Soccer Dad

Krauthammer's inquest

In "Campaign Autopsy,"Charles Krauthammer writes:

The patient was fatally stricken on Sept. 15 -- caught in the rubble when the roof fell in (at Lehman Brothers, according to the police report) -- although he did linger until his final, rather quiet demise on Nov. 4.

In the excitement and decisiveness of Barack Obama's victory, we forget that in the first weeks of September, John McCain was actually ahead. Then Lehman collapsed, and the financial system went off a cliff.

This was not just a meltdown but a panic. For an agonizing few days, there was a collapse of faith in the entire financial system -- a run on banks, panicky money-market withdrawals, flights to safety, the impulse to hide one's savings under a mattress.

This did not just have the obvious effect of turning people against the incumbent party, however great or tenuous its responsibility for the crisis. It had the more profound effect of making people seek shelter in government.

For the most part Krauthammer argues that there was little McCain could have done but that he made two major errors from which he couldn't recover.

1) His selection of Sarah Palin.

Krauthammer argues as does Elie that choosing her undercut the "Obama is inexperienced" theme of the campaign. Perhaps it blunted the mesage, but Palin was running for Vice President, not President. And my guess is that he made the calculation that she would bring excitement to the ticket. Would Mitt Romney, Tim Pawlenty or anyone managed to energize the base like Palin did?

2) His decision to suspend his campaign to work on the bailout bill.

At the time I thought it looked gutsy and showed that McCain wished to solve problems instead of simply speaking about them. Todd Zywicki explains why McCain's idea went bad:

Had McCain suspended his campaign and acted decisively and forcefully to oppose the bailout, and Obama remained "cool," I think that the politics of the situation would have been very different. The way in which the bailout was presented to Congress was outrageous and it would've been nice for someone to have said so. Had McCain opposed the bailout, in retrospect he could have been seen as independent and decisive (rather than merely impulsive) and Obama might have been seen as weak, indecisive, and just going along with the Wall Street-Washington establishment. It was the substance, not the style, that made this a turning point in my opinion.

At the end he gives three reasons why McCain didn't succeed, but my favorite was the first:

First, McCain simply does not understand economics, did not understand the problem that the bailout was trying to address, nor how the bailout was supposed to address it. And, I've I opined previously, he is not that good at faking it when he doesn't know something. I suspect Obama had no idea what the bailout was all about either, but he came up with some good, empty talking points that were enough to bluff him through.

Still despite these mistakes (and if you'd like 30 mistakes McCain made, there's a list of those too) I wonder if he'd handled the end of the campaign differently, if that might have been enough.

Jim Lindgren:

One thing struck me as well, though this opinion is probably tainted by hindsight bias: since 1960, it might well be that the campaign staff that ran the better campaign won each election, though I don't remember a few of them (eg, 1984) well enough to be certain of that. Of course, a great candidate makes a campaign look good, especially in retrospect.

Karl Rove:

So the two Davids registered millions of voters in states the Obama campaign picked as battlegrounds, especially where there were many heretofore-disinterested African Americans and younger Democrats. Messrs. Plouffe and Axelrod understood that over the last 28 years only 11 of 20 eligible Americans on average cast a presidential ballot. They focused on registering and motivating the other nine who don't usually vote. This decision, perhaps more than any other, allowed Mr. Obama to win such previously red states as Virginia, Indiana, Colorado and Nevada. It forced Mr. McCain to spend most of the fall on defense, unable to take once-reliably Republican states for granted.

Eric Trager:

Yet, as far as I can tell, the campaign failed in fulfilling the second essential requirement of its Pennsylvania-centric strategy: producing a top-notch "ground game," i.e., a well-organized volunteer effort for getting voters to the polls. In Philadelphia, the Obama campaign is absolutely dominating: on every couple of blocks, groups of volunteers are going from door-to-door, clipboards in hand, making sure that registered Democrats have voted. It's been going on since Saturday - Obama folks have rung the doorbell of my politically mixed household at least five times (!), twice leaving colorful door-hangings containing polling site information. Meanwhile, the McCain campaign reminded its local supporters of their polling sites via e-mail - the type that is typically directed to your spam folder.

Taking Lindgren, Rove and Trager together, I wonder if it's possible that McCain could still have won if he had simply done the organizing on the ground. Maybe advertising wasn't as important as reaching people personally.

In any case, whatever reason McCain lost and that's something that I regret. Krauthammer does too:

But before our old soldier fades away, it is worth acknowledging that McCain ran a valiant race against impossible odds. He will be -- he should be -- remembered as the most worthy presidential nominee ever to be denied the prize.