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Want to know why John McCain lost the presidential race to Barak Obama? It’s no secret really – all one has to do is listen to the criticism now being directed against Senator McCain’s running-mate, Sarah Palin. Every story leaked to the press, every attack leveled against the Alaska Governor, demonstrates with awful clarity just how unsuited members the McCain team were to be running a presidential campaign in the first place, and how inept they probably would have been running the White House if their candidate had won.
Over the years, I have organized or managed many political campaigns, local and national. Each of these has been unique in its own way, with its own issues, its own dynamics, and its own surprises both pleasant and unpleasant. One thing that never changes is that the candidate is always a human being, with unique strengths and weaknesses, who has good days and bad days, who says smart things and not so smart things, and who is kind and patient most of the time, but irritable and impatient some of the time, especially in the pressure cooker that is the modern campaign for public office.
It’s the job of campaign staff to work together to manage all this, with emphasis on the word “manage”, a responsibility that it seems those hired to work with Governor Palin were – if their version of events is to be believed – singularly unable to perform. Admittedly this is sometimes the fault of the candidate themselves, but only rarely so. In any event, only rank amateurs would expose their own candidate’s flaws even after the voting was complete, let alone blame those flaws for the failure of the campaign.
It was this lack of basic political sense combined with an astonishing lack of professionalism that did the McCain campaign in, not Governor Palin’s shortcomings, real, imagined, or simply invented.
Consider the extraordinary length of time it took for the McCain team to transform itself from a primary campaign to a presidential campaign. It was as if nobody had considered the possibility that the Senator from Arizona might win the GOP nomination. Was this the fault of Governor Palin?
How about the inconsistent, and at times, incoherent messaging of the McCain team throughout the campaign? Did it really take Joe the Plummer to point out that that the Obama tax plan was blatantly redistributionist? And when that issue was working to Senator McCain’s advantage, why did the campaign release new ads in the final week on – wait for it – the environment? Did McCain strategists really believe that winning over Sierra Club or Greenpeace members at the last minute would put them over the top?
What about Senator McCain’s participation in the deliberations over how best to respond to the credit crisis? Presumably his decision to suspend his campaign and return to Washington to take part in the negotiations over the so-called bail out package was meant to demonstrate his commitment to “country first”. Certainly it was a practical application of the principle. No discernable attempt was made to portray it as such though.
On the subject of the market meltdown, where were the ads laying out the Senator’s warnings regarding Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac well before the crisis hit? Surely I wasn’t the only one surprised never to see or hear “John McCain – right on the surge, right on the economy” or some such variation.
Is Governor Palin to blame?
The sad fact is that time after time, on issue after issue, the McCain team was out-classed and out-performed by a better organized, better disciplined, Obama campaign.
Even the post-election criticism of Sarah Palin illustrates the grade-school level of thinking that permeated the McCain campaign. If everything being said about the Alaska Governor is true – and I do not believe for an instant that it is – what does that say about judgment of John McCain who chose her to be his running-mate, or his advisors who one can reasonably assume played a role in the selection process?
It says a lot that those who think they are throwing mud at Governor Palin are blissfully unaware that it’s Senator McCain himself who is on the receiving end of their attacks.
It’s obvious that there are many things wrong with both the Republican Party and the Conservative movement in the United States that will need to be sorted out if the GOP is to return to power as the representative of common-sense conservative values in Washington. Sarah Palin is not one of those problems.
What’s needed now is a frank assessment of the competence and capabilities of key GOP operatives, and the cutting loose of all those who cannot make the grade. And the place to start is where the most damage is being done – the remnants of the 2008 McCain presidential campaign.
Frankly, if I were running the show, there are a few people who would never work for, or with, Republicans again.
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