Why McCain Lost

Now the Monday morning quarterbacking begins, only this time it's more of a November 5th quarterbacking effort. John McCain failed in his bid for the presidency. The reasons why on the surface are fairly clear - he failed to capture the 2000 and 2004 Bush states, and failed to sway Pennsylvania to shift to a more red hue. But there were underlying causes that began to doom him from the beginning.

The Charisma Gap has played a role in every election in the past fifteen years, since Clinton was elected in 1992. Clinton and W had "everyday guy" charisma, the kind that appeals to average working Joes. This played an important role in capturing the areas of the country which, frankly, may enjoy NASCAR a little too much and consider reading books to be a waste of time.

This election was a little different, but which candidate possessed the more charismatic qualities was obvious. McCain is a fairly good speaker, far better than George W. Bush ever had been or ever will be. Obama, though, is immaculate. Where McCain's technique involves jokes which aren't very funny and somewhat awkward soundbytes, Obama utilizes spotless segues and impressive inflections. Kerry and Gore were well spoken, certainly, but they spoke in a kind of monotonous fashion that made it hard to rally around them. Barack Obama was ready and willing to transcend the soundbyte culture that has grasped the media so tightly in the past eight years, and in many ways he succeeded.

Losing Control was seemingly a factor in McCain's downfall. Steve Schmidt, former Cheney aid and longtime political organizer, was given full control over McCain's campaign in early July. Schmidt comes from a school of thought that when it comes to campaigning, message isn't necessarily the most important issue; that as long as you can come out ahead in the majority of news cycles, the election is yours. This led to the McCain campaign turning quite negative, focusing on his opponent's political weaknesses rather than his own strengths. This probably also led to the strange and erratic movements of the campaign, jerking from one issue to the other as unnaturally as Sarah Palin's catwalk moves.

On the Sunday night before the last debate, McCain's core group of advisers—Steve Schmidt, Rick Davis, adman Fred Davis, strategist Greg Strimple, pollster Bill McInturff and strategy director Sarah Simmons—met to decide whether to tell McCain that the race was effectively over, that he no longer had a chance to win. The consensus in the room was no, not yet, not while he still had "a pulse."

The above quote, from a Newsweek article just released about the campaign, illustrates the little control McCain had over his own fate. The top advisors of his campaign had a hunch a month ago that things would not go well for their candidate, and they decided to not discourage him. Certainly McCain got wind of this eventually from how the polls and temperament of his colleagues and the media were moving, but it just exemplifies how weak of a grasp he actually had on his own campaign.

Probably foremost among the reasons why McCain's campaign failed so miserably was the selection of Sarah Palin for his Vice President. The pick seemed sound, at least at first. A relatively unknown Washington outsider - could definitely play for the "change" ticket. A woman to boot, to try and scoop up the rest of the Hillary vote. Sounds fairly reasonable, right?

It didn't seem to work out very well. Palin was a definite conservative, but she may have been too conservative for the American public to stomach. She galvanized the abortion- and tax-hating wings of the Republican Party, but did she also push the border cases further to the left? Was her inexperience and her penchant for disastrous interviews a death knell for the McCain campaign? I say yes. She also got off message several times on the campaign trail, "going rogue" as some put it and blathering off on her own tangents instead of sticking to the campaign line:

Palin launched her attack on Obama's association with William Ayers, the former Weather Underground bomber, before the campaign had finalized a plan to raise the issue. McCain's advisers were working on a strategy that they hoped to unveil the following week, but McCain had not signed off on it, and top adviser Mark Salter was resisting.

She seemed like quite the loose cannon, and some of her behavior toward the end of the campaign seemed to be motivated by her own ego rather than the ticket she was promoting. It seems like things may work out for her as well - in Alaska, where she remains remarkably popular, a Senate seat seems like it'll be up for grabs in short order. With most of the right-wing media calling the McCain campaign a failure because its candidate was not conservative enough, her status of a pariah may stand as a badge of honor.

McCain himself rarely spoke to Palin during the campaign, and aides kept him in the dark about the details of her spending on clothes because they were sure he would be offended. Palin asked to speak along with McCain at his Arizona concession speech Tuesday night, but campaign strategist Steve Schmidt vetoed the request.

Source.