Totally agree. The drop in Conservative/GOP turnout and McCain's pathetic ground game (not unrelated) were the stories of this election. If the GOP candidate got GWB levels of support from the base, he would have won.
Gov. Palin actually saved McCain from suffering a McGovern-like blowout.
Three reasons he did not.
1 - Supporting the bailout.
2 - When you add up all the primaries up to where Romney dropped out, McCain got only 37 percent of registered Republican voters. A nominating process that can produce such a result is fatally flawed.
3 - Freepers are occasionally under the illusion that all of the GOP base is like us. This is misleading. One who lives in the world of conservative blogs and fora may not be able to understand how successfully Obama was sold as a centrist. I have no doubt there are a lot of GOP voters who disliked McCain and were given no reason by the MSM to intensely dislike Obama, and so they stayed home.