McCain’s stock has fallen precipitously. As he continues to plummet in the polls, a quick recovery seems less and less likely. Atop of his campaign sinking, Sen. John McCain must be Greatly Depressed to watch as the intellectual right abandons ship to invest in rival presidential nominee Barack Obama.

With the election less than two weeks away, Obama has racked up a lengthy list of conservative supporters such as former Republican congressmen Jim Leach and Wayne Gilchrest, former Republican senators Lowell Weicker and Lincoln Chafee, former Reagan administration advisors Douglas Kmiec, Francis Fukuyama, Larry Hunter and Bill Ruckelshaus, as well as many conservative commentators including Jeffrey Hart, Christopher Buckley, Andrew Sullivan, and Michael Smerconish.

Even Mark McKinnon — the mastermind behind President Bush’s 2000 and 2004 election ads — felt compelled to step down from McCain’s campaign because he couldn’t bring himself to smear a man he admires as much as Obama. “I think it would be uncomfortable for me,” he explains, “and I think it would be bad for the McCain campaign.”

Former conservative Mayor of Los Angeles Richard Riordan explains the phenomenon frankly: “I’m still a Republican, but I still will always vote for the person who I think will do the best job.”

Perhaps the most important Republican endorsement Obama picked up came earlier this week from former Secretary of State Colin Powell.

While Powell scarcely fits the bill of intellectual — he was the guy who lied to the UN about Weapons of Mass Destruction — he is among the most revered figures currently in the Republican Party.

McCain even considered Powell as his running mate.

Powell’s announcement of support for Obama is reminiscent of a post-Vietnam Robert McNamara coming to terms with the catastrophic failure of the Domino Theory. Be it an attempt to preserve his legacy or an attempt to right his wrong, Powell articulates his reasoning for endorsing Obama with a degree of thoughtfulness uncommon to politicians from either end of the political spectrum.

“Mr. Obama,” he explains, “… has given us a more inclusive, broader reach into the needs and aspirations of our people. He’s crossing lines — ethnic lines, racial lines, generational lines.”

He continues, “(Obama’s) thinking about (how) all villages have values, all towns have values, not just small towns have values.” Take that, ‘down-home’ Palin!

He admirably addresses the problematic assumption that lies at the core of the ‘Obama is a Muslim’ lie by asking whether “there is something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president.”

Powell celebrates Obama’s “intellectual vigor” as a stark contrast to the ignorance-is-bliss philosophy the Republican Party has adopted under Bush, a philosophy that stands to be accentuated with Palin at the helm.

“I don’t believe she’s ready to be president of the United States,” Powell states emphatically.

McCain chose Palin despite her utter lack of experience or mainstream appeal because he is banking on mass voter turnout among the fringe right.

In contrast, Obama’s greatest asset —as is made abundantly clear by his bipartisan appeal — is his uncanny ability to bring people together from different backgrounds. He has all but neutralized the ‘race factor’ in this presidential campaign and set the stage for a post-racial, post-ideological society.

Although he acknowledges race, he does not carry the same baggage regarding it that his predecessors do. “Beneath all the differences of race and region, faith and station,” he stresses, “we are one people.”

It is this universal approach — the fact that he is not trapped in a civil-rights-era dichotomist state of mind — that allows Obama to succeed where African-American presidential runners Rev. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton failed.

Jackson is out of touch — he once went as far as to accuse Obama of “acting white” for having a platform in which race wasn’t the focal point — but the majority of Americans are receptive to Obama’s progressive approach.

Obama doesn’t ignore race or downplay its importance. He just has a much more sophisticated understanding of it.

Former Republican Congressman Joe Scarborough explains, “(Obama) doesn’t attack Republicans, he doesn’t attack whites and he never seems to draw … dividing lines.”

Obama knows that healing racial conflict in 21st-century America will come through unity rather than division, and he understands that most Americans are more interested in finding a solution to the problem than they are in accepting guilt or victimhood.

The only people at this point who remain adamantly opposed to Obama are the three-issue voters (abortion, stem cell research and gay marriage), the racists, and the profoundly ignorant.

McCain will never lose his grip on these constituencies, the bread and butter of the Republican Party. Signing on Palin, the Alaskan abortion-abolitionist, definitely did not hurt his standing with them, either. As a result, Obama’s ‘race’ is far from over, so to speak.

“(Obama) is a transformational figure,” Powell explains. “He is a new generation coming into the world — onto the world stage, onto the American stage, and for that reason I’ll be voting for Senator Barack Obama.”

I urge you to join him.