Ten Reasons the GOP Lost by Jon Gingerich

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I invited Jon Gingerich to take a swing at a postmortem of the election for our humble blog.  The result should be must reading for the GOP faithful.

Cheers,

Tom

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So, it’s been a week. We’ve had plenty of time to let this sink in, to let the euphoria settle, to mull over this historical election and to pontificate its wins and defeats. In the cyber-tradition of warming the proverbial armchair with lists, here’s my top reasons John McCain lost his bid for the White House.

1. Sarah Palin. Let’s go ahead and get this one out of the way. McCain nabbed Palin for her ability to appeal to evangelicals while mopping up female support in the wake of Clinton’s implosion. Neither worked. Evangelicals get excited when candidates talk about babies; they aren’t particularly concerned in advancing anyone’s political career unless their fundamentalist platforms have been addressed. And female candidates, as the campaign soon discovered, aren’t interchangeable. Clinton supporters who later switched parties were almost unheard of (not that there isn’t anything unappealing about a woman who, as Mayor of Wasilla, forced rape victims to pay for their own medical kits). Huckabee, Romney, turncoat Lieberman, or any number of candidates with far more experience would have been better suited for the VP title. Contrary to reports from the conservative press, the media was never out to get Palin. In fact, a frenzy of feature stories in the two weeks prior to her addition to the ticket gave the campaign its first and only substantive boost in the polls. Fact: when you debut a running mate who shoots at wolves from helicopters and acts like a character from a John Waters film, you can’t expect the media not to pay attention. The pooch got screwed the moment McCain brought her on board.

2. Voter registration drives. Barack Obama is the first democrat since Carter to win more than 50 percent of the popular vote. One of the reasons: Obama’s campaign placed a huge emphasis on tapping into the country’s eligible, non-registered pool of voters. Historical voter registration drives in strategic battleground areas were successful in turning ‘soft support’ into actual votes. With about 127 million ballots this year, the 2008 election set a record for the number of votes cast, breaking 2004’s record by more than 4.3 million votes. McCain, by contrast, did little to seek out untapped potential support.

3. Negative campaigning. McCain could’ve learned a great deal from the mistakes of former Hillary Clinton chief strategist Mark Penn. People don’t like ‘attack brands,’ especially when the attack is directed at someone whom research polls reflect resounding public approval. McCain had numerous opportunities to change this tone by campaign season’s end but instead he delved further into the negative, and the result cost him his credibility. In an attempt to persuade the American public that Obama “pals” around with terrorists, McCain’s campaign exploited racism for political gain, knowing the average American would associate words like ‘terrorist’ with ‘Muslim.’ Willy Horton attacks don’t work anymore, especially after the Bush administration exploited Americans’ ignorance of Iraqi culture when claiming it was tied to Islamic fundamentalist movements in Afghanistan. You know what they say about people you can fool twice …

3. Shoddy campaign management. McCain had a default advantage in battleground states like Colorado, Indiana, Ohio, Missouri and North Carolina, five traditionally Republican strongholds that went to Bush in 2004. He ended up losing all of them. Bad market research and spotty appearances on the campaign trail contributed to much of this. Obama hit more key markets with more frequency, a habit that continued until the day before the election. Obama’s wins in Colorado and Nevada have been credited to aggressive last-minute campaigning, and although McCain knew he needed Virginia’s delegates to win, his rallying efforts in the state were minimal comparable to Obama’s, who hosted five major Virginia rallies in October alone (McCain only had one that month) and who continued hammering away at the state until the weekend before the election, while McCain was in New York filming an episode of Saturday Night Live.

5. Unclear brand messages. McCain would’ve done well to combat Obama’s ‘change’ platform with a platform of ‘experience.’ Instead, he relied on cheap attacks and unpopular political positions (indefinite detainment of troops in Iraq, in particular) without defining a clear message that contrasted his brand from the notably superior brand message of his opponent’s. His late-game attempts at Reagan-era populism with the introduction of ‘Joe the Plumber’ was a good (albeit cheesy) attempt for drumming up working class fervor, but ultimately it was too little, too late.

6. Lack of party support. To give him credit, McCain has never pandered to Republican tropes. When he first came onto the presidential scene in 2000, he was viewed within the party as a Ron Paul-type radical for his independent voting record in the Senate. Unfortunately, this came back to bite him in the ass. A lot of his old enemies in the GOP never forgave him, and McCain was never able to gain the support of the coveted Evangelical community like Bush did in 2004. This speaks of a larger trend too: the 2008 election signals a Republican Party more culturally fractured then it has been since 1976.

7. The economy. It’d be unfair to blame our current economic clusterfuck solely on McCain – and we have to remember both Obama and McCain signed on to support Bush’s $700 billion bailout package for Wall Street crooks – but this one has ‘guilt by association’ written all over it. Not that it’s completely unfounded: his previous record of voting tax cuts for the rich didn’t help.

8. George Bush. Speaking of guilt by association, this is the single worst ‘endorsement’ McCain could have asked for. McCain himself admitted throughout the election he was playing the role of the underdog, and it’s somewhat of a backhanded blessing that Bush never hit the campaign trail after endorsing him. Even though Bush and McCain have never been on ‘friendly’ terms, as a member of the Republican Party, McCain had 8 years of administrative mistakes on his shoulders the day he decided to run for President.

9. Party Infighting. Now that the election is over we’re hearing more about it than ever, though most of us got a whiff of mutiny from within the campaign months ago. News of Palin’s penchant to go off-point during rallies and interviews were legendary, and by the end, stories of Palin “going rogue” were making national headlines. We now know that many of McCain’s aids really, really hated her. A lot of verbal snafus also came out of the campaign in the final days, and it didn’t help that McCain’s brother called northern Virginia “communist country” and McCain adviser Nancy Pfotenhauer said the area wasn’t a “real” part of the state – while they were vying for that battleground state’s votes.

10. Selling the wrong product at the wrong time. One of Al Gore’s biggest mistakes in the 2000 Presidential race was his ineffectually populist cries during a time when mass unemployment wasn’t an issue. Similarly, making fight-to-the-death pleas to a war-beaten nation is just as bad as pooh-poohing taxation for a sector of the population that is now standing in line for corporate welfare. Here’s the reality: Our economy sucks, people are tired of Iraq, and jobs are scarce. Realistic solutions for these problems should have been broached by McCain’s campaign first and foremost. Ice-cream never sells well in January.

Jon Gingerich is author of the blog The Owners Manual, at www.theownersmanual.org

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