His campaign isn’t that competent – it failed to gather enough signature to be on the ballot in one of the most conservative districts in Indiana. Thomas at Blue Indiana reports:

To my surprise, I noticed that John McCain — the presumptive front-runner for the GOP nomination — was just a little short in a few districts, including my precious 4th, despite the fact that Attorney General Steve Carter had already turned in their petitions. I made a few phone calls, and one by one I found out that the McCain camp had got the job done across the state.

Except in the 4th District.

In the 4th District, they are short.

By my latest count, they turned in 496 signatures for the 4th, and the latest IED report for this morning shows them with only 491.

So this afternoon, I filed a challenge with the Secretary of State’s office to keep John McCain off of the ballot. You can check it out here. (I’ll have a .pdf version up when I get back to Bloomington this evening.)

Let’s be clear here: This is one of the most Republican-friendly districts in one of the most Republican-friendly presidential states. John McCain has been endorsed by Governor Mitch Daniels, Attorney General Steve Carter, state GOP chair Murray Clark, and Secretary of State Todd Rokita.

And despite all of this high-level help, these guys managed to screw up one of the most basic steps that any candidate can take in the state.

Not getting on the ballot can mean different things. For example, New York state has very high requirements to be on the ballot statewide (something like 5,000 signatures statewide to be on, plus 500 per congressional district to win actual delegates). The Dodd campaign, having limited resources and facing small prospects for winning Hillary Clinton’s home state, made the choice to not go after a spot on the ballot. But then again, we were a second tier campaign that had very limited resources to work with.  McCain is the Republican nominee, though, and has attempted to get on the ballot in the IN 4th…and failed to get the support he needed.

I think this says more about the state of McCain’s campaign now than what we can expect, say, five months from now. But it certainly doesn’t make me scared about his capacity to organize now, particularly compared to the success we’ve seen the Obama campaign generate through their grassroots machine.

Hat tip to Joh Padgett for the link.