All he had to do was come out against the bailout and he’d have won. Worst campaign and worst candidate on the pubbie side I’ve ever seen.
They had a “better product” (aka a drug called hopieum) and $1B to market and sell it ... we had our granpap’s Olds and $85MM ... that was the ball game.
Dole was far worse, even though I like him better than McCain in many ways.
McCain actually outdid what I expected in spirit and fight. He did good other than the reaction to the economic blight, and taking very important issues OFF the table to take down Obama. O is a great campaigner but deeply flawed due to his odd background. They brought up almost nothing about it> Bill Ayers was identified only as a terrorist in the 60s, not a modern day marxist. They could have tied him to a series of marxists, but did not. A lot of the vote they lost in the suburbs would have re-evaluated before voting for Obama. Instead, he looked like a strong, well spoken young moderate with new ideas.
It took me longer to vote for McCain than it took me to vote for all the other offices, judges, and propositions because he was so un-maverick when it came to the horrid bailout bill.
I finally did vote for him, but I'm not particularly happy about it.
“Worst campaign and worst candidate on the pubbie side I’ve ever seen.....”
Please.
Once the campaign got on message with the tax and spend issue I thought the Captain put up one hell of a fight.
Something must be done about the slavish media coverage that the other side enjoys rather than just complaining about it. It is not a fair fight when one side is portrayed as avatars of a new age of peace and universal brotherhood and the other side is portrayed as yahoos and racists.
The backstabbing and blame game has begun but to paraphrase James Carville “its the media stupid”. The Obama campaign spent 600M but probably got 1B worth free publicity from the shamelessly slanted MSM coverage.
A counter strategy involves a total rethink on how to alternative Conservative to counter this bias. When the Republicans were in complete control of Congress nothing was done to permanently eliminate the possibility of eliminating the revival of the Fairness Doctrine. Nothing was to de-fund the left-wing groups that feed at the Federal trough including Accorn.
The key to managing a political coalition is to reward friends and punish enemies. We will spend the next fours learning this lesson.