If Obama was such a shoo-in among Florida Jews, there wouldn’t have been The Great Schlep.
McCain ended up doing no better with the Jewish vote in Florida than Bush had done against Kerry. He had been on track to do much better. Many of these elderly Jews were scared of the Black guy with an Arab middle name and his scary associations.
Did it lose him Florida, let alone the election? Not by itself. Just part of the package of the campaign of the damned.
I believe this aspect can’t be overstated: A lot of voters who initially dismissed Obama as just another tax-and-spend loopy-liberal Democrat, when forced by horror at Palin to take another, deeper look at him, discovered to their pleased surprise that he’s actually a man of reasoned substance and calm intelligence who isn’t going to take the country off a far-left cliff and in fact might do a damned fine job of fixing much of what’s wrong.
Romney possibly would have gotten Virginia for McCain, too. That said, I don’t think that would have turned the tide either.
Palin was a bad pick, but candidates have survived bad picks (cough-Dan Quayle-cough) and gone on to win.
McCain still had a fighting chance until the Wall Street meltdown and the whole broker-a-bailout fiasco.
Bingo.
There has never been a more respected VP nominee than Lloyd Bentsen or a LESS respected VP nominee than Dan Quayle.
It didn’t matter. It almost never does.
But there’s a difference between a pick that’s looked down on, and one that’s feared; and a difference when people think there’s a good chance the Vice President could actually end up President, and when they don’t.
Even if we want to pretend that Palin was Reagan, Obama wasn’t Carter.
Federal campaign funding was mentioned upthread. I can only imagine McCain’s reaction when he saw Palin drawing in millions of dollars from conservative donors – about two days before he was supposed to take public financing. I’m guessing part of the “Obama didn’t take federal funding like he promised!” gripe in the final days was born from McCain just being pissed on a personal level about how that turned out.
His ‘Return to Washington’.
I think most everyone is missing why the Palin pick was so bad. In the end, it is true, she was the clarion call to the Republican base and turned everybody else off.
However, in the beginning, she was picked not really for her Republican base credentials, but rather because she was a woman who would appeal to the disaffected “PUMA” Hillary Clinton voters. McCain didn’t think of her as divisive, but rather as someone who would pick up a large number of female votes while keeping the base satisfied.
This was, I believe, McCain’s biggest miscalculation, as virtually all of the angry Hillaryites came back into the Democratic fold well before the general election (as almost all of the commentators said they would). McCain tried to use Palin to capture what he saw was a new group that could put him over the top, and failed.
Those would be my two picks as well, OTOMH. Basically, McCain needed to lose the cities by a little less in both states. Maybe Ohio as well, for the same reason.
For good measure, I’ll suggest that Romney might have delivered Nevada, and Pawlenty might have put MN in play.
But for the record, I don’t think Palin “cost” McCain the election, she just made it worse.
I partially agree and partially disagree. I didn’t slog through all 352 Palin threads when she was first picked, but I thought and still believe that McCain basically had to do two thing at once, and Palin offered the most realistic hope of doing it.
In order to win, he needed to shore up the GOP base and peel off some persuadable Dems.
First, he had to convince the Evangelical conservatives that he was one of them. They weren’t going to vote for Obama, but they’ve made a lot of hay in the last 8 years by threatening to stay home.
But the base wasn’t big enough to win this year, so he needed to expand it. Hence the play for the PUMA vote – this was the most likely “persuadable” demographic.
This was doomed from the start, however, because it is impossible for a candidate to both support and oppose the right to an abortion. I’m not sure there was anyone who could have won significant support from both groups. But McCain had to dig so deep to find a pro-life woman that he probably ended up shrinking his base, as some GOP-leaning voters ended up switching sides.
Yup. And I think it was an impossible goal without some outside intervention (like Obama eating babies on live TV).
I’d say it was as soon as the Palin bump went away, combined with ongoing negative ads. If he’d come up with reasonable decisive solutions to some of the nation’s problems instead of concentrating on attacks I think he would have won.
If I had to pick a single moment it would probably be the Palin interview with Katie Couric.
Which I agree with but it just about makes my head explode.
Is there a less likely candidate than Katie Couric to do an indepth , hardhitting, tough, substantial interview that exposes a candidate’s shortcomings? It’s like she asked Palin, “Could you name some of your favorite desserts?” and Palin freaked out: “What, do you think we don’t eat dessert up in Alaska? We’re normal people, we eat dessert like everyone else. I can’t remember the exact names, not right this second you betcha, but we eat all of 'em, whatever you serve us, we just suck it down. Some of them desserts have funny names and some others have stuff sprinkled on 'em, I tell ya that furshure and my mom used to make some of 'em, usedta serve 'em up after dinner, sometimes in the middle of the meal too, desserts are great, yup, I love 'em…”
It’s Katie Couric, The Kingmaker.