A Step Back

Before we close the book on John McCain's political career, do give a read to this compendium of the five biggest flops of the election. McCain's penchant for "crazy stunt politics" - inserting Joe the Plumber into the debate, or "suspending" his campaign to deal with the bailout bill - was ill-suited to the sobriety of the political moment. I think the most amusing part of the election is how the Obama campaign used McCain's love of "crazy stunt politics" to bait him into running hard in Pennsylvania when the state was already wrapped up.

1. Obama's campaign learns McCain has just $37 million entering October.

2. Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell says he's "nervous" that McCain is gaining ground.

3. Obama's team "leaks" an internal poll proving Rendell's anxiety.

4. McCain pulls back in other states to "flood" Pennsylvania with resources.

In the end, Obama won Pennsylvania by double digits.

The key here is the leaked poll. The Obama camp never leaked anything. They were mute. But suddenly, you have their Pennsylvania operation losing track of an incredibly damaging internal poll showing them only two percent abover mcCain, even as all the public pollsters were showing a far less competitive race. And then you have Ed Rendell anxiously running his mouth off in public about his desire to get Obama back in the state. None of it vibed with how the Obama campaign generally operated, and none of it vibed with what we actually seemed to know about the fundamentals in Pennsylvania. But the McCain campaign certainly leapt on it, and time and money that could have gone to Ohio and Colorado and Indiana instead went to Pennsylvania.

I think they were accounting for the fact that McCain rolling the dice in Pennsylvania was a "story" that he couldn't pass up - it would get on the news and allow for lots of discussion. Of course he'd take a swing at that pitch in the dirt. I don't know if you can extrapolate anything out of how Obama would deal with, say, North Korea based on this maneuver, but it was very strategic.

There's plenty of talk that suggests McCain had to shake up the race because running as your basic Republican couldn't have won. Except that, in the public perception, McCain wasn't a basic Republican. He matured into one during the election. Now, it's true that the Obama campaign did a decent job of defining him as a Bush Republican. But McCain had a hand in this as well:

But McCain barely even tried to take advantage of the fact that, when the race began, he wasn’t closely identified with the rotten GOP brand. Of course when he decided he wanted to be president, the first thing to do was to start running to the right in order to win the primary. That’s what you do. And that’s what he did. And it worked — barely — he won, albeit in a way that relied on a lot of independent and crossover votes. Then having won the primary, you want to tack a bit to the center. That’s how the game is played. And it’s especially how the game is played when your party’s image is terrible.

But McCain didn’t do it.

On the climate/energy/environment issues where he really had staked out an unusual position for a Republican, he moved right during the primaries and then moved even further right during the general election, embracing drilling and coal as the centerpiece of his agenda. He shed his image as a moderate on cultural issues with the Palin pick. And he didn’t make up for those rightward thrusts with anything else. Instead of trying to undue the damage to his brand that was caused by shifting right during the primaries, he compounded it by continuing to move right, closing the campaign by dogmatically insisting that run-amok inequality is the essence of America (or something).

I suppose he figured that he had to nail down the conservative base. But they turned out in roughly the same numbers for McCain that they did for George Bush, and it's not like he totally cleared the hurdle of skepticism about him. What McCain lost big was independents, which was supposed to be where he could draw his greatest support. This is why he only improved on Bush's numbers in the Appalachian region and the Deep South, where conservatism is another religion. The far-right strategy is a downward spiral.

It seems like there was another campaign that could have been run. Maybe it wouldn't have succeeded. But it might not have had the same consequences of failure.