Was John McCain’s Biggest Mistake Sarah Palin?
23 October 2008 10:09 am by Taylor Marsh
BY TAYLOR MARSH
This
interview comes way too late for John McCain. But it outlines his biggest
mistake in the campaign.
Salon
outlines the “Seven Biggest Blunders” by the media with “The
Cult of Sarah Palin” as number one. I was in Denver when she was picked.
The first time I weighed in I called it a “desperation”
pick, with the second simply asking: Does
John McCain think women are stupid? A reference to Dan Quayle was next.
No doubt about it, she’s a disaster for McCain. But the media’s mistake was
not John McCain’s worst.
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Try to imagine where his campaign would have been if after the GOP convention
McCain had picked Pawlenty? Obama would have surged from the outset. As for
the pick of Mitt Romney, someone I thought when this thing began would have
been a very tough challenger (and still do), though few agreed, the evangelicals would have bolted, with Huckabee
leading the charge. Joe Lieberman would have been worse on the base.
The biggest mistake McCain made, understanding that he had to embrace Bush
and his base or not capture the nomination, came after Palin, when McCain-Palin were still very competitive in the polls. The real
McCain calamity hit when the economy collapsed. Would Mitt’s presence helped at this point. Maybe, but they would have still been making up points from the convention, because Mitt certainly wouldn’t have given McCain the 10-15 point bump Palin did. The economic crisis actually offered McCain a chance to throw his final
Hail Mary; though he did by suspending his campaign and rushing back to Washington, but it was the wrong one with no follow through.
The bailout package was going to pass without his vote. Considering
the pork and the political mood of the voting populace, McCain should have voted
against it. In one fell swoop, McCain would have gotten back a bit of his “maverick”
image, while finally taking the economic argument in a direction he
could have defended. Since Democrats own the economy, McCain simply had nothing
to lose, especially since he would have had public opinion behind him.
From today’s interview in the Washington Times:
“Spending, the conduct of the war in Iraq for years, growth in the size
of government, larger than any time since the Great Society, laying a $10
trillion debt on future generations of America, owing $500 billion to China,
obviously, failure to both enforce and modernize the [financial] regulatory
agencies that were designed for the 1930s and certainly not for the 21st century,
failure to address the issue of climate change seriously,” Mr. McCain
said in an interview with The Washington Times aboard his campaign plane en
route from New Hampshire to Ohio.“Those are just some of them,” he said with a laugh, chomping into
a peanut butter sandwich as a few campaign aides in his midair office joined
in the laughter. …
This is just part of the speech McCain should have given after he voted against
the bailout, with congressmen and women standing behind him, as Obama waited to debate him down south. Since McCain no longer needed Bush, he could have lowered the boom on him, while making the base once again euphoric. He would have had to add that something needed to be done about the crisis
unfolding, but that what was offered wasn’t it, especially with all the pork.
The ability to vote against the bailout, while having it likely pass, though
losing House members would have hurt the efforts and was a gamble, not only
would have helped McCain on economics, an argument on which he’s very weak,
but voting against the bailout was the right thing to do. People would have loved it.
Sure, it’s a mean, mean year for Republicans. But McCain was in a good position
when the economic crisis hit. Palin hadn’t imploded yet, so standing up against the bailout would have given voters something to see that McCain was stronger on economics than they thought. That he didn’t is on McCain.
As for Palin being seen as McCain’s biggest mistake, a bigger drag than Bush, is fitting. He didn’t take the care and time in not only choosing her, but rolling her out to the public, using the same snap judgment and tactics that McCain did on the bailout. Both were losers.
