According to Newsweek,
"On the Sunday night before the last debate, McCain's core group
of advisers -- Steve Schmidt, Rick Davis, adman Fred Davis,
strategist Greg Strimple, pollster Bill McInturff and strategy
director Sarah Simmons -- met to decide whether to tell McCain
that the race was effectively over, that he no longer had a
chance to win. The consensus in the room was no, not yet, not
while he still had 'a pulse.'"
This spirit of defeat explains why McCain staffers spent the last
week or so of the campaign leaking against Sarah Palin. By the
end of the race, the choicest pieces of inside-the-beltway
elitism were coming not from Barack Obama but from McCain's own
staffers. Palin and family, the staffers let it be known, were
clinging to their God, guns, and newfound Neiman Marcus items.
"Wasilla hillbillies looting Neiman Marcus from coast to coast."
That is the description Newsweek received from an "angry
aide."
That the staffers had given up by October also explains why the
most potent attack on Obama came not from the campaign but from
pure happenstance outside it: Joe the plumber's accidental
meeting with Obama.
McCain acted like that was the first time he had ever heard
Obama's thoughts on economic redistribution. Had the campaign
exhausted its opposition research budget at Neiman Marcus? To
anyone even remotely paying attention, Obama's understanding of
taxation as tool of economic redistribution was clear long before
Joe the plumber arrived on the scene. Obama had used the word
redistribution repeatedly in his writings and speeches.
McCain's last-minute reliance on the gimmick of Joe the plumber
made it easy for the media to dismiss his charge of "socialism"
against Obama as feeble name-calling. Many months early, the
McCain campaign could have been developing that case, and it
wouldn't have taken much effort: Obama had let slip socialist,
even Marxian, assumptions in his thinking several times, from his
Marxian description of religion as an opiate for the masses to
his bald calls for "confiscating" the profits of oil companies to
his open class warfare.
By the end of the race, the McCain campaign seemed to depend on
the latest Drudge Report links for the few talking points it
could rouse itself to make. Obama's casual comment about
bankrupting the coal industry had been gathering dust for months,
only becoming an issue via Drudge at the last moment.
Even when the campaign occasionally stumbled down a promising
avenue of attack, it would stop and dart down a new cul-de-sac.
Take the ad it ran early on about Obama's work with Planned
Parenthood to spread sex-ed propaganda in elementary schools.
That ad hit its target squarely enough to generate days of
grousing from Joe Biden and, in a rare moment of irritation,
Barack Obama. Obama's surrogates in the press also spent days
frowning over the ad, another measure of its effectiveness. But
where was the follow-up?
The McCain campaign could have rolled out a series of such ads.
Instead, social conservatism was henceforth treated by the McCain
campaign as a no-go area. For example, the day after the
Connecticut Supreme Court imposed gay marriage on the people
there, McCain said nothing about the decision. Not a word as far
as I could tell was even spoken during the campaign about Obama's
de facto support for gay marriage.
Meanwhile, Obama was running ad after ad about his belief in
"parental responsibility," crafting an unchallenged image of
himself as a centrist. Accidentally, Obama ended up doing more to
pass the traditional marriage initiative Proposition 8 in
California than McCain: the high turnout of blacks to vote for
Obama meant they also voted on Proposition 8, which they
supported overwhelmingly.
That McCain lost while traditional marriage amendments across the
country, no thanks to him, won is a fitting final note to the
haplessness of his campaign. The media perked up briefly in
October at the possibility of a rift when Palin strayed from the
McCain script by endorsing the marriage amendments. But that
quickly passed and the campaign staffers got back to topics of
more interest to them, such as, if Newsweek is right,
Palin's jackets and John McCain's inevitable defeat.
