Election Post-Mortems

Everyone seems to have a different idea of why McCain lost the election. My feeling is that McCain was headed towards a win until the financial melt-down occurred. That was the largest factor in his defeat.

A worried and angry electorate assigned blame to the party in power and voted for their opposites. This financial disaster was a godsend for Obama - it saved his campaign and assured his victory.

The blame, of course, belongs with the Democrats, but most Americans don't care about facts or history; they just want to vent their spleens at the ballot box. For these Americans, voting is largely emotional, not intellectual, and it is a big mistake to overestimate the impact of the latter on a given election.

The second biggest factor in McCain's defeat was McCain himself. McCain is a moderate who believes in many Democrat myths, like man-made global warming; he has sided with the Democrats a number of times to the detriment of his own party. Consequently, the conservative base of the Republican Party did not like him or trust him. He almost reversed this by selecting Sarah Palin as his running mate, but soon reverted to being McCain: ideologically ambiguous, lacking in ideological rigor and certitude about the rightness of his own cause. His ambivalent feelings about conservatism were obvious in his lackluster debates and stump speeches, and in his unwillingness to attack Obama on his radical associations and beliefs.

Most Republicans did not so much vote for McCain as they were voting against Obama. That kind of campaign is always weak. A far stronger campaign is one in which the base has a deep belief in their man and his principles (as they did for Reagan). That was not the case for the GOP candidate in this election.

In sum: we lost this election for two major reasons: (1) the sudden tanking of the economy six weeks before the election and (2) the lack of ideological rigor and moral clarity of our candidate.

There were other contributing factors, of course, but the above two are the major ones. Contributing factors include (1) the cyclical nature of politics following eight years of GOP rule, (2) the complete abandonment of objectivity and journalistic standards by the mainstream media and (3) Obama's youth, vigor and self-assurance combined with the historic nature of his candidacy.

That's it. Don't overthink the election. It's time to start thinking about the next one.