After stalling out in Iowa, presumably because his campaign's negative $116,000 weekly balance drained the coffers so dry he couldn't even afford a plane ticket, it turns out that McCain is not out of the race. Instead, he's just playing by an entirely different set of rules.

Read the details after the jump.

Over the course of July, McCain continues buying ads without doing anything to raise his income level. It seems the "challenging" AI in The Political Machine is competitive not because it's smart, but because it doesn't use the conventional accounting logic of making more money than you spend. In certain circles, this is called "cheating". It's awfully disheartening to see my opponent throw ads around willy-nilly while I've got to carefully weigh which ads to buy, where to place them, and when to instead spend the money upgrading my economic infrastructure. I furthermore have to squander valuable time holding fundraisers. Hey game designers, I don't mind giving the AI an advantage, but I do have a request: could it please not flaunt that advantage so openly? This is absurd.

Ohio continues to be closely contested, and it's crammed full of ads, HQs, and operatives. As the campaign goes on, the playing field gets to be an absolute mess in the Midwest, where you can't make heads nor tails of all the tiny icons and figures clustered in the already clustered states. At least the Eastern Seaboard has little breakout graphics popping up in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Instead of giving The Political Machine a really cute new 3D engine, Stardock would have been better off giving it some sort of stylized map that makes the game easier to play.

By carefully sorting through the colorful mob in Ohio, I can see McCain has here a smear merchant who reduces Obama's rating on all issues by 15%. This could be a decisive factor in a state where we're both hovering around 48%. Time to get rid of that guy. I spend political capital to hire a fixer, who I send to Ohio.

Unfortunately, the fixer can't be directed against a specific operative, so he takes out McCain's Hollywood friend, a fellow who just improves awareness and is wasted in Ohio anyway, where both of us have long been at 100% awareness. I spend even more political capital to hire another fixer (the price of each type of operative goes up as you hire them, so this is getting expensive). Luckily, this guy hits McCain's smear merchant and restores to the good people of Ohio a truer perspective on Obama's stance on the issues. Now I've got a two-point lead in Ohio. But I'm not likely to be able to afford any more fixer's this campaign.

By the end of July, the projected votes for the electoral college have again tilted to McCain's favor by 311 to 227. The national summary also shows that he's spent $22 million to my $16 million. Guess where he got that $6 million dollar lead? From the magical Republican money fairies!