis accelerated. He suspended his campaign and then couldn't deliver Republican votes for a bailout plan, reversed his position on federal regulation and executive compensation, and said he wanted to replace Chris Cox as Securities and Exchange Commission chairman with New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo.

Blame It on Bush

Moreover, the Obama camp would counter that any national security incident occurred because the Bush administration, with McCain's support, invaded Iraq, diverting attention from the real threat in South Asia.

With four weeks left until Election Day, McCain faces a daunting task. Yet the two biggest casualties of the past year have been conventional wisdom and static analysis. The biggest surprise would be if something completely unforeseen doesn't occur in the last month.

If so, that may or may not redound to McCain's advantage. It also may be his only shot.

(Albert R. Hunt is the executive editor for Washington at Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the writer of this column: Albert R. Hunt in Washington at ahunt1@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: October 5, 2008 10:18 EDT