An Ending?

Salon hesitantly predicts/suggests that the Rubicon has been crossed

But mostly it has to do with the fact that a 72-year-old candidate literally embodies a party and an ideology that have grown old in a hurry, and how the personal resentments that candidate exhibits toward his opponent merely confirm that party’s fear of new ideas and the future. Strip away the superficial narratives and horse-race distractions and we see that McCain is a late adopter, the inheritor of a dying movement that mythologizes a past that never really existed and, even if it did, isn't returning anyway. This is why the senator from Arizona flails around, gasping for air and behaving as if he were unaware that he and his followers have reached the point where nothing -- not even a young, cheeky, tabula rasa governor from a separatist state -- can save them.