My friends, let’s have some straight talk. John McCain didn’t run a very good primary campaign. He didn’t stage a historic comeback to vanquish his more right-of-center opponents. He got the nomination because we fought amongst ourselves for too long. The social conservatives rallied behind Huckabee, the Reagan fanatics of the party (myself included) grabbed at straws– first falling in line behind the unenthusiastic Fred Thompson and then scrambling to justify our support of Romney, and too many independents wandered into the process in order to vote for the Maverick™.
So then we ended up with McCain, who had the foreign policy foundation that we could support along with an apparent willingness to fight based on the mud he flung at Mitt during the primary. Most of us jumped on board the Straight Talk Express or at least read the travel brochure. We gave him kudos for picking Palin and attempting to negate the shimmering aura of ‘historic ticket’ that the Democrats had been brandishing since we began this election cycle. It turned out that she wasn’t quite ready for prime time and that John McCain lost to George Bush in 2000 for a reason. He is unable to effective go negative, and what’s worse is that while he does start to stir the dirt and water together, he’s still attempting to keep things completely honorable at the same time.
That’s how we end up with supporters literally begging him to take the gloves off at his campaign events. It’s how we end up with McCain standing there at his rallies defending his opponent. John McCain just doesn’t run a good campaign. He isn’t effective because of his constantly changing definition of what makes the fight fair. He removed Obama’s character as an issue while trying to lay one on the Messiah for playing with Ayers.
He has also managed to let himself get stuck with the blame for our current economic crisis. How his campaign let that slip through their fingers, I’ll never know. McCain was perfectly poised to shout his Maverick reform record from the rooftops, lay waste to the Democrats, and once again illustrate how hollow Obama’s policy of ‘change’ is. Instead he did such a horrible job that Saturday Night Live had to spell it out!
I think the real question Republicans should be asking is: Where are we? Why does everyone here make Dennis Kucinich look like Michael Jordan and who stole our ruby slippers?
Things are looking bleak and if McCain doesn’t pull it off, he has no one left to blame but himself. Honor before electability are apparently the rules of the day for our new Bob Dole.
I hope I am wrong, but I don’t think that is the case. What is worse than losing honor? Letting the country be driven into the ground for eight years. It isn’t even dishonorable to fight back. Obama’s votes, experience, decisions, associations and judgment are fair game, McCain just won’t do it.
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Thank you very much for this moment of introspection. It is understandable that you would cast off John McCain\’s campaign as the problem, or our inability to pick a better candidate. The truth is that John McCain would be winning if the economy were not in such bad shape. We have lowered taxes, lowered regulations and kept this country free from the radicals and yet are in a crisis of unknown magnitude. George W. Bush has done nearly everything we would want in a President and yet so many people dislike what he has done. How could this be? How could so many people be unhappy with our vision? And why has the economy under George W. Bush not performed as well as we would expect? Are we just not communicating our message well enough?