Since both John McCain and Barack Obama purport to be persons of faith and prayer, I have devised a little prayer for both of them. It goes:

“Lord, save me from my friends—I can cope perfectly well with my enemies.”

Oddly enough, some of the friends plaguing or having plagued both candidates are themselves persons of faith and prayer.

We need no further reminders, do we, of Rev. Jeremiah Wright and more recently Father Michael Pfleger and the varying degrees of damage they have inflicted on Obama?

“Poof!” declares Obama, quite wisely, “they are no longer my friends.”

Then there are the Reverends John Hagee and Rod Parsley. Until very recently they were McCain’s newest best friends of convenience, vigorously courted to calm the qualms of the fundamentalist evangelical constituency so necessary to Republican victory. Trouble is, their historic histrionics seriously offended other necessary constituencies.

“Poof,” declares McCain, quite wisely, “they are no longer my friends.”

Well, neither the good Rev. Wright nor the good Rev. Hagee took this distancing well. Wright finds his way to the National Press Club and trashes his former congregee. Hagee ups and complains very recently that McCain—in this year’s campaign cliché—“threw me under the bus.”

Trust me. We have not yet heard the last of Rev. Hagee.

With friends like these you don’t really need enemies. But political history shows time and again it’s the candidate’s friends who do him or her the greatest damage.

Hillary Clinton was constantly embarrassed by the comments and antics of Mark Penn, her pollster and chief strategist. Former Sen. Bob Kerrey made so many disastrous comments about Obama while speaking as a Clinton surrogate that he was put on ice the for balance of the campaign.

So, too, did the former vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro, who is still complaining that her racially divisive comments were interpreted as being racially divisive. She is now trying to prove that she is not divisive by threatening to vote for McCain.

Perhaps no one caused Clinton more pain and injury than her very own husband Bill, whose gaffes constantly undermined her campaign.

Michelle Obama, too, used an unwise sentence structure in a comment that I am sure will continue to live throughout the general election campaign.

In the 2004 election cycle it was John Kerry’s wife Teresa who kept going off message with a series of ultimately harmless but unbecoming blurts that kept the focus on her, while it was her husband who needed the attention.

Back farther some may recall Jimmy Carter had an embarrassing brother named Billy—one of nature’s attempts to create Hugh Rodham, Hillary’s brother, who profited by selling Clintonian pardons.

Going forward, I am sure the world will get to know Tony Rezko, a man of conviction, almost as well as they know the Rev. Wright. It will be difficult then to forget he was once Obama’s buddy and financial benefactor.

The same might also be said of former Sen. Phil Gramm, the top economic advisor to McCain and a heavy-duty lobbyist whose big-money clients are on the wrong side of the mortgage crisis.

Perhaps the formula for a successful run for the presidency is to have no friends.

I hereby declare my candidacy.