John McCain’s 2008 Campaign Team, originally uploaded by Rob Bluey.

Howard Kurtz’s piece in the Washington Post about “McCain 2.0″ is almost laughable. Basically you have a collection of establishment Republicans who did everything they could to tarnish John McCain in 2000 (while working for George W. Bush) who are now drawing their paychecks from McCain in 2007.

Kurtz’s story was appropriately timed with McCain’s unprovoked attack on Mitt Romney today. While it may score political points among the Romney critics, the attack revealed what kind of a campaign McCain intends to run: one that’s full of negativity. It’s what turned me off last cycle when the Republican National Committee chose to engage in personal attacks instead of principled debates.

Writing critically of McCain’s campaign brings me no joy, particularly because I have at least a couple friends working there, including Patrick Hynes, whom I consider to be one of the best blog outreach coordinators in the mix.

Finally, on that note, I find Kurtz’s chart (above) interesting because it includes no new-media operative among the people in McCain’s “core election team.” It seems that National eCampaign Director Christian Ferry should have his picture there. Or maybe McCain really was serious when he called his eCampaign “one of the worst parts of our entire campaign … with the worst, by the way, staff.”