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With final passage of the Wall Street rescue package, John McCain might finally hope for an end to his long, nightmarish slide in the polls.

Throughout the last half of September, as the panic on Wall Street intensified and Congress struggled to respond, the Republican presidential nominee watched helplessly as an increasing number of voters abandoned his campaign and declared their support for rival Barack Obama.

The latest numbers are almost terminally grim: Both the Rasmussen and Gallup daily tracking polls show Mr. Obama ahead by about six points, and that number seems to be entrenching.

The RealClearPolitics aggregate now shows Mr. Obama leading Mr. McCain in the battleground states of Ohio, Florida, Nevada, Virginia, North Carolina, Colorado, Wisconsin, Minnesota and New Hampshire. Mr. McCain holds slim leads in Missouri and Indiana.

If those numbers hold, Mr. Obama is headed for a landslide.

But the primary and election campaigns this year have given new meaning to volatility. A year ago, pundits and competitors wrote off Mr. McCain after his fundraising campaign collapsed. But he came back then, and he has one month left to repeat history. Here, then, is an armchair quarterback's prescription for what must happen if Mr. McCain is to pull off an October surprise.

Make the economy go away: The decline in Mr. McCain's fortunes coincided with the meltdown on Wall Street. To the extent people vote based on economic concerns, a majority of them favour Democrats over Republicans, whom they hold responsible for the recession that America is probably already in.

Mr. McCain needs a month of steady markets, available credit and no bank failures. Then, perhaps, he can persuade undecided voters that the election really is about trusting experience rather than gambling on change.

Michael Barone, an analyst at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, believes Mr. McCain could still win, by retooling his economic message, stressing that he fought for greater oversight of mortgage lenders, which the Democrats and Mr. Obama opposed.

Send out Sarah: Although instant polls suggested that Joe Biden beat Sarah Palin in Thursday's vice-presidential debate, Ms. Palin helped dispel the impression, gained during some dreadful television interviews, that she is egregiously ill-equipped to be president.

Mr. McCain is falling behind because lower-income white women in industrial states, who were initially attracted to Ms. Palin's candidacy, began switching to Mr. Obama as the economy worsened and Ms. Palin's lustre faded.

Mr. McCain must gamble that the lustre has been at least partly restored. He should be sending his running mate out on the trail, in hopes she can win working women back to the Republicans' side.

Move to Pennsylvania: Mr. McCain's decision to pull out of Michigan, earlier this week, was devastating. It was one of the few states that went Democratic in 2004 where the Republicans had reasonable hopes of making gains. With Mr. Obama ahead in so many swing states that went Republican in 2004, Mr. McCain's strategy of simply duplicating George W. Bush's 2004 win seems increasingly problematic. To win, Mr. McCain needs to turn a Democratic state. Now that he's given up on Michigan, Pennsylvania offers Mr. McCain his last, best chance.

The polls, in aggregate, put Mr. McCain about eight points down in Pennsylvania. That's a deep hole, but if Mr. McCain is to win, he has to find a way to climb out of it. He has to reconnect with blue-collar voters worried about their jobs, disgusted with the mess in Washington and looking for help.

He must make them believe that his health-care plan – everyone gets money to go shopping for the best private plan – is better for them than Barack Obama's, which offers a public-sector alternative to existing private-sector offerings.

He must persuade them that it's smarter for Pennsylvania to retool its economy than to fight against the migration of manufacturing jobs offshore.

And must remind them that he has a proven record of accomplishment in Washington, while his opponent does not.

Retreating to New Hampshire and campaigning there exclusively rescued Mr. McCain's primary campaign. It's time he got to know the Keystone State equally well.

Make it about Obama: While Mr. McCain rushed to Washington to rescue the bailout, suspending his campaign, then un-suspending it, taking credit for the rescue package even as it was being defeated in the House, Mr. Obama continued steadily on, creating the impression that he could work effectively for the passage of the bailout without blowing up his election campaign.

Mr. McCain has been showing signs of increasing frustration. In a meeting with the Des Moines Register's editorial board earlier this week, he seemed irritable, even hostile.

When asked about criticism among conservatives of Ms. Palin's performance in television interviews, he dismissed such critics as “a Georgetown cocktail party person who calls himself a conservative and doesn't like Palin,” adding sarcastically, “Good luck.”

The Republicans wanted this election campaign to be about Mr. Obama's lack of experience, exotic background and alleged arrogance.

Instead, it has become about Mr. McCain's volatility, erratic tactics and notorious temper. The Arizona senator needs to settle down and try to shift the focus back to his rival.

Mr. McCain is at his best when the odds are against him. As everyone always does in such times, he needs to evoke the example of Harry Truman, who defied expectations and the polls by going out and giving them hell.

Strangely, however, with the election only a month away, the campaign announced that Mr. McCain was returning to Arizona and taking the weekend off.