8 years ago I really liked Sen. McCain. Sure I don’t see eye to eye with him on a lot of religious-type issues, but overall I felt he was a level-headed and realistic guy with enough guts to make up for what he maybe lacked in marbles. During the primaries I was really rooting for him because I felt he was better qualified and perhaps more honestly motivated than Sen. Clinton. He would totally have gotten my vote over her. Sen. Obama simply wasn’t in the realm of possibility in my mind.
But then the contest became McCain/Obama and everything changed for me. Obama, it seemed to me, had the right attitude, the right leadership qualities and just the right overall demeanor. And here is where it gets weird.
McCain changed. Like a world-series patsy that strikes out just a little too often, drops a couple too-many fly balls, throws just a few too many home-run pitches, it was almost as if he did everything he could to lose the election without actually coming right out and saying, “I love Fidel Castro and his beard!”
He didn’t have to associate his campaign with Rove. He didn’t have to endorse through silence false Obama myths (Muslim, not a citizen, etc.). He didn’t have to pick the hockey mom for a running mate.
Until Obama got the nod, I had always thought of McCain as decent and wise. But It just seems like when McCain saw what America’s alternative was, he admitted that he wasn’t the better man. And like the hero he was in the past, he stepped aside to allow the better leader to guide us in our darkest hour.
I know I’m a fruitcake, and fully expect to be told so. But which is more realistic do you think? That McCain got as far as he did in his life and still thought Palin would be a better #2 than, say Rice (assuming she was game)? Or that he, as a military guy, saw that the needs of the country were more important than his own and “did the right thing?”
Being so close to the Oval Office, is it so unthinkable that he might have (perhaps temporarily) checked his integrity and principles at the door and made decisions based less on his past political philosophy and more on what advisors convinced him he needed to do to get elected?
Actually, I’d argue it looks like he did just about everything he could to win the election according to the old GOP playbook, no matter how inconsistent, pandering, or transparently insincere it was. I think his complete inability to hide his distaste for Obama when they were on stage together also negates your assertion that he somehow saw his opponent as “the better man”. McCain clearly saw Obama as someone not even in his league, and did very little to suggest otherwise.
Hereis a summary of McCains previous decisions, which demonstrate that most of his “maverick” positions were simply good PR ploys. If he didn’t follow real principles, but tried to play the opportunistic game, then he simply misjudged with his nomination of Palin and his handling of the financial crisis.
Also, he apparently still got some 50 mill. votes all together - so people still voted for Republican no matter what, or against Obama because of his abortion stance, and similar sentients. It’s not that the fans changed their opinion of McCain, it’s that Obama mobilizied more people to go out and register and vote for him (that’s also why the voter turnout is higher than usual.)
I’ve said it on this board before–I think McCain was affected by the 2000 GOP primaries. He lost to a candidate who fought dirty and fought below the belt by his own advisors’ admission.
Maybe that got to him. Maybe that got him thinking, “The way to win is to fight dirty, get personal.” He hired campaign advisors who had either worked with the opponent who had hit him below the belt, or shared that political mindset. That was his decision alone–maybe everything else was the decision of others, but it was his decision to hire those guys.
I don’t know if McCain would have won if he’d run a relentlessly-positive campaign. I personally doubt it; hard to find optimism when you’re the incumbent party in a country sliding into recession. But I can’t help feeling that what we were seeing was the equivalent of a boxer who was smiling to pretend that that last punch didn’t hurt.
The idea that McCain would lose an election on purpose is just so risible, so ludicrous, that it defies any reasonable belief.
You’re assuming that making terrible mistakes in a Presidential campaign is somehow unusual for John McCain. But you can’t know that, because McCain had never before been nominated for President. His being a competent Senator does not necessarily translate into his being a competent Presidential nominee, which is a very different game. It certainly would not be in McCain’s character to give up his dream to “Do the right thing,” since he’s been an egotistical careerist his entire life.
You’re also playing with the benefit of hindsight. McCain didn’t do anything past Republican winners had not done. George Bush 1.0 won the 1988 election doing fundamentally everything you just said McCain did, and then some. He played to racist fears (Willie Horton ad) picked a stupid running mate (Dan Quayle) threw pointless and irrelevant slurs (painting Dukakis as a “Card-carrying ACLU member”) and generally didn’t perform well in debates (“Thousand points a-light. We’re on track. Thousand points a-light!”) And he was elected easily. As ArchiveGuy points out, everything McCain did was straight out of the same GOP playbook that’s worked before. This stuff, historically, had won elections.
Why didn’t it work in 2008? Well, because the Democrats had a strong candidate running a picture-perfect campaign and McCain had an R after his name.
My take on this was that, rather than seeing Obama get picked and then throwing the election so the better man could win, instead he said “w00t! the democrats picked a black man for a candidate? Man, I’ve got this one in the bag. I can say and do any damn thing I want and so long as I’m still breathing on election day, I’m good.” Hell, the citizens of Alaska relected Stevens after he was convicted of a felony.
Morons. IT DIDN’T MATTER WHO WON. They were just having fun with each other throughout the campaign. McCain and Obama have been working together for the last 10 years to get either one of them into the Oval Office so that they could steal the Hope Diamond.
I liked McCain a lot. I still maintain that he was a better man for the job then Bush or Gore (I’ll add Kerry and Dole to the mix too). He got screwed out of his chance in 2000 and along the way he sadly decided to embrace the methods of Rove/Cheney and not stay true to himself. He knew this would be his last chance. He was already older than Reagan in 1980. McCain sold out and there is no better way to put it.
I will never, ever understand why he would let someone like Palin on his ticket. That was the final straw. He can work now to rebuild his reputation by being one of the bridges between the Republican Senate and Obama to try and fixed this currently screwed up country. I hope he does.
My home state is known as a “bellwether.” It has generally gone with the country as a whole in Presidential elections. This year it went slightly for McCain–at least, last I heard. I love living in Missouri, you can go to sleep early knowing that the election won’t be decided until morning at the earliest.
So it’s an ethnic mismatch reluctant buddy action flick? Suddenly it all makes sense. John McCain is Bruce Willis and Chris Tucker is Barack Obama. Can’t wait for the sequel.
You can sleep for three days. I don’t know why they haven’t called it. There can’t be that many provisional ballots, especially when they only have about a 40% acceptance rate.
After reading that gigantic Newsweek article that went into detail about each of the campaigns, I really think McCain was just too mavericky for his own good. I’ve said it before that republicans view elections like football seasons; what happens afterward isn’t important, it’s victory that’s important.
But McCain took it a step further, and viewed himself as an action hero and winning the presidency as a Hollywood-style obstacle to overcome. He didn’t seem to take the whole thing seriously and viewed it like a game. His choice of Palin was clearly an impulse decision without much thought put into it. That’s just how he worked. It also explains why his campaign message was so erratic; once he tired of one message he’d quickly jump on another, just to keep the enemy on his toes, even if his enemy was his own imaginary demon.
Not that I mean to insult McCain, though. He seems like a fun guy to hang out with. But given his approach on life, I think it would’ve been dangerous to put him in the presidency.
Another vote for incompetence over master plan. McCain, like every other high profile opponent Obama has yet had, had no idea how to combat him. Same problem we had with Reagan. How do you counter optimism? How do you counter eloquence and charisma? McCain tried making a caricature out of him. Didn’t work. (remember the Paris ads? Sure, Obama has everyone loving him, but can he lead? Can he gather support?)
Everything McCain tried, save for the real curveballs, had a tested track record. Had we nominated another Kerry I think this stuff would have performed better. On the other hand, McCain didn’t seem as deft at nastiness as Bush, so maybe I’m wrong about that.
