How McCain Lost, or, Blaming Sarah says it all.
There is no one reason why John McCain lost, of course, just as there’s no one reason that Barack Obama won.
Having said that, perhaps you’ve heard the reports that former McCain staffers are now anonymously attacking Sarah Palin with leaks to the media of insulting stories — and they’re just that, stories.
To me, if these reports of two-faced McCain staffers are true, nothing says why McCain lost more than that fact itself — Indeed, how could McCain, who spent his career as a “maverick” thorn in the side of traditional conservatives, ever win them back if his own staffers were acting as elitist and derogatory of middle America as your run-of-the-mill far Left Democrat?
Here’s John McCormack on Palin’s reaction:
Byron York, Jen Rubin, and Michelle Malkin all have smart takes on the McCain aides’ smearing of Sarah Palin. The Anchorage Daily News has a couple videos of Sarah Palin talking to the press after arriving back in Alaska, and it looks like she’s more than capable of defending herself, if she thought it was worth her time. Regarding the leaks against her, Palin said:
“If they’re an unnamed source, then that says it all. I won’t comment on anybody’s gossip, or allegations that are based on anonymous sources. That’s kind of a small, evidently bitter type of person who would anonymously charge something foolish like that, that I perhaps didn’t know an answer to a question.
“So until I know who was talking about it, I won’t have a comment on false allegations.”
Absolutely.
Somebody needs to remind these tee-hee-hee-Sarah-doesn’t-know-NAFTA staffers that John McCain was behind Obama for the entire duration of the election with one exception — after choosing Sarah Palin as his VP he bounced ahead of Obama.
That lead dissipated not because of Palin’s alleged geography problems, and perhaps not even because of the banking & loan crisis itself, but rather it dissipated after McCain’s calculated reaction to it.
[Wall Street Journal] On Sept. 24, with financial markets verging on panic and the economy thudding, Democratic Sen. Barack Obama placed a call to rival John McCain. He wanted to suggest they issue a joint statement on proposed financial-bailout legislation. As hours went by without a return call, Obama aides emailed each other, asking, “Have you heard anything?” One answered: “The McCain camp is cooking up something.”
Later that day, Sen. McCain went before the cameras to say he was suspending his campaign to focus on helping craft the legislation. “What does that mean — suspend the campaign?” Sen. Obama asked his staff on the trail, according to aides. At a news conference in Florida, he said, “It’s going to be part of the president’s job to be able to deal with more than one thing at once.”
Beyond the economic tumult, troubles in the McCain camp had contributed to the Republican’s extraordinary move. These included a shaky performance by his running mate in a mock debate and an admonition to Sen. McCain by some major donors to quit blasting Wall Street and focus on solutions. Suspending the campaign, one McCain adviser recalls hoping, would let them “push the reset button.”
The next day, while conservative House Republicans maneuvered behind the scenes to block the bailout bill, Sen. McCain sat largely silent at a crisis summit at the White House. Afterward, Sen. Obama called his staff from his car: “I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said, according to several aides. “Some of the Republicans are clueless. Bush and I were trying to convince them.”
The presidential candidates were essentially tied at the time, a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll showed, with Sen. McCain just a point behind. But in the next few weeks, as the handling of the economic crisis overshadowed all other issues, Sen. Obama opened a 10-point lead. Although Sen. McCain began to gain some ground at the end, he never fully recovered from the pivotal late-September juncture.
At the time, just about every pundit called this maneuver a gamble.
But on September 24, I wrote the following:
I sure wish I had been wrong. But politicians make gambles, which is why they’re politicians, and this one didn’t pan out for John. A couple of bounced balls the other way — such as more shenanigans from Russia — pushing the topics to a McCain strength like foreign policy, and he might have won. But economics has always been McCain’s weak point, and you can’t out Democrat a Democrat on vilifying Big Oil or pharmaceutical companies or corporate greed or any other number of populist straw men.
Even so, dispite his grave miscalculation, the only reason — and I do mean only reason — that John McCain even still had a shot at beating Obama a few nights ago was because of Sarah Palin.