I agree with Mark McKinnon that the tendency to call political winners ‘geniuses’ and political losers ‘idiots’ is overblown and unfortunate. For example, I thought John Kerry ran a very strong campaign, won all the debates, and has little for which he should apologize. At the same time, when we look at the many things Obama’s campaign has done that Kerry’s did not do, we can see the difference between a good campaign and a great one. But where does John McCain’s campaign come down on this scale.
For starters, please try to tell me one thing that McCain has done well. Everyone knows that you run to the right or left (depending on your party) during the primaries and then you tack back to the center in the general. Obama did this. Did John McCain?
Everyone knows that you have to define your opponent early, before they can define themselves. So, why did McCain wait until October to bring up William Ayers and all this other mumbo-jumbo?
While John McCain was blathering on and on and on about his time as a POW and the superfantabulous ‘Surge’ in Iraq, Barack Obama was defining him as George Bush’s older, more cantankerous, twin.
Obama created a brand that is familiar, from his rallies, his website, his commercials, his posters, his buttons, and his bumper-stickers. John McCain campaigned in front of lime-green backdrops, settled on no defined message, and finally came up with the vaguely fascist ‘Country First’ motto. How inviting!!
Barack Obama had a clearly defined strategy for winning the Electoral College. It involved empowering a ground-up grassroots campaign and getting them out to register voters in record numbers. It involved expanding the map of competitive states into every region of the country. It involved mobilizing the youth vote. What strategy did McCain have besides copying Bush’s 2004 strategy?
In a way, I’m sorry that McCain ran such an inept campaign because it will rob Obama of some of the credit he deserves for running a great one. But there is simply nothing that I can point to and say ‘that was a smart move by McCain’. I mean, I haven’t even brought up the selection of Sarah Palin or his erratic response to the financial meltdown. Those were mistakes, but they were wholly gratuitous mistakes. He would have lost anyway. And his debate performances? They were the worst I’ve seen in my life.
So, I don’t blame the Republicans for pointing fingers. But the Republicans should remember before they go throwing stones at McCain, that they’re the ones that created a situation where only 9% of the electorate thinks the country is headed in the right direction. They all own a share in McCain’s epic failure.
I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to the Republican primaries, but didn’t McCain pretty much do the opposite?
Also, on a marginally related note, about a month ago I had a discussion with my friend and fellow bootrib member halo0. We were talking about the need for something further along on the FAIL scale beyond EPIC FAIL. I suggested PALIN FAIL, and would still like to see that stick. So, pass it around.
McCain ran as being more for the war than Bush, Cheney, or Rumsfeld, and then picked a far-right beauty queen than can’t complete a coherent sentence as his running mate. I’d say that’s the opposite. I’d say that’s PALIN FAIL.
Excellent. That’s the spirit – I am hopeful that I will see PALIN FAIL here in some headline on November 5th!
Living in CA, I can see the difference between a great campaign and a weak one right before my eyes. Obama, of course, is running a great campaign that not only presses his positive message and energizes his supporters and raises lots of money, he also responds to McCain’s attacks and lies with expert judo.
Meanwhile, the No on Prop. 8 campaign seems to be a well-intentioned mess. They can’t complain that they don’t have enough money — they’ve achieved equity with the Yes on 8 people with about $30 million. But goddamn, their ad campaign is really a huge disappointment.
We are being bombarded with fearmongering Yes on 8 ads that tell us that gay marriage will be taught in schools, and what do the No on 8 people tell us in their ads? “No matter how you feel about marriage, Prop 8 is wrong.” Can you say “blah”?
The anti-Prop 8 people have all the facts on their side, they have all the important endorsements, and yet their total lack of creativity and energy is causing them to lose this campaign. Right now black people support Prop 8 by 58-35%. But have we seen a single ad telling us that Barack Obama (the most popular black man in America right now, virtually a hero of MLK proportions) is OPPOSED to Prop 8? No. Obama doesn’t have to cut an ad or get involved, they just need to name-drop him in every freakin’ ad. Have we heard a single ad tell us that Arnold Schwarzenegger, Diane Feinstein, and Barbara Boxer are opposed to Prop 8? Nope.
Ellen Degeneres made a web ad, but why isn’t she on TV every day? Where is George Takei? Why not put a face on this campaign for god’s sake?
The Yes on 8 people are running a fear-based campaign that feels like a flashback to Prop 187 and other divisive Republican tricks in the 1990s. And the No on 8 people are bringing knives to the gunfight.
It pisses me off because I know 8 is beatable. But the No on 8 people are dropping the ball in a major way….
Fortunately, Prop 8 is extremely unlikely to pass judiciary muster, so there is some hope to fall back on, but I have been deeply disappointed in the No on 8 campaign. I think they were blindsided though. We all thought defeat of 8 was a done deal, and then suddenly we start seeing those lying ads all over the place, and it started going up in the polls. I was shocked. But I agree that the no on 8 ads are lame as can be, and not very convincing at all compared to the lying yes on 8 ads.
I agree with both of you. The counter campaign has been nonexistent at least from what I’ve seen. The only thing I’ve seen are those stupid ads saying you’re kids are going to be taught about gay marriage in school..and I don’t think my hollering at the tv ‘so what’ has done any good.
The counter response has been lame.
Tying Obama to no on prop 8 would bring him down in the polls measurably. Which is probably why he hasn’t cut an add himself. What would the response be if they started name dropping him?
It’s better to let Prop 8 pass than to jeopardize McCain’s loss. I really think the Supreme Court will shoot down Prop 8 if it wins. After all, this is the same Supreme Court that said denying gay people the right to marriage is a violation of Equal Protection. Why would they reverse themselves?
There are only two reasons that McCain was remotely competitive in this race– First, Obama is a black guy, and that guarantees that some % of the electorate will vote against him. Second, the corporate media has spent decades sucking up to McCain and helping him construct the POW/maverick image that he has ridden for so long. It all worked just fine, until the McCain schtick was held up to the light of day.
mccain admitted his fundamental problem eight years ago: he has nothing to offer the voters:
mccain ran a vanity campaign based on a fake persona he spent decades cultivating: the straight-talking rock-of-gibraltar ex-pow. bizarrely, he tossed away his only talking point almost immediately.
like the inveterate gambler he is, he thought he had enough capital in the bank to gamble away some negligible part of that trademark in order to slime obama. worse, when the slime failed to stick he doubled down and put it all on the table.
the political climate was never in his favor, but in the end, the voters are deciding that the oval office isn’t some kind of lifetime achievement award — especially for perpetual losers.
So, why did McCain wait until October to bring up William Ayers and all this other mumbo-jumbo?
Where’ve you been the past 3 months? McCain has been talking about Ayers for months. It hasn’t worked, so he’s doing it some more. Just like his Joe the Plumber didn’t work, so he’s trying that some more. He’s doing these things because he doesn’t have anything else. He’s trying to say yeah, the past 8 years of Bush has been awful so you need to change it by voting for the guy who supported Bush’s policies and voted the Bush line. That doesn’t work either.
It didn’t work for Hillary, so I suppose the Republicans decided to try something different first…
I’ll bite and make an attempt to answer the question.
My late father used to express his peculiar sense of optimism with his favorite phrase, “It could be worse.”
The Palin pick could be viewed with that filter. Specifically, was there have been any other GOP candidate that would have satisfied, and indeed energized, James Dobson and his minions? I reckon not because McCain had months to figure out that question and ended up with Palin. Consider this simple series of headlines:
Clearly a more moderate pick than Palin would have satisfied independents and moderate-leaning Republicans, but what good would that be if the GOP religious right skipped the election, and failed to donate dollars and volunteer hours too?
So, my submission to the question, “What did McCain do right?” is that he avoided even worse consequences for himself and the Republican ballot by picking Palin. Caught between a rock…
It’s a hypothetical scenario. I hope a McCain campaign insider will some day give us more information about what VP choices were considered and discarded, and the rationale for those decisions.
The Republican insiders HAVE talked about what the choices were and who was vetted and supported by which of McCain’s staffers. He was pretty much blindsided by Schimdt (who’d bought onto Palin’s Christian Dominionist credentials a couple years ago, but didn’t tell anybody on the campaign until they were out of time to vet her). His staff members had to have known that McCain would approve of a hot beauty queen, just like Clinton’s aides knew that he preferred bimbos with big hair and electric grins. They also know his health. Palin could never have been in position to reach for this much power on her own. She’d have been vetted the moment she stepped out of Alaska. Like a plague-riddled flea, she needed a rat to get upstairs.
How much worse? Well, he didn’t choose his dog or horse or son as a running mate. But McCain is still the candidate being judged.
If McCain hadn’t run this hard and this dirty and this incompetently, then Salter could have continued burnishing the image and writing the books for him. Salter can’t keep a candidate in shrink wrap. Instead of the Maverick, Hero, Legislative Lion and Reformer of the narrative, we’ve seen the truth.
McCain is a lying, cheating, adulterer. He is a Songbird who made 26(?) tapes for the Viet Cong. He is a compulsive gambler. He has a temper. He takes risks for the adrenaline high. He mixes drugs and caffeine and sleeping pills and treats his body like shit. He has severe personality issues because he will never be as good as his father and grandfather. his judgement as a pilot was piss-poor. He is stupid and lazy and incurious. He prefers to get raucously drunk with his buddies in the Senate to actually reading and voting on the various bills. He is greedy, vain, narcissistic. He thinks he is entitled to rule, that he is owed this place in history. He’ll break election laws, soak the donors, and rouse the rabble to unthinking riots if it brings him into more power. He is woefully unprepared to do anything other than scream “attack!” at his demons. We’ve seen the real McCain, and it is uglier than that portrait of Dorian Grey.
Could his aides have hidden all that? We have had Presidents who hid illness or adultery or secret bombing campaigns, but not in the age of the Internet where anything said can be fact-checked by thousands. Narratives must not waver. Even if you discover more facets to the diamond, it is still structurally a diamond. McCain is merely broken glass.
McCain could have finished out a Senate career and retired with honors and wealth and his family around him. Given his medical history, that would have been a great thing to do, even if the greatness was hollow. We’d have never known.
Unfortunately, I now know far more than desired about the McCains and the Palins. My fervent hope is for a landslide so vast that it washes away any shred of their reappearance.
Great post, especially the reference to Dorian Grey.
I am glad that McCain got the nomination, picked Palin then used a Rove/Bush strategy because the ugliness was there for all to see. Maybe lessons were learned for future campaigns.
McCain’s only chance was to oppose the bank bailout, but instead chickened out and bailed out of that one being gutless with lack of conviction. Just as well.
Everyone knows that you have to define your opponent early, before they can define themselves. So, why did McCain wait until October to bring up William Ayers and all this other mumbo-jumbo?
Actually, McCain DID define his opponent early – with real attacks that were actually sticking. McCain worked overtime branding Obama as an inexperience, first-term Senator who was moving too fast and wasn’t ready for the Presidency. That was working, and it let McCain bring up questions of Obama’s judgment – into which the narratives of Obama’s lack of faith in “the Surge”, his willingness to serve on a board with Bill Ayers and his attendance at a church with a pastor who “says bad stuff about America” all slotted nicely. The McCain camp laid the groundwork for months to make the question one of Obama’s lack of judgment and inexperience. Sure it was the campaign that Clinton tried to run in the end, but she ran it as a desperate ploy after the fact once it became apparent that Obama was very popular and that she didn’t have the nomination locked up. The McCain camp was laying the groundwork early, and they were winning over independents with the argument (and might have carried some center-left Clinton supporters as well).
Of course, then they threw it all away by making decision after decision that called McCain’s judgment into question. For every accusation of poor judgment leveled at Obama, it seems like two come right back at McCain. And instead of experienced, the man started looking old and erratic. After the convention, it became apparent that the Palin pick destroyed the idea that McCain had better judgment.
That left the gloss of the narrative without the substance. There were still these “associations” that they could tar Obama with, and the accusations that he didn’t support the Surge and doesn’t support “winning in Iraq”. And they kept pushing them, but instead of being accusations of poor judgment, they became crazy accusations of anti-Americanism.
That’s the Epic Fail of this campaign, IMO. They worked so hard to create a narrative around Obama and then they threw it all away with a few random decisions for short-term gain in the news cycles. Someone needs to remind these guys that winning a battle isn’t the same as winning a war, but then these are the folks led by the guy who doesn’t know the difference between a tactic and a strategy, so I’m not sure what else to expect.
McCain himself is not a great campaigner. But this year would have proved a tremendous challenge to even a good campaigner.
The McCain campaign went along well-trodden paths; that means they were extremely predictable to people who understand strategy. They had a message and used techniques that people have grown sick of, and in any case were totally out of tune with the mood of the country and the actual predicaments we find ourselves in.
McCain’s campaign was so bad in part BECAUSE Obama’s was so good. They didn’t understand what they were dealing with, and the Obama people knew very well how to deal with McCain. Not even Palin threw them off. They just waited a couple of weeks.
It finally hit me the other day whyn the Rovian smear tactics work. It’s not that so many people, for example, really believe the Swift Boat crap. They knew Kerry was a war hero. But they wanted to see that war hero shut down the Swift Boaters; he didn’t and he couldn’t. If he couldn’t defeat such obvious bullshit, what kind of a leader was he?
The very fact that Obama could withstand the Rovian
bullshit and even do the judo where it now hurts the people who use it more than it hurts him, shows this guy really is a leader. People have been waiting for that kind of a Democratic candidate for years.