"Socialist," "celebrity," "palling around with terrorists," "redistributist-in-chief," "the original mavericks," ACORN, Ayres, "lipstick on a pig," "drill, baby, drill," the right-wing sanctification of Samuel J. Wurzelbacher...today all this, and so much more, is mere roadside debris. And as we busily sweep up, even at the risk of soiling ourselves further at the mere touch, let us assess a few of the factors that made the John McCain presidential campaign one of the worst in modern times.
It is inescapable logic that any Republican candidate would have been swimming against the tide this year, given the current lame duck's disastrous tenure. And surely it would have been a tough autumn for any Republican in the wake of the Wall Street collapse, given the public's traditional perception that the GOP can't be trusted to cure a sick domestic economy (indeed, Republicans might want to ponder why that is so, and what they can do about it). These are the "fundamentals" that many in the defeated party are citing today, if only to dwell in denial and insist that there's nothing really wrong with the GOP, and that it lost only because it was victimized by external factors.
But it's impossible, as we sift the wreckage, to ignore the creative contributions of the Republican candidate, and his Rove-trained handlers, for they clearly made the situation far worse. It's hard to know precisely whether McCain is truly a centrist maverick who pragmatically embraced the dark side, or whether he was always a denizen of the dark side masquerading as a centrist maverick (thereby bewitching the once-fawning Washington press corps), but...whatever. All that matters now is the ignominious end result.
McCain's biggest screw up was the decision to pluck Sarah Palin out of Alaska, in order to appease his conservative base. Long before she proved herself to be a clueless demagogue on the stump, and long before she revealed in interviews her ignorance of the issues and of the U.S. Constitution, it was stone cold obvious that the pivotal swing voters of America would hardly embrace the implicit notion that any hockey mom in the Costco checkout line is qualified to serve a heartbeat away.
As I wrote here less than 24 hours after her ascent, "The Palin choice is not as egregious as Bush's decision to install Michael Brown at the helm of FEMA (Brownie had previously run the International Arabian Horse Association), but some swing voters may be forgiven for wondering whether McCain is perpetuating the Bush tradition of filling key posts with ill-qualified people…and, in the present case, somebody whom McCain barely knows at all." And referring to Hillary Clinton's female supporters, I also wrote that "millions of women are likely to feel insulted by the assumption that they'll flock to Palin merely because they all share the same gender. No doubt McCain would like to think that he can make inroads with the disgruntled Hillary Clinton sisterhood merely by putting Palin on display. But I hardly think that those women will march behind the GOP banner once they learn...that basically she stands for everything that Hillary Clinton has opposed for the past 35 years."
If this was all obvious to observers like me, why was it not obvious to the McCain professionals? Palin ended up damaging McCain in the swing suburbs of swing states. Moreover, 60 percent of all voters told the exit pollsters that she was not qualified to be president...and perhaps that share would have been higher if some of the dirt now being leaked had surfaced earlier. Take last night's tidbit, for instance. Fox News, citing leaks from McCain advisers, reports that Palin didn't even realize that Africa was a continent. Seriously. She thought that Africa was one big country, and that South Africa was just one of the regions. Today, Palin semi-denied the story, calling it "foolish," and complaining that she had been anonymously maligned by "a small, evidently bitter type of person."
(In hindsight, McCain would've been wiser to choose Mitt Romney, who at least is conversant with economics and business issues, and who, while not a visceral favorite of the conservative base, would at least have been acceptable. He also could have reminded centrist swing voters that he worked closely with Democrats in Massachusetts to get some stuff accomplished, such as health care. But McCain didn't like Romney. Never underestimate the importance of personal chemistry, or lack thereof, in the march of human events.)
Another big screw up occurred on the eve of the first debate. Yes, the economic crisis hurt McCain because he was a Republican - but his various responses to the crisis deepened his woes. One day he was pulling a Herbert Hoover by claiming that the fundamentals of the economy were strong, and another day he was declaring that the situation required his presence in Washington as a savior, even if it meant canceling the debate. McCain came off as erratic - a word that the Obama camp eagerly marketed, but it's also a word used in the past by McCain's party brethren to describe the guy. Witness Mississippi Republican senator Thad Corcoran, who told a newspaper last January: "The thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine. He is erratic. He is hotheaded. He loses his temper, and he worries me."
And that's how McCain came off in the debates. He had originally launched his '08 campaign - and his '00 campaign as well - by seeking to sell himself as a centrist, bipartisan guy who reaches across the aisle to get things done...and here he was seething with barely suppressed anger, and sneering condescendingly, thereby looking anything like a guy seeking to change the tone in Washington.
Which brings is to another screw up - the decision (whether his, or his Rove-trained handlers, or both) to descend into the slime. Americans can abide a happy warrior, but not one who dwells on the negative. Week after week this autumn, the polls reported that McCain's relentless negativity was getting him nowhere. The conservative base was clearly prepared to believe the worst about Obama, but the conservative base is not big enough to win a national election. People in the middle of the electorate were focused on their 401(k)s, not on the nature of whatever interactions Obama and Ayres might have had while serving (along with prominent Republicans) a decade ago on the same education reform board. But still the McCain campaign - actually, the remnants of a Republican attack machine first assembled in 1988 - stayed in character.
These mistakes help to explain why McCain was beaten so decisively in swing suburbia - even (as Palin would put it) in some of the "pro-America areas of this great nation." Yes, the underlying "fundamentals" were bad, but let us not underestimate the persuasive power of ineptitude...as evidenced by the fact that, on the final weekend of the election, in a masterpiece of mis-timing, who did the McCain people trot out to endorse their candidate?
Dick Cheney.
That one says it all. As does the Republican party's decision to dispatch a lawyer to Alaska, for the purpose of fully inventorying (and retrieving) the pricey Palin wardrobe.
Grab a broom, counselor. There's plenty of debris left to sweep.
