The most potent attack on Obama came not from the campaign but from pure happenstance outside it: Joe the plumber's accidental meeting with Obama. McCain acted like that was the first time he had ever heard Obama's thoughts on economic redistribution. Had the campaign exhausted its opposition research budget at Neiman Marcus?
McCain's last-minute reliance on the gimmick of Joe the plumber made it easy for the media to dismiss his charge of "socialism" against Obama as feeble name-calling. Many months early, the McCain campaign could have been developing that case, and it wouldn't have taken much effort: Obama had let slip socialist, even Marxian, assumptions in his thinking several times, from his Marxian description of religion as an opiate for the masses to his bald calls for "confiscating" the profits of oil companies to his open class warfare... Obama's casual comment about bankrupting the coal industry had been gathering dust for months, only becoming an issue via Drudge at the last moment.
Ah, says JJ, but nobody could have done better than Mac. Well, duhhh. I mean, are you sure?
Saturday, November 08, 2008
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Barone's take: The decisive shift of public opinion came when the financial crisis hit. McCain approached it like a fighter pilot, denouncing Wall Street, suspending his campaign, threatening to skip the first debate. Obama approached it like a law professor, cool and detached. Voters preferred law professor to fighter pilot. This was a triumph of temperament, not policy.
Ah, says JJ. Fighter pilots are what we need for running the country. (Of course, he doesn't think we need them to run the wars -- just boots on the ground. But that's another story.) Well, maybe -- depends on which fighter pilot, and what they would bring to the table. I'm still not sure what that fighter pilot experience had to do with McCain's campaigning. I'm totally underwhelmed.
Voters are homos this election cycle.
As I've said before, I think McCain would have been the right President for what was coming on 9/11. His great chance, and when he would have been most needed was 2000; for McCain the fighter pilot would have fought the bloody war with intent to victory-and clarity before the world as to why--no shit about it. But he didn't win. Why? Well, does anyone really think Bush Jr [or Sr. for that matter] was a hell of a campaigner? What Bush had was a heck of a campaign team, built up well ahead of time and drawing many elements from the seasoned politicos around his father. McCain always ran amateurish campaigns, even in his Senatorial efforts. McCain lost to a poor campaigner, and learnt nothing from it.
This campaign against Obama was most winnable-- but grotesque media bias, bound to Fortuna's [the Bitch] exquisite bad timing on absolutely everything, made it absolutely essential that McCain run an excellent, even brilliant, campaign. He didn't even come close.
Palin [Pace, AI--I've met only one who hesitated to vote for McCain due to Palin, I've met many who decided to vote for him--counter to their previous misgivings-- only because the choice of Palin gave them hope they had misjudged John] was a very good choice that revitalized a moribund campaign. But that Wall Street collapse--and then the seemingly flustered "all over the map" response from McCain-- so close to the election, doomed him.
Twice in his life John has been shot down by Leftists. It is unlikely there will be a third time.
Curious, AI, that you would fault McCain for being all over the map. You're shooting serious blanks when you holler bring beck Mitt.
If the media were unfair to McCain-Palin, they would be fair to Mitt (or Huck) and the electorate would fairly toss them out of contention without even their home states.
In Spanish, your efforts are well described by the image of patadas de ahogado, kicks of the drowning.
Maybe a little bit of good sense here in the form of put up or shut up, huh?
I think it goes the other way around. Your man McCain ran, and lost (badly), so it's for you to make the case why he was the right choice at the right time (ie, 2008, not 2000), not for me to make the case someone else deserved a chance.
At any rate, the purpose of this exercise, the way I see it, is to identify what went wrong (and why), so as learn some lessons for the future, and hopefully fix things. If the only lesson you learn is that one should narrow down the tent, well, then, get used to indefinite pinko rule.
I think we all agree that the tent for "team sanity" should be as wide as rationally possible. It should be wide enough, for example, to include both a McCain and a Palin without packs within the tent turning foaming rabid in anger.
Amen to that. But defeat is not too conducive to such rational thought. So expect sterile infighting for a long time.
I hope not too long.... The problem is, who on the horizon seems to have the right stuff to unite a large tent with a coherent vision? Reagan was a remarkable man, and at the right moment in history. History doesn't offer a comforting track record in the frequency of occurrence of such a happy coincidence between character and time.
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