Turning Lemons into Lemonade: This Jonathan Martin story may corroborate Kaus's theory that McCain may be an indirect "winner" of the failed cloture vote (or at least his office may be trying to make him seem a "winner"): this failure takes the bill "off the table" (for now). Martin writes:

While lamenting that its failure was "bad for the country," this person [a McCain aide] indicated that they were looking forward to getting past an issue that had been the focus of the campaign for the last six weeks.

"We talked about it at every town hall meeting, we did talk radio, we did O'Reilly, we did regional press conference calls, we gave a speech in Florida on it," the source pointed out. But having fought the good fight for what was recognized as a political loser, this person said they would use the summer to do grass-roots campaigning and seek to shift the focus onto "core economic issues" such as taxes, trade and spending.