Republican National Chairman candidate Michael Steele:
“Let´s just be very frank about it. What the party´s got to do is get its head out of the clouds and out of the sand and recognize that the dynamics politically and otherwise around them have changed.”
Hoo-boy.
Kathleen Parker, already on thin ice for her criticism of Sarah Palin during the campaign, may be setting herself up for a good old-fashioned stake burning among religious Republicans with her column today:
Conservative columnist & former Bush speechwriter David Frum becomes the latest to leave the National Review, which in its heyday was the center of conservative intellectual thought (now a shell of its former self, in my opinion).
Frum was one of the many Cassandras this election cycle who warned Republicans to broaden its base before it was too late.
He’s now started a new site called ‘TheNewMajority.com,’ which we’re adding to our blogroll. Here’s his mission statement:
1. Avoid mindless opposition. We should support President Obama when he is right (Afghanistan), persuade him when his mind appears open (trade) and oppose him when he is wrong (taxes). It is the Republican Party’s job to hold him accountable on the merits only.
4.Republicans must regain ground among critical voting groups. Voters ages 18–29 voted Democratic by a 2-to-1 margin. A market-oriented “green” agenda that’s true to our principles would help win them back. Hispanics dropped from 44 percent Republican in 2004 to 31 percent in 2008. The GOP won’t be a majority party if it cedes the young or Hispanics to Democrats. Republicans must find a way to support secure borders, a guest-worker program and comprehensive immigration reform that strengthens citizenship, grows our economy and keeps America a welcoming nation. An anti-Hispanic attitude is suicidal. As the party of Lincoln, Republicans have a moral obligation to make our case to Hispanics, blacks and Asian-Americans who share our values. Whether we see gains in 2010 depends on it.
& probably what I think is the most important:
“In 1980, the Republican Party platform spoke at length to blacks and Hispanics, promising to stand “shoulder to shoulder with black Americans” in the fight against racism and to “pursue policies that will help to make opportunities of American life a reality for Hispanics.” That year, Ronald Reagan captured Read the rest of this entry »
“…there are signs in this year’s returns of voter shifts that could herald a new political era — and that certainly define the challenge facing the Republican Party.
Several of the most important are pointed up in memos I received this past week from Stan Greenberg, a Democratic pollster, and Steve Lombardo, a Republican consultant. They were done independently, but there were significant overlaps.
Greenberg’s post-election survey for Democracy Corps found that the three most important reasons voters gave for supporting Obama concerned his promises to Read the rest of this entry »
“History has shown that the greater threat to economic prosperity is not too little government involvement in the market, but too much."
"Conservatives rightly think, or once did, that much, indeed most, government spreading of wealth is economically destructive and morally dubious — destructive because, by directing capital to suboptimum uses, it slows wealth creation; morally dubious because the wealth being spread belongs to those who created it, not government. But if conservatives call all such spreading by government "socialism," that becomes a classification that no longer classifies: It includes almost everything, including the refundable tax credit on which McCain’s health-care plan depended.
[above: Snakeranch, Missouri, January, 1978. photograph by my father.]
Intriguing idea from Jesse Walker:
“Expel your base or retreat into an echo chamber: If those choices seem dispiriting, Republicans can take heart. Read the rest of this entry »
Above: A radio spot by the victorious Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander, which aired in Memphis, & was voiced-over by a prominent retired African-American judge.
He didn’t have to do it. He had a commanding lead all year long, & could have coasted with just the party faithful.
But to his credit, Alexander’s strategy helped him carry a sizable segment of the black vote on November 4th:
“While colleagues like Senator Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina were coming out on the losing end in part because of a strong African-American vote for their opponents, Mr. Alexander, who had a record of appointing blacks to government and education positions, was able to win about 26 percent of the black vote.”
“It’s something deserving of at least grudging political respect, if not outright kudos.”
You’d think this is a strategy that would at least cross the mind of a Senator who’s in the fight for his life one state to the south.
But instead… this is what we’re hearing:
From former Bush EPA Director Christine Todd Whitman & Robert M. Bostock:
“In the wake of the Democrats’ landslide victory, and despite all evidence to the contrary, many in the GOP are arguing that John McCain was defeated because the social fundamentalists wouldn’t support him. They seem to be suffering from a political strain of Stockholm syndrome. Read the rest of this entry »
Democrats hoping to get Jim Martin elected Georgia’s new senator are using this ad as a way to drum up votes for the December 2nd runoff.
Watching the ad again, I find its content tame by the standards of today - in which a politician can claim, with a straight face, that their opponent “pals around with terrorists.”
No, what was wrong with the ad (which aired ad infinitum on NewsChannel9) was what it represented at the time.
“If we’re going to be the majority, we’re going to have to see we need to grow the party. We cannot compete in the Northeast, the West; we’re losing seats in the Great Lakes region. We have a large deficit with women, Hispanics, African Americans — people with modest financial circumstances. That is not a formula for a majority.” - Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty speaking today at the Republican Governor’s conference in Miami.
He also said, in what could be interpreted as a swipe at Palin:
Ed Kilgore at Democratic Strategist hopes conservatives & Republicans keep up the anti-Obama rhetoric:
What should the incoming chair of the Republican National Committee put on his or her priority list?
Some interesting ideas already expressed on that site:
Republicans: if you are interested in finding your way out of the wilderness, a good place to start is GOPAC (the GOP’s political action committee) chair Michael Steele, writing today in the Wall Street Journal:
“I think the Republican ticket represented too much of the status quo, too much of what had gone on in these last eight years, that Americans were kind of shaking their heads like going, wait a minute, how did we run up a 10 trillion dollar debt in a Republican administration? How have there been blunders with war strategy under a Republican administration? If we’re talking change, we want to get far away from what it was that the present administration represented and that is to a great degree what the Republican Party at the time had been representing. So people desiring change I think went as far from the administration that is presently seated as they could. It’s amazing that we did as well as we did.”
-Sarah Palin, to the Anchorage Daily News
That’s her take. I’m more in the school of these essential reads:
From the LA Times:
“The Obama recession is in full swing, ladies and gentlemen,” Limbaugh told his radio audience of 15 million to 20 million on Thursday. “Stocks are dying, which is a precursor of things to come. This is an Obama recession. Might turn into a depression.”
“Ideas matter, Richard Weaver once wrote, and the Republican Party has become a party bereft of ideas or trapped by the wrong ones. The Reagan-Thatcher revolution of low taxes, deregulation and tight money seems irrelevant to the problems of underregulated financial products, huge deficits and a deepening recession. The Republican Party’s social program is out of tune with an increasingly young, diverse and tolerant electorate.
As the conservative writer David Frum points out, “College-educated Americans have come to believe that their money is safe with the Democrats — but that their values are under threat from Republicans.”"
My advice for Republicans: Read the rest of this entry »
George Bush won Indiana in 2004 by 510,000 votes.
Barack Obama won Indiana in 2008 by 9,000 votes.
That means Obama improved Democratic turnout by 519,000 votes Tuesday.
How did he do against Clinton in the Hoosier state primary? Click here to find out.
[& check out which other state had its primary on the same day, interestingly]
What can the GOP do to recover?
Here’s what some conservatives are saying:
Although John McCain’s loss was not as numerically stunning as the 1964 defeat of Barry Goldwater, who won 16 fewer states and 122 fewer electoral votes than McCain seems to have won as of this writing, Tuesday’s trouncing was more dispiriting for conservatives. Goldwater’s loss was constructive; it invigorated his party by reorienting it ideologically. McCain’s loss was sterile, containing no seeds of intellectual rebirth.
Some of you will say “we have learned our lesson“, and then try to pass off cosmetic changes as Reform. You are the problem.
Some of you will say “Republicans need to fight/hold Democrats accountable“, as if it is sufficient to be against Democrats. The pendulum may eventually swing back to you, but you won’t know what to do with it.
Some of you will say “Republicans need to carry our message to the American people“, as if the problem is that Republicans haven’t been saying “tax cuts and limited government” loudly enough. The problem is not the inability to communicate; the problem is that you have no idea how to actually deliver on those ideas.
Others will say “Republicans need to be more principled“, as if the problem is a mere lack of personal courage and principle by Republicans. Even the best people can’t limit government if there is not an effective strategy for implementation - for getting “from here to there”. You don’t need better people. You need a better strategy.
People have been focusing on whether the youth vote was up. It was — slightly: going from 17 to 18 percent. But the real story about the youth vote is not how many “new” voters Obama got to show up. It’s how he produced a gargantuan 25% swing among existing young voters, or those who were sure to vote for the first time anyway.
How big?
18 percent times a 25 percent increase in the Democratic margin equals 4.5 points, or a majority of Obama’s popular vote margin. Had the Democratic 18-29 vote stayed the same as 2004’s already impressive percentage, Obama would have won by about 2 points, and would not have won 73 electoral votes from Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, or Indiana.
So, to clarify here: Obama’s youth margin = 73 electoral votes. Without the economic crisis, this would have been the difference.
Above: NewsChannel9’s Derek Dellinger speaks with Zach Wamp.
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Above: 109 year old Texas resident Amanda Jones, daughter of a slave, who just cast her vote for Barack Obama for President.
Regardless of whom you hope will win the White House, this truly is an amazing achievement for our country.
[scroll down to see Biden, McCain & Palin]
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Dick Morris thinks the answer is yes.
Nate Silver thinks the answer is no.
This article takes a look at last-week undecided trends from past elections.
..that would be Cape Girardeau, Missouri. Scroll down to see McCain in Ohio.
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[Scroll down to see Sarah Palin & John McCain.]
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The Politico weighs the pros & cons of Biden’s contributions to the campaign trail.
Also: the Obama campaign tries to clarify Biden’s “mark my words” comment in a new ad:
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Read examples of racism from the left this election season here.
But whatever you do, don’t pigeonhole rednecks:
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Read a letter to the New York Times from 1908 that brands McCain’s favorite president with his current favorite perjorative for his opponent.
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Is McCain really in that much trouble in his home state? Check the average of polls here. The Obama camp claims their internal polls are tightening.
Personally, I don’t think he’s going to lose his home state. But it may be the ultimate margin of victory that McCain’s trying to manipulate.
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What’s with the “yet” in this ad? Bob Cesca has a theory.
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It would appear so, based on the clip above. A loss will have the conventional wisdom coronating her as the 2012 front-runner. However, there may be a few in the GOP who have been holding their tongues until after the ballots have been cast.
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From Domino’s Pizza, via Marc Ambinder. I sent this out to the newsroom & got a funny response from operations engineer John Creel, whose text below is in red:
— Spend more per order than other consumers.
(*WITH THE OIL MONEY PROFITS WE CAN SPEND MORE.)
— They rely on credit cards to pay more than other consumers.
(*DOESN’T EVERYBODY’S HAVE A AMERICAN EXPRESS GOLD CARD.)
– They tend to order two large pizzas at a time, and they’re usually
specialty pizzas.
(*EVERYTHING WORTH HAVING COMES IN 2′S. WE ALL GOTTA PAIR DON’T WE.)
– They are more likely to order online, and more likely to pick up their
orders.
(*LIMOS ARE GREAT FOR PICKING UP PIZZAS, ESPECIALLY WHEN LOBBYIST ARE
BUYING.)
— Rely on delivery more than Republicans.
(*DELIVERY BOY IS A JUST A GUY TRYING TO MAKE A BUCK. WE’RE SPREADING THE WEALTH WITH HIM.)
– Pay cash more than other consumers.
(*CREDIT CARDS LEAVE A PAPER TRAIL TO FOLLOW. WE DON’T LIKE ANYTHING TRACEABLE BACK TO US.)
– Like more variety with their orders, opting for side items, chicken and
beverages more than Republicans.
(*WE LIKE OUR PIZZA LIKE OUR POLITICS … LOTS OF VARIETY.)
(*REPUBLICANS CALL THE SIDE ITEMS PORK, BUT WE PUT THEM ON OUR
CONGRESSIONAL BILLS AND VOTERS LOVE THEM.)
Funny stuff, John! Thanks!
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Oops. Maybe he was recording his album?
More from McCain’ speech in Defiance, Ohio:
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The ad above may be remembered as one of the worst in the country for the year 2008. It’s also a sign of how much trouble Elizabeth Dole finds herself in. The worst part about the ad is the woman saying “there is no God” at the end which is NOT Kay Hagan, Dole’s opponent. No politician who has integrity - on either side of the aisle - would do something like that.
…but how much of the ad is true? Click here for a fact-check.
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Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com speculates on the spellbinding Georgia Senate race:
“Very quick observation about Georgia’s senate race, which along with California’s Proposition 8, may be the thing to watch on Election Night in the event of an Obama blowout. The polls, from what I can tell, are showing a fairly high undecided vote among the African-American population. Rasmussen’s most recent poll, which had Saxby Chambliss up by two, shows that 12 percent of black voters are undecided in the senate race. Were those voters to split 4:1 to Jim Martin, that would be worth a net of around 2 points to him, making the race a tie. SurveyUSA, likewise, shows a higher rate of undecideds among black voters (7%) than among whites (3%).
Related thought: it’s very difficult to imagine what a Chambliss-Obama voter looks like. It’s pretty easy to imagine what a McCain-Martin voter looks like. So if the Georgia polls have Obama down by 4 or 5 points, but Martin down by 2 or 3 points (as they do), something doesn’t quite seem right; I’d think the gap should be a bit wider.
Basically, I think this race is a true toss-up rather than a Lean R. African-American voters might be unfamiliar with Jim Martin, who didn’t become the nominee until August, but the ‘D’ beside his name is worth a lot..”
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Above: at long last, the folks at Freedom Blogging have finally enabled me to post videos from NewsChannel9.com here. Above: NewsChannel9’s Erica Green has an early voting report.
The Hamilton County Election Commission says as of Wednesday, 61576 people have voted early.
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From the Boston Globe:
“Ad spending and ad placement data obtained from Democratic and Republican operatives show that in the closing days of the campaign the Republican voice has grown louder in states such as Florida, Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia and Pennsylvania.
For instance, Obama had been scheduled to buy about $2.5 million in Florida ads for the last week of the campaign. McCain is now set to spend about $1.6 million and the Republican National Committee added $1.5 million to their buy in the state this week. Obama appears to have added more weight to his ads since.”
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From Time magazine:
Pennsylvania: Obama 55, McCain 43
North Carolina: Obama 52, McCain 46
Nevada: Obama 52, McCain 45
Ohio: Obama 51, McCain 47
Arizona: McCain 53, Obama 46
Find out more info, including male/female & making over $50K/under $50K preferences here.
How about those Arizona numbers? Here’s another one, from NBC, that’s no doubt making McCain nervous. [Remember, Al Gore infamously lost his home state in 2000.]
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Think about it: what ad since 1984 can that infomercial compare to, besides this one?
“Discuss: all else being equal, the most optimistic candidate wins the election. And that’s definitely the mood that Obama is going for with this thing.”
I also would point out that not mentioning John McCain or President Bush was stroke of genius. It makes it harder for the right to criticize the ad because of this.
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Above: a screen grab from Fox News yesterday.
This is not the first time Fox’s graphics department has gotten it wrong.
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Test your 2008 campaign knowledge here, & answer questions that include
2. Which one of these statements did Barack Obama make while campaigning?
A) “I’ve now been in 57 states. I think one left to go.”
B) “Most of all, I believe in you, Nebraska. Or South Dakota. Or wherever I am.”
C) “We’ve come so far since we began this campaign 21 years ago.”
Here’s a trivia question I’d add: which two presidential candidates stopped in Chattanooga during the primary season? (answer here)
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[below: the latest writings about the state of the conservative movement, as expressed by conservatives]
From the invasion of Iraq to the selection of Sarah Palin, carelessness has characterized recent episodes of faux conservatism. Tuesday’s probable repudiation of the Republican Party will punish characteristics displayed in the campaign’s closing days.
Some polls show that Palin has become an even heavier weight in John McCain’s saddle than his association with George W. Bush. Did McCain, who seems to think that Palin’s never having attended a “Georgetown cocktail party” is sufficient qualification for the vice presidency, lift an eyebrow when she said that vice presidents “are in charge of the United States Senate”?
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Above: Bill Clinton & Barack Obama, together on stage for the first time, last night after the ‘infomercial‘ aired.
I thought it was well-done. It certainly beats Ross Perot’s informercial from 1992.
He kept it positive - didn’t mention the word “Bush” once.
Watch & tell me what you think.
Read McCain’s ‘prebuttal’ to the infomercial here.
A lot of you have voted already. As of Monday, more than 50,000 people have voted in Hamilton County.
Which way are early voters leaning? Marc Ambinder:
Obama leads by 16 points among likely voters, by 17 points among independents, by 13 points among men, by 20 points among women, is tied among whites, and is up eight among white Catholics. Of the 15 percent of the sample who’ve already voted, Obama leads by 19 points (although this subsample has a fairly large MoE). 74% of Obama’s backers say they support him “strongly,” which is 20 points higher than the percentage who say the same about their support for McCain.
Click here for the full Pew results, as of Tuesday.
Here’s a site where you can see the early voting numbers already in from around the country. Very useful.
From that site I glean:
The Peach state is turning into one of THE states to watch this year - & I had written that state off months ago, back when Bob Barr’s Georgia support started dropping off.
& not just the presidential race. The battle for Saxby Chambliss’ Senate seat remains intense.
The two latest polls come from polling firms that lean either way.
The left-leaning InsiderAdvantage poll has Saxby Chambliss & Jim Martin at 46-44%, That same poll also shows McCain leading by just 1 point).
The right-leaning Strategic Vision poll has Chambliss up by 2, & McCain up by 6.
& it’s possible that Georgia may be the last Senate race called - as in called several weeks after election night. MSNBC’s First Read blog explains:
“If Martin wins, he’ll have Obama to thank because the surge in African-American turnout is clearly benefiting the Democrat. By the way, Georgia could be the state that is the final race called in the country. Why? The state has that quirky runoff law, and a third-party candidate in the race might hold one of the major party candidates under 50%. The last time Georgia hosted a Senate runoff was the last time the country elected a new Democratic president: 1992, when the election of Clinton ended up helping the Republicans pull the Senate upset (Paul Coverdell defeated Wyche Fowler). This time, however, Republicans fear that an Obama victory will only energize African Americans in the runoff and make Chambliss’ path to victory even more difficult.”
Speaking of African-American turnout, it’s huge in Georgia - check it out. Georgia’s Secretary of State reports that 35% of early voters are African-American - more than double the percentage of the state’s population.
& there seems to be a correlation between a state’s African-American voting population & percentage of early voter turnout. FiveThirtyEight.com’s Nate Silver has the details here. In short, the higher the percentage of blacks in a state, the higher early voter turnout is. The states with the highest turnout are Georgia, North Carolina & Louisiana.
Can McCain count on voters who make up their minds in this final week? The trends (from Pollster.com) from past Presidential elections, in terms of their numbers, don’t look promising:
Click this link (again, to Pollster.com) to find out which way those last-minute voters swing.
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But still, interestingly, yet probably unsurprisingly, Obama still faces a major disadvantage with voters down here in that long-GOP stronghold, the South, per ABC News:
Obama is outperforming any Democrat back to Jimmy Carter among white voters, getting 45 percent to McCain’s 52 percent. But in the South, it is a very different story. Obama fares worse among Southern whites than any Democrat since George McGovern in 1972.
Whites in the East and West tilt narrowly toward Obama (he’s up 8 and 7 points, respectively), and the two run about evenly among those in the Midwest. By contrast, Southern whites break more than 2 to 1 for McCain, 65 percent to 32 percent.
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Above: wet, wet wet conditions in Chester, Pennsylvania on Tuesday. Doesn’t look fun at all.
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Above: Obama making calls to undecided voters in Colorado.
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Michelle Obama appeared on Jay Leno Monday. Click here to watch.
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From the Toot:
“…once you’ve made a narrative choice, you do have to stick with it - you can’t just keep bouncing around, or people become confused. If you are telling the story of a scary vampire, you can’t decide in chapter 2 that he’s also 500 feet tall and radioactive and bent on destroying Tokyo, in chapter 3 that he is actually a giant man-eating shark, and in chapter 4 that he is all this and a super-terrorist trying to plant a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles. All of these things are, indeed, scary, but taken together they add up to a muddle.
This is the problem. It’s not just the McCain campaign’s problem - although their inability to pick a narrative and stick to it is a special kind of inexcusable - it’s a problem for the entire wingnut noise machine. Obama is a Marxist Muslim Arab Jesus Black White Terrorist Technocrat Racist Do-Gooder Liberal FDR Stalin Hilter Commie Fascist Gay Womanizing Naive Cynical Insider Noob Boring Radical Unaccomplished Elite Slick Gaffe-Prone Pedophile Pedophile-Seducing Liberation Theology Atheist Etc. & Anti-Etc. with a bunch of scary friends from - wait for it! - the Nineteen Hundred And Sixties. It makes no sense. It’s a jumble sale of fears and scary associations from 50 years of wingnut witch hunts and smear campaigns, a flea market of pre-owned and antique resentments, and if one does detect a semi-consistent 1960’s motif running through it all, that’s because that’s when most of these ideas were coined.”
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Above: at a joint rally with Sarah Palin in Hershey Pennsylvania on Tuesday.
He also appeared in North Carolina..
…but, interestingly, without incumbent GOP Senator Elizabeth Dole. (this may be why)
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It’s the major card McCain has left to play. But Newsweek’s Andrew Romano is pessimistic. Former Bush staffer Peter Wehner hsays the party needs to return to its reformist roots [which, I'd add, is what John McCain should have pushed harder for - challenging his party to return to its fundamental principles - instead of blatantly pandering to its base, which has spent the past year essentially rooting for the status quo, or at least is blind to why the status quo is in such a sorry state].
Single-party government rarely works for very long. It tends to overreach when there are no limits to those in power (see Congress/President Bush, 2002-2006). If this plays out, that will bode well for the beginning of a comeback for the now-battered GOP. [though I will say that if you sat on your hands & approved of how things were run under Republican leadership, you have a smaller rhetorical leg to stand on.]
['divided' here being less than a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate]
If this crazy year ends the way the trends are looking - that Obama will be elected - Obama’s historical standing would improve if he brought about change with the help & support of the minority party.
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Why is McCain behind Obama in the Pennsylvania polls? Michael Barone hazards a guess:
“My hypothesis is that that is because places like the Philly suburbs are places where the recent decline in household wealth has been most conspicuous. Housing prices mean a lot more to you when your house started off at $400,000 and declined to $290,000 than they did when you started off (as may be typical of Scranton or a blue-collar town in metro Pittsburgh) at $140,000 and declined to $110,000. Newspaper coverage of our current economic distress focuses on the very poor (like a recent Washington Post story on North Carolina, which focused on an ex-convict in a cheap motel in Charlotte), but the people who are getting hurt most visibly in their lifelong project of accumulating wealth are the more affluent. They’re the ones whose house values have most visibly and spectacularly declined, and whose 401(k) accounts and stock portfolios have tanked in the last few months as well. Folks in Scranton or in the cheap motel in Charlotte didn’t expect to live comfortably ever after off their increased house values, 401(k)’s, and Merrill Lynch accounts; a $700 monthly check from Social Security is about what they have long expected and that’s not in danger (yet). Folks in the Philly suburbs did expect to live comfortably off such assets.”
& he concludes
“The irony here is that voters motivated by anger at the decline in their wealth seem about to elect a president who has promised to embark on wealth-destroying policies.”
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The exodus of a chunk of voters - Libertarians - who traditionally vote Republican, that’s what.
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Here’s a view-from-the-crowd at a Joe rally in New Port Richey, Florida on Monday. He remained in Florida on Tuesday.
Above: at a rally in Hershey, Pennsylvania, appearing with McCain.
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Sadly, there appears to be quite a few reports of ‘ugly Americanism‘ at her rallies, & that’s a shame for Palin & her supporters, who in my opinion should quickly & forcefully speak out about those who would tarnish her image, especially if you are hoping she becomes the Republican party’s standard-bearer after the election.
That’s it for now! I know it’s a lot to digest, but please feel free to comment on anything mentioned above. ALL views are welcome here.
& check back later in the day, as I’ll provide more info in this post. Let me know what you think of the ‘one-post’ format. I think I’ll stick to doing it this way through the home stretch.
Today’s most interesting writings about the future of conservatism - by conservatives - in the blogosphere:
“the problem is real: the mechanisms for acceptable self-criticism on the right aren’t very good, especially in election years. Any institution, even one with noble intentions, that dedicates itself to simple self-preservation without the added step of self-monitoring is bound to face corruption, disarray, and discontent. Do I have a grand, systematic solution? No, but a little more honesty and public self-questioning from any somewhat influential conservative who can afford to do so would certainly help.”
Patrick Ruffini, the Next Right:
“Like Mark McKinnon I too feel the McCain camp could probably have done some things differently, but it probably wouldn’t be enough to save them. What is striking about 2008 is how little the campaigns have mattered in comparison to the fundamental nature of the two men running.
Nothing the McCain campaign did could change the reality of McCain the candidate’s poor management instincts and his tendency to fidget around and not stay on message. When the economic crisis hit, this reality flew in the face of the McCain campaign’s message of steadiness versus inexperience. Whether by design or the candidate’s nature, Obama’s caution and deliberation was a living, breathing talking point against the experience card.
Likewise, I think it will be said that the McCain campaign has yet to really lay a glove on Obama character-wise because Obama himself simply does not project the cloying, insecure, effete tendencies of past nominees like Gore and Kerry, though the only two times he’s come close (Wright and bitter/cling) have barely figured in the general election campaign. I do think “celeb” was the best chance we had to define Obama personally, but again, though there is something to be said for attacking a guy’s strength, Obama’s grassroots appeal was a legitimate strength, not a hidden weakness.”
Whatever direction you think conservatism should be going in from here on out, the absolute worst thing the members of a losing political movement can do - if they ever want to win again, at least - is attempt to pre-emptively close off debate about the movement’s future. Conservatives need to have arguments, not
George Will: