Did Sarah Palin Lose the Election for McCain?
Did Sarah Palin lose the 2008 election for John McCain?
It should first of all be said, that even before the meltdown of the financial markets in September, the 2008 presidential election was the Democrats to lose. President Bush’s approval ratings were in the tank and most people blamed the Republican Party for a host of perceived ills.
And while I always believed that John McCain, because of his penchant for working with people from across the aisle, his strong record for frugal spending, and his status as a hero, was the only Republican who could win this year, it was always a mission improbable.
McCain could likely only have won this year if his Democratic opponent pulled a bonehead mistake and if his own campaign was savvy, polished, and attuned to the sentiments of the American electorate. McCain’s opponent never made a mistake and McCain’s campaign was disorganized, leaky, and seemingly incapable of devising a coherent theme or rationale for putting the Arizona senator in the Oval Office.
To lay blame for McCain’s loss on Palin then, isn’t fair. But, it seems to me, she’s a good symbol of what went wrong with McCain’s uphill quest to become president.
What Went Wrong #1: McCain and his handlers were always too concerned with how the “base” felt toward the Arizona senator. It bothered them that there was no depth of passion among the GOP who take their philosophical cues from people like Rush Limbaugh.
But, here’s the deal: When people go to their neighborhood voting booth, there is no “depth of passion” slot on the ballot. You only vote for candidates, sometimes enthusiastically and sometimes not. No matter how tepid their feelings for McCain, there was never any chance that the neocons were going to vote for Obama or, had she been the nominee of the Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton.
Intent on shoring up a base that would simply not have abandoned him in the fall though, McCain spent lots of time wooing the “dittoheads,” as some call themselves, and others on the right of his party, rather than trying to build his appeal among other “woo-able” US voters. And it was, in part, to appeal to “the base” that McCain chose Palin to be his running mate.
McCain wasn’t alone among the contenders for this year’s GOP presidential nomination in exhibiting a fixation on this base. Over the last two election cycles, with the wins engineered for President Bush by Karl Rove, Republicans had become believers in what I’ve called Rovian Minimalism. I described it this way on March 5:
It’s a minimalist, get-out-the-base strategy. The idea is to excite the base by throwing out lots of red meat, plenty of references to Ronald Reagan, and lots of hot button issues and then squeak by.
I went on to write in that piece, that:
this year, with concerns over the economy rising and frustration with the war continuing, the Republican nominee needs to expand the party’s base. John McCain cannot do that by energizing a shrunken Republican base that puts off the very people he will need to win in 2008, persuadable independents, Dems, and Republicans who regard Bush’s domestic and national security policies as betrayals of conservative and Republican principles.
What Went Wrong #2: I am wary in saying this, but I think that it’s true that John McCain panicked. At one level, I know how laughable it is for me to say this about a certifiable war hero who used to land jets onto aircraft carriers and went through hell in a North Vietnamese prisoner of war camp.
But we’ve seen this movie before. John Kerry, in spite of the “swift boating” to which he was subjected in 2004, is a certifiable hero.
Neither Kerry nor McCain scare easily. But something happened to both of them once they got close to their White House dreams.
Four years ago, a friend of mine who had voted for George Bush, watched John Kerry’s concession speech, an address that was human, eloquent, and compelling. After seeing it, my friend told me, “If I’d seen that in Kerry during the campaign, I would have voted for him.” Many Obama supporters I’ve heard from in the past twenty-four hours reacted similarly to McCain’s concession speech on Tuesday evening.
Like Kerry before him, not wanting to blow his big chance, McCain did desperate things like “suspending” his campaign to address the financial crisis, making a big deal of little things like “lipstick on a pig,” and asking someone who had been governor of a tiny-population state for less than two years to be his running mate.
The latter move denied McCain one of his most potent arguments against Obama, the fact that the Illinois senator, had little national experience. And, as Palin fumbled through her interview with Katie Couric and the McCain people seemed to want to insulate her from scrutiny, caused voters to question McCain’s judgment.
If every play called by a football coach was the Hail Mary pass, people would begin to suspect that his approach was all tactic and no strategy, all flash and no substance, all panic and no direction.
In the end, McCain’s campaign for president was swamped by an economic tsunami. But by the time the financial crisis erupted, the convince-able non-Republican voters had already started to tune John McCain out.
He hadn’t pitched his campaign to them and he never presented a coherent case for electing him.
Sarah Palin didn’t cause those two things to happen; she just symbolized them.
[I didn't post this on my personal blog.]
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Don Karnoski
