The Politico has an early autopsy of the McCain campaign. At a high level, the campaign has already conceded defeat and key aides have started sending their résumés around to the private sector. The finger-pointing has started in earnest. What’s funny is that no one, except maybe David Frum, has any realistic assessment of what went wrong. Both on the record and off, McCain’s advisers misdiagnose the problem:
For one anonymous source, it was the ‘change’ strategy:
Running as a steady hand and basing a campaign on Obama’s sparse résumé was a political loser, it was decided.
“The pollsters and the entire senior leadership of campaign believe that experience vs. change was not a winning message and formulation, the same way it was no winning formula with Hillary Clinton.”
For Rick Davis, it was money:
Earlier this week, campaign manager Rick Davis complained to reporters in a conference call that reporters refuse to call out Obama for alleged shady fundraising tactics, but in the process revealed no small amount of envy over the Democratic financial advantage.
Another aide blames the lack of strategic vision:
One aide told writer Robert Draper, “For better or worse, our campaign has been fought from tactic to tactic,” and one criticized McCain’s debate performance.
Mark Salter blames the media and fate:
Longtime McCain alter ego Mark Salter gave an interview to Atlantic writer Jeffrey Goldberg criticizing everything from the news media to the vagaries of fate: “Iraq was supposed to be the issue of the campaign. We assumed it was our biggest challenge. Funny how things work.”
Naturally, the selection of Sarah Palin is debated:
One school — including syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker and Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal — called her a drag on the ticket and implicitly rebuked McCain’s judgment in picking her. Another school believes she is the future of the party, a view backed by Fred Barnes of The Weekly Standard: “Whether they know it or not, Republicans have a huge stake in Palin. If, after the election, they let her slip into political obscurity, they’ll be making a huge mistake.”
Only David Frum had anything insightful to say:
“It’s a failure of the Republican Party and conservative movement to adapt to the times.”
Bingo.
What all of these Republicans failed to realize is that it is the epic failure of their political ideology, once put in practice, that is on trial in this election. The relative lack of news out of Iraq, the selection of Palin, and the economic meltdown were not helpful, but they weren’t decisive. What was decisive was McCain’s choice to run as a Republican. If he wanted to win, he had to take a chance and run against his own party even harder than he ran against Obama. People needed to believe that he was as appalled by the GOP’s performance as everyone else. He didn’t, and they don’t.
It was the failure of the GOP that led to the huge recruitment and fundraising advantage the Democrats enjoyed. It’s the reason the Dems registered so many more voters. It’s the reason that they have so many newly-involved volunteers. All of that was baked in the cake back in the spring, which was why I was able to predict with such confidence a realigning election.
McCain didn’t act like he had any understanding of this shifting landscape and neither did his advisers. When he finally realized he would lose with a conventional campaign, his response was the wrong one. He thought he could sell Palin as a reformer. But he didn’t vet her, and they didn’t break with the party, they broke with the center of their party. The center is where elections are won. Palin merely put an exclamation point on a failure that began in the spring.
Why did I continually advise McCain to pick a northeastern, or moderate, pro-choice candidate? Because I could see that McCain’s base had been whittled down to an unattractive fringe…the 28 percenters that still give George W. Bush their approval. I could see that McCain was losing the socially-tolerant youth vote, the pro-choice suburban vote, the pro-science professional vote. I could see the voter registration numbers. I could see the swell of Obama volunteers. I could see the hunger on the Democratic side. I could see the fundraising and the recruitment differential in downticket races. There was no way for McCain to match that by appealing to his base. In fact, it would just exacerbate the problems the Republicans were already facing. McCain had to run to the middle, and run there very hard and very convincingly. He didn’t, and that is the reason he lost.
When you get into the what-if game, it’s a mistake to look through a small window. This was all foreseeable last winter and I wrote about it incessantly. Mainly, I wrote about it to reassure Democrats that Obama could and would win. But I believed it because all these factors were there staring me in the face. A lot of Democrats wouldn’t or couldn’t believe that things could have changed so much in their favor. Their experience was one of underperformance and disappointment. Now it is the Republicans’ turn to feel the sting of failure.
John McCain ran the wrong campaign in the wrong year. But you can’t place all the blame on him. His advisers were unable to shake off their ideological delusions, and that prevented them from taking the kinds of actions that might have shown they could adapt to the times.
