Posted on 12/12/2008 8:05:43 PM PST by ConservativeJen
John McCain's top pollster, Bill McInturff, said this evening that attacking Barack Obama over his relationship with Rev. Jeremiah Wright would not have helped McCain's campaign and could have destroyed his presidency, had he been elected.
Some Republicans were angry during the campaign that McCain had -- reportedly for reasons of principle, and out of concern that he'd be viewed as racist -- refused to air ads with Wright's inflammatory sermons, and believed they were fair game and a silver bullet against Obama. An outside group did air one such ad in the closing days of the race.
"I said 'Look, if f we do win we’ll win with about 273 electoral votes and we’ll lose the popular vote by 3 million,'" recalled McInturff of the internal discussions about cutting attack ads with Wright. "If [McCain] had used that issue that way, you’d already be delegitimized as a president. You couldn’t function as government."
McInturff also said that McCain's burden in the final days was to close the gap with young voters and Latino voters.
"John [barred Wright attacks] for instinctively all the right reasons," McInturff said. But "anybody who believed that his issue would have affected the groups we were losing by those margins had never talked to anybody in any of those subgroups about how they felt about those issues."
McInturff also praised campaign manger Rick Davis for resisting the "enormous pressure" from the Republican Party to attack on the Wright issue.
Obama campaign manager David Plouffe concurred that, by the fall, Wright was not the toxic issue some thought.
"Voters had digested Reverend Wright, and it gave some of them indigestion -- I don’t want to minimize it," Plouffe said. "People had seen the tapes, they had talked about it a lot," he said, dismissing the notion that it could have changed the game in the final days.
Plouffe did concede an early failure to understand the power of Wright's sermons.
"We failed as a campaign to do the proper research there," he said. "We hadn’t done as thorough research, looked through every tape of every sermon," he said, saying the "ferocity" of the tapes' appearance on the scene "took us by surprise."
"It was a moment of great peril," Plouffe said of the day the story broke in the spring.
Chief strategist David Axelrod chimed in with a story about receiving the text of Obama's speech on his Blackberry early in the morning he would deliver it.
"I spooled through the speech and I got to the end of it and I emailed him back and said, 'This is why you should be president.'"
And then they decided not to do it.
Who ‘was’ John McCain?
buh bye McCain!
conservativism wins every time.
but mccain was not a conservative.
'Look, if we do win we’ll win with about 273 electoral votes and we’ll lose the popular vote by 3 million,'
Sorry, what we didn't need was 4 more years of Soros and his minions whining about the Electoral College. Either way, we were screwed with McCain at the top of the ticket.
Don’t care if it works, tell the truth, all of it, and some day it will work.
Hey McCain, attacking a nasty, rabid, evil racist like Wright is NOT racist. It's anti-racist.
McCain is just bloody nuts. He deserved to lose.
The slim chance McCain had went down the toilet when Paulson and Bernie visited congress with the ‘sky is falling’ presentation. It was an October surprise like no other.
Had McCain campaign been able to translate Ayers into a Mcveigh like figure, it would have helped.
Not worth arguing....Mc was a weak candidate.
Soros?
Who is he?
And why should I care if he whines if we win the electoral votes and lose the popular vote? He will be the one developing heart attack, and getting sleepless nights, not me. He's been whining about that since 2000 about Florida, and I still sleep very well at night.
Forget it.
Once McCain went back to autopilot and instinctively attacked EVERY conservative that was trying fire up the base to help him...it was over.
Sara gave him one last chance, but he gave it back by voting for the $700B bailout.
McCain is truly a feckless man.
I talked to several swing voters who were upset by Obama’s connection to Wright (and planned to vote for McCain partially because of this issue), but were even more upset by McCain’s choice of Palin and switched back to Obama after that. Rightly or wrongly they saw her as also religiously extreme—to a lesser extent than Wright, but obviously closer to the ticket. I’m not sure advertisements featuring Wright would have picked up many votes for McCain, though it might have encouraged a few Obama supporters to stay home.
I think the real point wasn’t just Wright, but the totality of strange connections Obama had: Rezko, Wright, Ayers/Dohrn , Pfleger, and ACORN. Odd company for a Messiah to keep though the McCain camp never pointed it out. Add now to that mix Blagojevich to Obama’s peculiar menagerie of chums.
He was the guy who lost the the illegal alien who was married to the lady who hates America.
Actually, McCain needed to do two very important things immediately. The first was to denounce/renounce McCain Feingold as a mistaken, fascistic piece of bizarre legislation ~ . The second was to renounce fascist legislative techniques (and we could go all day on what that means, but, in general, it means hitting people on the head with abusive laws to prevent them from doing stuff they aren't going to do anyway).
Once he'd got that straight, McCain needed to pick up on the social issues.
Many think he's ignorant of them ~ or that he's like Colin Powell, simply an abusive personality type.
He could have actually gotten some of those social issues voters in California who told the gays to go stuff it.
McNasty was not LIKEABLE and too old.
You nailed it. Whatever slim chance he had was blown on the 2nd question of the 1st debate: “Do you support the bailout?” Instead of giving a cogent answer, he went on some diatribe about Wall Street.
At that point, he showed he was totally clueless in an economic crisis. He sucked, he lost. End of story.
McCain Feingold - was that the name of the $850 million club that Obama used to beat him heavily around the head and shoulders?
That proves, BTW, that you are easily led by your Leftwingtard masters.
She's no more religious than anyone else, and it was her parents who were into Holy Roller stuff, as are tens of millions of people.
Good grief, I even know some of 'em, and I'll bet you don't.
Currently she attends services at a couple of non-denominational "community churches" (according to the latest info on the net).
Given the foregoing, I don't believe you ever met anyone who thought Palin was actually "too religious" ~ you've just made that up please Colin Powell.
Next time you see him give him a message from me ~ it's obscene ~ I know you can do it, so make it juicy, OK!
McCain is bad history. I am sick and tired of hearing about him and how bad his campaign was. Yes it was terrible, awful, and I say good riddance McCain. We need to stop looking back and look forward to those who will bring us back, Palin, Sanford and others.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.