Why McCain Lost
Digg 
Stumble Upon 
Newsvine 
Slashdot 
Mixx 
Diigo 
Delicious 
Reddit 
Facebook
Why did John McCain lose?
Let’s start with those “headwinds” into which he was flying.
The president of the United States, the leader of his party, was at Nixon-Carter levels of approval, 25 percent, going into Election Day.
Sixty-two percent of the nation thought the economy was the No. 1 issue, and 93 percent thought the economy was bad. Two-thirds of the nation thought the war McCain championed was a mistake, and 80 percent to 90 percent thought the country was on the wrong course.
As a political athlete, measured by charisma and communications skills, McCain is not even in the same league with Barack Obama. He was outspent by vast sums, and his political organization was far inferior.
It is a wonder McCain was even competitive, dealt such a hand.
Yet by Sept. 10, McCain, thanks to Sarah Palin, whose selection had proven a sensation, had come from eight points behind to take the lead, and Joe Biden was wailing that maybe Hillary would have been a better choice for Obama.
Then came the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the bailout of AIG, McCain’s assertion that the economy was fundamentally sound, and his panicked return to Washington to assist Bush and Hank Paulson push through a wildly unpopular bank bailout — using 700 billion in tax dollars to buy up rubbish paper the idiot bankers had put on their books.
The Establishment’s Man had come to save the Establishment.
Suddenly, it was McCain who was down 10 points, as the feline and feral press went on a wilding attack on Sister Sarah. He never recovered, though the McCain-Palin final push left egg on the faces of pollsters who were predicting a double-digit triumph for Obama.
Perhaps no Republican, in these circumstances, could have won, especially with that month-long bloodletting on Wall Street that wiped out $4 trillion to $5 trillion in stock and bond value, ravaging IRAs and 401Ks, portfolios and pensions alike.
Yet McCain might still have won had he not, like his three fellow establishment Republicans Gerald Ford, George H.W. Bush, and Bob Dole, been inhibited by the Mainstream Media and his own Beltway beliefs.
Consider. In California, where a liberal judiciary had ordered the state to recognize homosexual marriages, voters, by 52 to 48, slapped the judges across the face and ordered the ban reimposed and placed in the California constitution. Arizona and Florida also voted to outlaw gay marriage, by landslides.
The New York Times deplored the “ugly outcome” of these three referenda and said voters were “enshrining bigotry,” thus calling the majority of Californians, Arizonans, and Floridians bigots and their Bible-rooted Christian beliefs nothing but bigotry.
Good to know what they think of us.
Yet McCain, who might have been out front on these moral and cultural issues, paid only lip service — and lost Florida, and California by a landslide.
In Missouri, where McCain eked out a victory, a proposal to make English the official state language carried six to one. In Nebraska, a proposal to ban affirmative action carried 58 to 42, but lost in a 50-50 tie in Colorado.
Parental notification won 48 percent support in California, a far higher share of the vote than McCain got, while a measure to outlaw abortion except in cases of rape, incest, and the life of the mother got 45 percent in South Dakota. Had McCain made an issue of Obama’s support for a Freedom of Choice Act that would eliminate all state restrictions on abortion, he could have forced Obama to defend what yet remains a radical and extreme view in America.
While Barack was locking up black America, McCain failed to hold onto Bush’s share of the white working class, though Obama had the most liberal voting record in the Senate and long associations with the likes of Jeremiah Wright and ’60s bomber William Ayers.
Perhaps fearful his “good guy” reputation with his old buddies in his media “base” would be imperiled, McCain ruled Wright off limits and seemed hesitant even to go after the Ayers connections. Lee Atwater would not have been so ambivalent. Leo Durocher put it succinctly: “Nice guys finish last.”
Ultimately, however, the Beltway Republicans are losing Middle America because they are ideologically incapable of addressing two great concerns: economic insecurity and the perception that we are losing the America that we grew up in.
Economic insecurity is traceable to NAFTA-GATT globalization, under which it makes economic sense for U.S. companies to close factories here, build plants in China, and export back to the United States. Manufacturing now accounts for less than 10 percent of all U.S. jobs.
Social insecurity is traceable to mass immigration, legal and illegal, which has brought in scores of millions who are altering the character of communities and competing with U.S. workers by offering their services for far less pay.
These are the twin causes of death of the Reagan coalition, and as long as the Republican Party is hooked on K Street cash, it will not address either, and thus pass, blissfully addicted, from this earth.
COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.
Filed under: Election, Politics
Snap out of it Pat! Especially your old man’s crush for Sarah
Dukakis led by 17 in the polls after the convention. Carter was leading Reagan (do you believe the press was kind to Reagan at that stage?) till before the debate. It is a delusion if you believe McCain-Palin would have won California of all places, talking about cultural issues. The white working class did hear about Wright and Ayers (Sister Sarah was pounding on the later), but went with their pocket books.
Forget that McCain’s campaign was a disaster. This election was a dirty fight. It was all about money well spent on dominating a biased media which never gave McCain a chance. It was all about a savvy PR campaign capable of burying any kind of damage to Obama, spinning, any tale that would make him smell like a flower, and mostly fought in the internet with blogs and websites, saturated with Obama supporters, abusing, spamming, trolling any kind of comment that would favor McCain. And that’s not even touching the tip of the iceberg – which is Acorn… While McCain became the republican candidate, the democratic party took forever in electing a candidate which rendered Obama into a recognaziable figure of celebrity status. And this generation is so fascinated by celebrities, so they chose dross over gold.
Who knew that this race would be fought mainly in the internet – mainly by a biased press?
They chose, the people followed.
Time for conservatives to go back to being conservative.
http://rightklik.blogspot.com/
“their Bible-rooted Christian beliefs”
Rooted? Eh, not so much. “Rooted” suggests that their beliefs stem from the Bible, in which case you would find the many injunctions of, say, Leviticus more widely observed amongst the Christians of California, Arizona, and Florida.
Shellfish? Pork? A camel through the eye of a needle?
In fact what one finds is that Biblical sanction is sought, ex post facto, to legitimize whatever visceral revulsion of the moment, and the remainder of the word of God disregarded and discarded without further thought.
And if that isn’t the essence of bigotry, then what is?
Bravo, Michael Robinson.
So many are sick of the Bible being used to justify what would clearly be bigotry in every sense if not for a Biblical premise. The Christian Conservatives don’t have much standing when they cherry-pick the Holy Word in support of points of view they’d agree with regardless. They should get off their high horse and start stoning adulterers if they want to be respected as real traditionalists. Otherwise, they’re just positioning their subjective discomfort with open homosexuality behind the shield of religiosity–right-wing political correctness.
Incidentally, liberal Christians, liberation theologians and the social gospel advocates are just as guilty of this shameful incoherence and inconsistency; shameful, because its accompanied by a sickening self-righteousness that attempts to use G-D as a rhetorical bludgeon to achieve political (anti-social) objectives.
Ironically, Christians feeling threatened by homosexual activism betrays a lack of faith in their own ability to inculcate their understanding of Christian Morals in their children. It implies a fear that G-D’s Word is somehow fragile enough to be shaken by a bunch of gays who want to have a marriage ceremony in addition to equal protection under the law.
Pathetic.
“It implies a fear that G-D’s Word is somehow fragile enough to be shaken by a bunch of gays who want to have a marriage ceremony in addition to equal protection under the law.”
What I find pathetic is you pretending to believe the Orthodox Jewish injunction against putting the “O” in God, while coming out in favor of an idea so crazy and anti-heterosexual that even the Ancient Greeks didn’t think of it.
Pat Buchanan has pointed out many times that California is no go territory for the GOP in presidential elections, his point vis a vis the ballot proposition measure’s victory was that:
If even California, one of the most overly permissive hell holes in the history of the world, a place that will go down soon, with no help to come from the bankrupt USFG…
…If even California turned against the radical agenda of the raging homosexual lobby, what does that tell you about the rest of the Country?
If Republicans sell out on gay marriage just because they’re afraid of being called bigots, they’re too weak to be entrusted with national security.
And if that isn’t the essence of bigotry, then what is?
Perhaps the smearing of an entire religion just because most of it’s adherents aren’t interested in seeing marriage go in a biologically unsustainable direction?
I take the O out of God because growing up, people around me seemed to care about this. I thought acquiescence would avoid unfortunate confrontation, but it’s apparent that, no matter which way you write God, you can’t catch a break! I agree with you that it’s pathetic that people would concern themselves over such things.
But I fail to see your, and others’ hang-up with homosexual marriage. I don’t see how it changes anything you care about; hetero marriage and homo marriage is not some zero-sum tug-o-war for the monolithic “institution of marriage”. Why is it impossible for homosexual marriage to exist in parallel to the traditional version you are free to preserve; does one crowd the other out? Is it crucial that the state validate one kind of union above others–social engineering?
In your rebuttal, you took a certain understanding of good and bad, in terms of sexuality, for granted. Why does this issue rise above many others to stoke your biblical ire? Where does the threat to society come from? Where does the visceral discomfort come from, because let’s face it, there are other clear and present blasphemes that don’t elicit such a strong reaction.
[...] Buchanan doesn’t think Obama won so much as McCain lost, or something like [...]