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Goodbye McCain
Seriously, how many blows can Senator John McCain overcome?
John Kerry says that John McCain’s people approached him in 04 “to engage in a discussion about his potentially being on the ticket as Vice President.”
It is amazing that McCain is still at 16% in the latest Rasmussen poll.
Meanwhile, McCain denies it. According to him, Kerry contacted him.
Well, whether it’s true or not, the damage is done. McCain can adjust his campaign as much as he wants, but I don’t think he’ll be able to make some grand comeback.
(To be) cross posted at my own blog.
9 Responses to “Goodbye McCain”
I keep wondering in the Democrats have learn the Gary David lesson of trying to pick your opponent during the primaries. It seems that every Republican candidates is going to come out of the primaries as damaged good and will have about as much chance of winning the general eleciton as Bob Dole did in 1996.
I guess this is what happens when one party is totally dominate and the other is sliding into oblivion.
Well, I do not completely agree with your prediction that whomever wins the Republican nomination will have no chance of winning the national elections for president, but that aside: you make a very good point.
My theory in regard to McCain’s implosion was that he simply had no base of support among conservatives.
McCain was — like Hagel — the GOPer the media loved, as he would criticize his own party and Bush. Look at how liberals and the media keep floating Hagel as a “Republican presidential contender” (to quote how the BBC continually describe him).
However, the moment McCain tried to run and needed to gain the support of his party…the media and liberals dumped his stock.
Is it a coincidence that the most successful GOP candidates of the past decades were – Nixon, Reagan, Bush — were absolutely despised by the MSM? Recall Pauline Kael’s famous puzzlement about Nixon’s election: “How did he get elected? Nobody I know voted for him.”
A successful Republican candidate will ride on the support of the party, not Jon Stewart, David Letterman and the Washington press corps.
Of the ’08 candidates, that would make Guiliani the man to beat.
Remember, regardless of his non-Republican aspects, as the MSM and the left blogosphere begin throwing everything at Guiliani, this will trigger the inevitable response in the GOP that it did with Reagan and later Bush.
Ironically, it will probably be liberal loathing that defines the GOP candidate for 08.
I think Marlowe is absolutely correct. Don’t forget one other famous example: the bumper stickers during one of Bush 41′s campaigns that read “Annoy the Media: Elect Bush”.
So, that means the GOP oughta run Newt. Which in turn would galvanize the left giving the Democrats the win! To be honest, I think they would be most successful with a candidate like Giuliani, who can reach out to different constituencies or Sen Thompson, who would have the backing of the solid south, and could use his TV image to lure independents. McCain is losing ground because once he came under increased scrutiny of a presidential campaign, he no longer attracted either conservatives, who doubted his conversions on their key positions, and independents, who saw him as going too far to the right to win the nomination.
You don’t think he damaged his own stock by supporting torture, Falwell and Bush?
He damaged his credibility, because you can’t claim to oppose intolerance and be in Jerry Falwell’s back pocket. You can’t claim to be anti-torture and wink at the administration while it adds a signing statement allowing it to do just that. You can’t change your positions on abortion and gay rights at the drop of a hat and expect the support of liberals. He was well-liked by the press and by liberals because he was willing to take independent stands from his party. When he put getting the nomination ahead of those stands, he lost everyone’s respect. The current reports that have him approaching Democrats in 2001 and in 2004 to change parties really make you wonder about what he really does think.
Right now, I’d put a fork in him, he’s done.
Marlowe:
So you’re saying here that the MSM was trying mightily to get Gore elected? You’ve gotta be kidding.
Just one example–for every reference (via a Nexis-Lexis lookup) during the ’00 campaign to Bush’s irregularities with his service in TANG, there were more than ten to Gore’s having claimed to have invented the internet.
No POTUS was more “despised” by the MSM than Clinton. They didn’t like Gore any better.
McCain put the nail in the coffin on himself, when he was walking around freely in Baghdad with two attack helicopters overhead, and a small milita for security support.
I forgot to mention the bullet proof vest.