It's Not How McCain Said It; It's What He *Said*

As you will no doubt be aware, last Wednesday Senator John McCain called a press conference to denounce the Obama Administration's lack of forthrightness on the subject of the Benghazi attack, at the same precise moment that the Obama Administration was briefing the senate on the subject of the Benghazi attack. At the end of the press conference the senator did not take questions, but the following morning CNN producer Ted Barrett managed to catch up with him and ask why he would express outrage over an apparent cover-up by the White House, instead of attending a meeting in which the facts as we know them were being presented by the White House.

As you will no doubt be aware, the senator's reaction was blistering and profane. McCain refused to comment about why he missed the briefing -- which was conducted by top diplomatic, military and counter-terrorism officials -- instead becoming increasingly testy when pressed to explain why he wasn’t there. “I have no comment about my schedule and I’m not going to comment on how I spend my time to the media,” McCain said. Asked why he wouldn’t comment, McCain grew agitated. “Because I have the right as a senator to have no comment and who the hell are you to tell me I can or not?” When CNN noted that McCain had missed a key meeting on a subject the senator has been intensely upset about, McCain said, “I’m upset that you keep badgering me.”

This story has been all over the political news, from mainstream outlets to amateur bloggers and back again, with withering coverage of McCain's once-again-proven inability to contain his emotions. Comment threads below the various stories about this incident have described Mr. McCain as a sore-headed old crank, and even some members of his own party have apparently wondered aloud at his judgment, with Senator Susan Collins referring to the proposed formation of a special investigative committee by noting that the existing Select Committee on Intelligence is already co-chaired by "Senator Carl Levin, who was at the White House briefing on Wednesday, and by Senator John McCain, who was not."

The admittedly unflattering narrative of this event, we are to believe, is that Mr. McCain is too short-tempered for either his own good or that of his party.  It's a fun story to see covered this way, not least because journalists are finally beginning to wonder -- albeit implicitly, at least for the most part -- what the Administration would stand to gain by misrepresenting what it knew and when it knew it regarding an attack on one of our consulates. Mostly, however, the coverage has been conspicuously confined to the emotional temperature of McCain's reply to Barrett. There's only one small problem with journalists covering the McCain outburst in this fashion, which is that is misses the point as completely as if they'd reported on a show-jumping competition instead.
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Mitt Romney's Really, *Really* Bad Week

Seven days ago, the 2012 Presidential election was close -- to be sure closer than it should've been in the absence of the Denver debate -- with Barack Obama leading on the rail by a neck. He was up by about two points in Ohio and about three points in Nevada, with Iowa, Colorado and Virginia tied. Mr. Romney was narrowly ahead in Florida and North Carolina, but the dynamics of the race in these two places were suggesting to some pretty smart people (Nate Silver, among them) that things weren't really that close. Romney's path to electoral college victory was simple, if not enviable: Close the gap in Ohio, hold in North Carolina, Florida, Virginia, and Colorado.  Doing so would have been an upset, but a mild one, mostly involving a gotcha pickup in the Buckeye state.

Seven days later the map isn't really all that different, or at least doesn't immediately *sound* all that different in laundry-list form like this: Mr. Romney is narrowly ahead in North Carolina and Colorado, with Florida and Virginia more-or-less tied, and Mr. Obama leading in Iowa and Nevada and Ohio. Why is it, then, that the state-of-the-race feels so completely different?

The easy answer is that the week Mr. Romney just had is one of the worst of his entire campaign -- and after London and 47%-gate, that's definitely saying something -- and the polls really haven't caught up yet. State-level polling is notoriously slow to respond to the changing realities on the ground, since polls have to be in the field over multiple days, then regressed, then scrutinized for math errors, then written-up, then published by the polling firm, and then re-published by political news sites, all before any of us get a chance to begin factoring them into our sense of where things stand. The data is often over a week old, and even some of that data will itself display a conspicuous lag, as individual respondents in the process of changing their mind will often exhibit more stubbornness about it than they really feel, just to avoid having to re-reverse themselves a day or two latter.

The slightly less easy answer, though, is that while the two lists of swing-state standings I've digested in the opening two paragraphs sound cosmetically similar, the new list actually describes an electoral map in positive *shambles* for Mr. Romney -- even before the effects of this past week can fully manifest there. The only way, then, to accurately report in real time on the question of just how much things have  turned, is to begin with a recap of the seven days that Mr. Romney has just had. And oh my goodness, what a week it was.
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What a New Republican Party Might Look LIke

A Person would have had to be living on Mars (or at the very least, not so politically minded as to have routinely checked for the past four months to see if there are any new entries on this blog), to have missed the news that things are going badly for the Grand Ole Party -- and on any of a wide and growing assortment of fronts. According to the most recent polling data on the subject, about twenty percent of respondents now self-identify as Republicans, the lowest that number has ever been in history. A plurality of Americans now support gay marriage, the impending retirement of Supreme Court Justice David Souter will come at the precise moment that the GOP is scrambling to fill its most senior position on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Newt Gingerich is in a shooting war with his own party chair, and Lindsay Graham, Steve Schmidt, and Megan McCain are all running around talking in various ways about the need to embrace some of the least likely talking-points for Republicans to consider embracing since Nixon reached out to the south. Meanwhile, a certain Governor of Alaska has suddenly and inexplicably gone to ground during all of this "re-branding" talk--presumably since re-branding the GOP away from its current forumla of lowest-common-denomenator hate-baiting would render her instantly obsolete. All of which begs the question: Assuming the Republican party survives at all (incidentally, not an automatically safe presumption), what would a competitive version of it look like, moving forward?

Obviously any exercise in visualizing a future Republican party is going to be speculative on two important levels: it must presume omniscience with respect to the thought processes of the people who will actually carry it out, of course, but it must also presume enough precience about future events that major re-invention continues to seem necessary long enough for it to happen. If the United States should suffer another terrorist attack on its own soil this coming September, for example, and if--as happened the last time--it should turn out that the President was briefed about the danger in advance, there can be no question but that Republicans will cheerfully embrace the hypocrisy necessary to scapegoat the Administration and run the midterm electoral table by making blood-soaked hay with the whole affair.

On the other hand, this author has been thinking for quite a long time now that there are certain innate inconsistencies in the Bush/Dole/Bush/McCain incarnation of Republicanism, that these inconsistencies are not (for the most part) mirrored with offsetting hypocrisies on the part of the Democrats, and that cleaning up some of the mess might render the decision of which party to support a much more interesting one in the hearts and minds of those white males who are capable of thinking in complete sentences about anything more serious than Monday Night Football. Here, then, is the list of changes that The Key Grip believes are inescapable prerequisites to a revitalized and nationally competitive Republican Party in a post-Bush twenty-first century:

1) They must abandon the 1988 playbook. Many people have spoken very eloquently about the incomperable genius of Karl Rove as an electoral tactician, and that's a curious thing in this author's judgment, since Rove was a first-circle protege of Lee Atwater--the man who gave us the first of the post-Reagan, slash-and-burn, lowest-common-denomenator hate campaigns, back in 1988. In the absense of a washed-up movie actor who could still use a teleprompter to plagiarize his commemoration of a space shuttle disaster, the Republican agenda was essentially dead in the water. Most people don't remember it now, but in early summer polling Michael Dukakis was leading Reagan's default successor by seventeen points. Nobody doesn't remember what happened next: With breathless speed, the Atwater operation descended on Dukakis' character with what became the textbook Republican one-two punch of questioning the man first, and then the policies. Dukakis was shown riding in a tank, and then Willie Horton was... well... just shown, if it comes to that. The whole thing was cynical, odious, and intentionally tailored to the "low-information voters" whose emotions (not to say their racism) could easily be manipulated by images on television. And it worked.

It worked in 2002 and 2004, too, when the deep and searing anxiety about September 11th so overwhelmed the American public's capacity for reason, that the man who'd been reading nursary rhymes to schoolchildren when the whole thing happened could somehow argue that he was the only person in the country who could keep us safe. On the Democrats' opposition to what we all now realize was a trumped-up war being argued on false pretense with tenuous connections to the attack, he ran up his numbers in the '02 midterms. On the Democratic nominee's representation of himself as a strength-and-security alternative, the incumbent's Atwater-protege campaign strategiest trotted out the Atwater playbook to maximum effect: Question the character first, and then, once the character is questionable, question the policy. And it worked. At least in part because the guy they were doing it to, is a douchebag. But that's another column.

Point being, a lot has changed in the world since 2004--and not just the replacement of security as the top issue concerning most Americans, either. In 2008 and 2009 and beyond, the primary vehicle for political discourse simply isn't television anymore; it's the new media. It's the internet. It's blogs like this one. And the thing is, hot-button catch-phrases just don't work in a comment-driven medium like this one. John McCain runs an ad saying that Barack Obama wants to teach sex education to kindergarteners, and the story gets blurbed in the political news websites all over this country, after which the comment forums directly beneath the stories overflow with meticulous dissections of the ad for the hate-baiting drivel that it is. The hot-button defenders weigh in, but are quickly shouted down by an avalanche of reasoned, thoughtful, one might even say nuanced counter-argument, until eventually they give up and go back to listening to their AM-radios at the vacuum cleaner store.

Meanwhile, the "low-information voters" whose television-based voting heuristics have, after a generation of being rewarded for lower and lower levels of information, inclined them to decide that all politicians are rascals, have responded in the only way they can: by sitting the whole thing out. Much was made about the comparatively small up-tick in voter turnout this past election cycle; it is my belief that the top-line data hides the story: there was an abnormally high "churn" in voter turnout, with television-watchers supplanted by normally self-disenfranchised new agers whose ire could no longer be suppressed by the latest album out of Windham Hill.

Like it or not (and this author at least does), the new political debate is one of substance over shock-and-awe. Internet forums don't let people shout emotion-fanning nonsense and have the last word the way television does. If the Republican party wants to revitalize itself, it will have to start with a repudiation of the anti-content, anti-intellectual, anti-agenda with which it has been auguring the country into the ground for the thick end of my lifetime. It'll have to stand for something more significant than repealing the estate tax and calling the other guy a socialist. Because the only people who vote anymore will be waiting to swat-down anything less.

2) They must embrace small-c conservatism. It's been said before by persons more articulate than I, on both sides of the political aisle, but there's a fundamental inconsistency inherent in calling one's group "the party of small government" on the one hand, and embracing runaway defense spending, on the other. And the irony is that the Republican party hasn't always been like this: in the days preceding the second world war, Republicans were clamorously non-interventionist, fearing that militarization of the national economy would unduly empower the federal government. Indeed after the war, none other than Dwight David Eisenhower used the opportunity of his farewell adress to warn the country of the growing power of the "military industrial complex" to set the national political agenda.

Forty-eight years later his words seem heartbreakingly prescient, and the party from which he hailed now holds the record for the largest explosion in military deficit-spending in history. A party that claims to be for smaller government can't withstand the glib, internet forum smack-downs that it so richly deserves for gobbling up our children's future to spend it all in Iraq. And unless and until the small-government wonks can gain the upper hand over the shoot-em-in-the-face crowd, a tea party to protest basic, Keynesian recovery-spending on roads, bridges and schools will ring hollow in the minds of anyone who bothers to scroll down and read the first four comments beneath the story. In 1993 the tea parties would've made for great television; in 2009 they make for self-caricaturing blog comedy--and the Republican brand just sinks lower and lower and lower. Not everyone would support a smaller-government party, but at least that party would be self-consistent with respect to the two biggest planks in its platform: taxes and spending. This would seem a relatively obvious prerequisite to re-branding the Republican party, regardless of who in the current coalition would have to be sacrificed in the process.

3) They must be more inclusive with respect to faith. I myself have no faith, indeed am proud to count myself among those who have no faith, but there is no particular reason why a political party whose agenda includes renewed commitment to faith-based living has to be fundamentally offensive to me the way the 2008-2009 Republican party is. The reason they make people like me so angry (and scare the hell out of everyone else) is not so much their embrace of faith but rather their rejection of it--specifically, their rejection of any faith that isn't extremist, born-again Crhistianity in its least christian and most aggressive forms. Granted, a re-branded Republican party could position itself in the other direction, toward a more "libertarian" approach on social issues, but there's a reason why libertarians are so few in number: They're either Republicans because they don't like taxes or they're Democracts because they don't believe in God.

I believe that a re-branded Republican party succeeds not by renouncing its faith but rather by re-positioning itself to focus on the objectives of that faith, a la Mike Huckabee: It could be the party that opposes not just abortion but also the death penalty. It could be the party that supports not just orphanages but ending world hunger. It could be the party that welcomes not just Southern Baptists and Joe Lieberman, but right-minded persons of all faiths, instead. I'd have a hard time supporting a party that wanted explicitly mulitdenominational religious instruction in our public schools, but I'd have a harder time being so angry and scared by the idea as I am by the existing intention to turn our nation's classrooms into hot-houses of extremist Christian-right-wing proselytizing.

4) They must find their roots on the subject of free enterprise. Your intrepid author has attempted a Ph.D. in economics, depending on how you count, no fewer than three times in his life, and all of them have ended in failure. Part of the reason is that your intrepid author isn't bright enough to pass the tests--but that's only part of the reason. The rest is a crippling and ubiquitous frustration with the fundamental, nay preposterous self-inconsistency of the modern conservative economic paradigm. It advocates greater market concentrations so as to exploit economies of scale, but ignores the anti-competitive side-effects of the decreased competition. It embraces free trade on the premise of lower product prices, but ignores the nagging detail that the only firms large enough to justify the move to cheaper labor markets are also large enough to withhold the cost-savings from their customers. It calls agriculture a perfectly competitive industry despite the fact that all those countless farmers get together once every October to sell their production to a monopsony buyer, with all the market distortions that appertain thereto.

There is absolutely no reason why a re-branded Republican party couldn't embrace all aspects of a less-encumbered, properly functioning market economy--notably including some basic checks on the extent of anti-competitive corporate power. They could advocate for freer trade, while at the same time supporting wage insurance and increased investment in workforce training. They could espouse less government regulation over the subject of opening and operating a business, without also embracing anti-perfect-information policies with respect to product- and workforce safety. They could be cavalier about the environment without coming across as cavalier about the downstream, downwind safety of our kids. I'd probably still vote the other way, but a party that said "free enterprise only works when there's less government intervention and smaller firms with greater competition" would at least be a lot harder to dismiss on the basis of open and shameless hypocrisy, the way this Republican party and its corps of professional economists is, now.

5) They must drop their one-sided policies with respect to immigration and the Middle East. This one is a toughy, since the White House is so tough to win without holding Florida and Arizona, but neither the Latino community nor the well-informed political junkies of the internet are going to suffer cheerfully a political party that panders to anti-Hispanic rhetoric in the desert southwest, or to an "anti-terrorist" plank that green-lights unilateral military adventurism by Israel. The situations on the borders between the United States and Mexico and between Israel and the West Bank are both bad and getting worse--not in spite of, but because of the Republican party's tacit acceptance of a race-dividing status quo with respect to the former and a barely contained anti-Muslim furor with respect to the latter.

When the path to citizenship is difficult, bordering on impossible, the only people who try are the most desperate (and, to that extent, the least easily recognized as potential benefactors of hard work and ingenuity). An easier path to citizenship in this country encourages not just free enterprise but increased innovation, attracting the very people most likely to be frustrated by their home country's thwarting of their Horatio-Algier spirits. It's a little-known but important fact that if Albert Einstein was alive and living in Germany today and wanted to come to the United States, he'd have to go through the infamous April Fool's lottery like everyone else--and probably wouldn't get in. (It'd be okay, though, because he could go build the atomic bomb for a more welcoming country somewhere else, instead.) Until the path to citizenship in this country returns to its free-enterprise-encouraging ease, and corporations are forced to hire U.S. citizens and pay them a living wage, no party that claims to love free enterprise can rest on a bed of anything other than hypocrisy when it advocates such ridiculous and race-dividing measures as the construction of a fence along the border.

Meanwhile in the Middle East, the previous Administration's quietude on Israeli excesses has created a powderkeg of disempowered resentment on the part of the Palestinians, largely in response to the Israelis' construction of a border fence of their own--a nightmarish concrete monolith that already stretches to over 200 miles, dividing families, destroying towns, suppressing Palestinian economic activity and effectively ruining all prospects for peace for the duration of its own existence. No political party that claims to be in favor of suppressing terrorism can turn a blind eye to this outrage without risking dismissal in the political news comment pages as a vehicle for shameless doublespeak. To re-brand itself in a way that would appeal to a plurality of better-informed and more racially diverse voters, the Republicans would have to drop the anti-immigration hate mongering, and call for a renewed commitment to forcing all sides to the peace table in the Middle East.

None of this will happen right away, of course, and most of it will never happen. Fortunes will turn and much of this re-branding will be either overtaken by new events or rendered unnecessary by some offsetting implosion on the other side. The purpose of this column was never to suggest that these are the only ways out of the low-20's doldrums for the Republican Party--but rather, to lay out the principal changes through which the "new" Republican Party would be harder for this author not to vote for. It might not make for an extra thirty-percent of the public in its corner, but making it harder for hardened Democrats like myself to dismiss it out of hand could well be the first, big step toward the next realignment of political fortunes, however far into the future that realignment may be. Lest we forget, the Democrats were in a situation not unlike this one in the early days of the Reagan Administration--and it took just this sort of reexamination of principles to get it where it is today.

Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida

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The Ten Myths of Election 2008

Most of us aren't thinking as much about the election anymore as we are about turkey, presents, and a certain presumptive nominee for Secretary of State. And that's too bad, because now that we have a little more distance from the thing, it's a lot easier to come to a few sober--if not necessarily popular--assessments of what really happened over the past year and a half. Here, then, are the Key Grip's assortment of the ten biggest misunderstandings, misapprehensions, misinterpretations, and outright misses of the 2008 Presidential election cycle. If I've done my job, at least one of these will make you mad; that is, after all, what I do best.

10. It was John McCain's money disadvantage that sank him in close states. The shame of this one is that it sounds the death-knell for public financing of election campaigns, but the truth of the matter is significantly more complicated and has a great deal more to do with McCain's inability to take the ground war seriously. The intrepid young (?) journalists at fivethirtyeight.com spent a significant amount of time and personal treasure criss-crossing the country in the final four months of the campaign, and in stop after stop--battleground after battleground--they found Obama field offices in the least likely of places, bursting at the seams and open well after dinner, while the McCain field operation in the same places was either empty of volunteers or entirely non-existent.

McCain lost Indiana by a hair's breadth and Nevada by an eye-popping twelve points, and both of those results were largely attributable to the massive turnout advantage brought to bear on the situation by Team Blue. If recent election cycles have proven anything, you can't win toss-up states without a solid ground operation, and the McCain people (like the Clinton people before them) seemed pathologically incapable of taking the Obama organization seriously enough to answer it--despite the fact that most of the hardest work could've been carried out by volunteers.

9. A Republican couldn't possibly win in 2008. This country has a long and storied history of holding its nose and electing people that it either doesn't want, or who come from a party that it doesn't want. The most recent example is George H. W. Bush in 1988 -- whom absolutely nobody in this country was thrilled to have as our forty-first President but who, owing to the swift and precipitous collapse of the Dukakis campaign, found himself backing into the top job on account of being the last man standing. The better example, though somewhat less modern, is the time-worn story of Harry Truman (a man whose disapproval ratings were for a time even higher than Nixon's were in August of '74) coming from nowhere to beat Thomas Dewey for a full term in the Oval Office in November of 1948. To suggest that, post Bush, post Katrina, post Iraq, there was no way any Republican could've carried 270 votes is to ignore whole swathes of America's singularly peculiar political history. McCain--or possibly someone else--most assuredly could have won.

8. Mr. Obama's agenda will prove difficult to secure in such a center-right country. America is not a center-right country. What America is, rather, is a country that wants a Head of State as much as or more than it wants a Head of Government--and thus it routinely elects people who talk in short sentences, press the same hot-buttons all day, and aren't quite up to the messy job of governance (Reagan, Bush I, Bush II) if those people can also manage to run an entire campaign without looking weak, indecisive, palpably dishonest, or unable to hit big-league pitching (Dukakis, Kerry, Gore, McGovern). The fact that most of the people who've passed this metric in recent times have been Republicans is a semi-accident of the Republican party's far deeper stable of individuals willing to be stupid about governance in favor of a carefully crafted leadership image. When Democrats advance people who are in fact capable of looking the part of a strong leader, it doesn't even matter if they are Catholic, a philanderer, talk with a funny Massachusetts accent, and their father was a war profiteer with borderline antisemitic German sympathies and contacts.

7. Barack Obama was inevitable. This is partly a reprise of number 9, above, but the specific question of Mr. Obama's supposed cult of personality bears an independent thought or two, precisely because it so willfully disregards the facts surrounding his ascendancy. In early 2004, Mr. Obama was, at best, the second-most popular candidate in the Illinois Democratic primary for U.S. Senate. Then the Democratic frontrunner, Blair Hull, was forced to withdraw when he became embroiled in a domestic abuse scandal and Obama raced in to fill the vacuum. Obama's presumptive opponent in the general election for the seat, Jack Ryan, was also forced to withdraw after damaging information about his child custody battle with an ex-wife in California was released to the press. With no one else to run, the Illinois Republican party turned to Alan Keyes, a man so extremist in his conservatism that he no longer even considers himself a member of the Republican party because it's--wait for this one--too moderate.

With his inevitable trouncing of Keyes (and the stirring keynote address he'd given at that summer's Democratic National Convention), Obama became a national figure overnight and shortly thereafter he began to organize himself toward a run for the Presidency. But fate had one more blessing to bestow on the supposedly methodical-genius Obama, and this particular blessing would come from the least likely of sources: The Republican-controlled state legislatures of Michigan and Florida, both of whom ignored national agreements to schedule their primaries after the "first four" of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Nevada. Instead those two delegate-rich states scheduled their primaries "too early," and in consequence were (temporarily) disenfranchised by the Democratic Party.

Had these two states held primaries on Super Tuesday, the President-elect wouldn't necessarily be Hillary Clinton right now, but it certainly wouldn't have been Barack Obama, because Clinton would've clobbered him so forcefully in the Super Tuesday primaries that he'd never have been able to recover. Take nothing away from David Plouffe's brilliant general election campaign, please, but the cold hard fact is that it took an unusual haul of artfully timed serendipity just to get Mr. Obama into that position in the first place.

Moreover, on the day the Lehman failure precipitated the first big crash on Wall Street (and John McCain uttered his now infamous gaffe about the fundamentals of our economy being strong), Mr. Obama wasn't ahead by six or eight points, he was trailing by three. Much of that was convention bounce, but still: The notion that Obama and his people deserve the credit, the whole credit, and nothing but the credit for their victory two weeks ago is about as far from the reality of the election we've just had as anything I've yet heard. Would Mr. Obama still have won without this enormous assist from the Citigroups and Lehmans of the world? Perhaps. But it certainly wouldn't have been a 365-electoral-vote wave, the way it was.

6. Obama's decision to pick Joe Biden was designed to bolster his foreign policy credential. Rightly or otherwise, Barack Obama and his campaign never much worried about the prospect of a foreign policy debate in the general election campaign. If the Republicans had tried to turn this into another referendum on security, Mr. Obama (as the fall cycle has proven) was capable of pivoting the discussion to his advantage in a variety of ways, without the help of Joe Biden.

This myth is particularly frustrating to me because it's such an insult to Joe Biden: The idea that Obama would never have "risked" picking such a rambunctious and talkity partner if his own weak resume on foreign policy hadn't forced his hand, completely misses the point of the Joe Biden selection. Biden is middle-class through and through, and just the sort of public figure against whom charges of Massachusetts elitism were just never going to stick. He raised Obama's stature not so much with foreign policy voters (is there any such thing?) as with Catholics, working-class voters in Ohio, the Jewish vote in Florida, and anybody who worried that an Obama Administration would be distant and aloof. Say what you will about Joe Biden, he's not distant and aloof.

5. John McCain's biggest mistake was choosing Sarah Palin. This one is actually half-right: It was a huge mistake to pick Sarah Palin, and this very column said so at the time. With the combination of her youth, inexperience, and manifest unreadiness, Palin's selection to be McCain's running-mate opened the door to renewed consideration of McCain's age, judgment and temperament. But as poor a choice as she was--and in the end she certainly damaged her benefactor more than she helped--the question that such analysis begs is, who else? Mr. McCain's very strength as a candidate, his very appeal in the first place, was that he could pitch himself as the country's premier independent: a politician without a brand. It's a marketing strategy that makes for great theater (even when it's mostly a bald-faced lie), but it does raise some serious problems when it comes to picking someone to balance the ticket.

Had McCain chosen, say, Joe Lieberman, then the evangelical right--without whom McCain couldn't possibly prevail--would've stayed home. Had McCain chosen one of his prominent opponents in the primary campaign (say, Mitt Romney), the evangelical right would've revolted against that choice, too, with the added drawback that Mr. McCain himself didn't like any of his prominent opponents in the primary campaign. Had he picked a candidate who was suitable to the evangelical right and also not Sarah Palin (say, Haley Barbour), he would've alienated the swing voters in the middle even faster than Palin herself ultimately did. What Mr. McCain needed was a devout culture warrior, pro-life to the extreme, who liked to hunt and fish and generally kill other living things while talking about being pro-life, and yet who still carried at least the longshot prospect of consolidating his claim on the persuadable independents-- especially women. In 2008, there was exactly one person who came even close to fitting that description, and he picked her.

4. The PUMAs were McCain's best path to victory. File this one as a counterpoint to (5), perhaps, but the idea that there were legions of disaffected Hillary voters out there, prepared to cross over and vote McCain, was even at the time so fanciful as to seem downright comic. PUMAs were never going to cross over in force and vote for McCain, and there's more than one pretty good reason why.

To begin with there is the small problem that a great many of those supposed PUMAs were actually Republicans who'd been recruited by the hate-wing radio crowd to pretend they were Hillary supporters, in the hope of sowing dissension in the Democratic party. The more these people did exactly what Rush Limbaugh and Laura Ingraham and Ann Coulter were telling them to, by logging in to comment fields in the blogosphere and droning on and on about how pissed they were that Hillary was getting such a raw deal, the harder it became for the senior McCain campaign staff to discern that they were, in point of fact, liars from within their own party who never had any intention of voting for Hillary in the first place. If there is one great untold story left among the debris of the losing side in this great contest, it is the as-yet unspoken admission that the campaign literally head-faked itself on this question, picking a woman to appeal to a constituency that they themselves had conjured out of nothing.

Add to this the small problem that there wasn't a Democrat left on Planet Earth who was prepared to commit the same sort of ritual seppuku in the voting booth that had denied a clean win to Al Gore in Florida back in 2000. Mr. Bush saw to that. By the time of the Lehman meltdown, the Democratic party was as united behind its own brand as it has been in my lifetime by a margin too wide to measure, and no woman on earth would have made any difference in partisan-base support for the Democratic ticket--not even Hillary Clinton herself.

3. Defeating Barack Obama would've resulted only from making him look scary and different. The Lee Atwater / Karl Rove / Steve Schmidt playbook is to convince persuadable voters that the guy they wish they could vote for is unacceptable on sweeping character grounds, then move in for the kill on a specific question of policy. You show your opponent riding in a tank, and then you follow that up with the Willie Horton ad. You stand passive while a 527 accuses him of lying about his purple hearts, and then you hit him on his right flank over his voting record about Iraq. This technique is referred to as "stripping the bark off" the opposition, but the most important aspect of it is the timing of the two approaches: You can't call someone a tank-riding, unpatriotic, weak-kneed liberal if you've already endeavored to engage him on policy grounds, and you certainly can't do it if the general public has already gotten to know the other guy and come to respect him.

It's no accident that the McCain candidacy enjoyed its strongest polling during the weeks immediately following the Paris Hilton ad--the tactic was pure Atwater and it worked. Many people were still making up their minds about Barack Obama, and here was a concise, not entirely groundless, almost funny TV commercial to assist in making the final judgment on character.

The problem wasn't so much with the ad itself (though of course anyone reading these words would rather live in a country where such tactics didn't work), as with the fact that the attack was leveled immediately prior to the conventions. Mr. Obama neutralized the effects of that commercial by winning back the persuadable character voters at his own convention, after which news of Mr. McCain's choice of running-mate had the unintended effect of blotting out any consideration of anyone else's suitability for high office for the weeks afterward. By the time Sarah Palin herself was standing on an airport runway before a microphone, saying "The American people have a right to know who the real Barack Obama is," the American people already felt they knew who the real Barack Obama is--he had passed the "living-room test" and become someone we were used to thinking of as one of our own. In consequence, instead of asking the question Ms. Palin wanted us to ask, we turned their attentions to the question of just who this interloping stranger was, leveling such nasty innuendo.

2. The Obama campaign won by widening the playing field. Again, this is certainly at least half-true: You weren't going to win an election for President in 2008 by defending all the states that John Kerry had won, and not winning any others. But just below the surface of this inescapable reality lies a Machiavellian bait-and-switch so deft and so brilliant that I find it personally frustrating to have seen so little written about it: Barack Obama and Joe Biden never seriously contested the states in which the Democratic party had always been believed to make or break its fortunes every four years. From Arkansas to West Virginia, along a roughly arrow-shaped swathe of the country on the south side of the Ohio river basin, Messrs. Obama and Biden never spent serious ad money, never made serious campaign appearances, never hedged their electoral bets, and in consequence never stood a chance.

The brilliance of this wasn't in the money that it saved--heaven knows there was plenty of money--but in the agenda that it allowed them to ignore. Democrats and independents in Arkansas and Louisiana and Tennessee and Kentucky and West Virginia had for a generation been thought of as the ideological key to victory for Team Blue (think of a certain Governor from Arkansas or, more recently, a certain first-term senator from North Carolina).

By attempting to build a coalition around the voters in these states, the Democratic party consistently presented itself as a "donkey designed by committee," with no clear sense of what its priorities were or how best to respond to the venomous attacks that were being launched from within its own power band. By running on a platform that carried broad appeal in other parts of the country--one might even say, a platform that carried broad appeal only in other parts of the country--the Democratic ticket of 2008 accomplished something that the Democratic tickets of 1988 and 2000 and 2004 could not: They cabined-off the influence of the upland South. Make no mistake, it was a brilliant campaign on so many levels as to leave them too numerous to count here, but a fifty-state strategy it manifestly was not.

1. Elections are won and lost using time-tested formulas. Here at last we come to what I believe is the core lesson from this campaign season: Successful election campaigns aren't one-size-fits-all. In 2004 if you were a Republican who wanted a (second?) term as President, you ran a security-conscious, character-assassinating, slash-and-burn election campaign designed to paint your opponent as a mealy-mouthed fumbler who can't be trusted to stick to his word in a pinch, and you won. In 2008, you try the same set of tactics, orchestrated by many of the same senior campaign staff, and you lose.

Now, on one level this observation is a tautology. People realize that each election presents both candidates with a different set of challenges and a different set of opportunities. (Imagine a Bush v. Gore election in the middle of the sort of financial crisis we've just had, and you've pretty well proved this point to yourself on a sample of one.) But electoral strategies also succeed or fail owing in large measure to the personality of the candidate him- or herself, too--and this would seem to be far less obvious to at least the people who were running John McCain's campaign, if not Hillary Clinton's.

Mrs. Clinton, lest we forget, ran the bulk of her primary campaign on the platform that Mr. Obama couldn't grasp the bitter realities of a permanent Democratic minority on the electoral map-- offering herself as the only candidate who knew to play for John Kerry's 252 plus one or the other of Ohio and Florida. This strategy would've served Clinton better than it served Kerry, for sure, but it also would have freed McCain from the majority of the downside consequences of his funding disadvantage. The 527's would've descended on Ohio and Florida with a gusto that makes the Swift Boat campaign look vague and indecisive by comparison, after which Clinton would've had a very difficult time defining herself in the eyes of the blue-collar Ohio independents as anything other than the gal with her fingerprints all over the Whitewater billing records.

Meanwhile, the same John McCain who once decried the polarizing influence of the evangelical opinion leaders in his own party could be heard approving television commercials in which Barack Obama was accused of trying to teach sex education to kindergarteners and fighting to prevent post-natal care for the surviving babies of botched abortions. Not only did these attacks ring hollow with an electorate that had already come to know and respect Obama, but the backlash of such a character reversal redounded mercilessly to McCain's own detriment. McCain -- perceived until this election as a principled centrist who would tell it like it is, regardless of hiw it was -- had been coached by Steve Schmidt and Rick Davis into campaigning like just another Bush, at the one time in history when presenting one's self as just another Bush would prove singularly devastating for one's electoral fortunes.

Much will be written and said about this election for years to come. It may, indeed, become the sort of watershed that people have already suggested, thus heaping even more expectation onto the shoulders of a certain skinny kid from Chicago. But out of the shadows of all these crazy and surprisingly durable myths about how the race was run and why it turned out the way it did, the one inescapable truth that has already crystallized is that John McCain lost this thing every bit as much as Barack Obama won it. ...And that McCain lost it, in the end, when he lost himself.

Dave O'Gorman
("The Key Grip")
Gainesville, Florida Click Here to Read More...