Robert Stacey McCain examines the body in his most recent American Spectator column:
John McCain lost the election Sept. 24 and Barack Obama will be the next president of the United States. Nothing that is likely to happen between now and Nov. 4 can change this outcome.
Since Sept. 24, polls have increasingly pointed toward a Democratic landslide. Obama not only has an outside-the-margin advantage in nearly every national poll, but leads strongly in enough battleground states that if the election were held today, the Electoral College vote would be 353 for the Democrat, 185 for the Republican. Even Karl Rove’s electoral map now shows Obama winning,
Two weeks ago, after polls first began showing a trend toward Obama, I warned against a Republican panic. The candidates had not yet met in their first debate and it was possible that a strong performance by McCain might shift the momentum back toward the GOP candidate.
On Sept. 24, however, the McCain campaign suddenly freaked out. The Arizona senator announced that he was suspending his campaign activity, seeking a postponement of the Sept. 26 debate, and flying off to Washington to push for the Wall Street bailout bill.
(…)
It was McCain’s outspoken support for the unpopular bailout — a big-government intervention incompatible with conservative economic philosophy — that handed the election to Obama. The bailout failed as politics and, as evidenced by Monday’s selloff on Wall Street, it also failed as policy.
Democrats are already rushing to promote Obama’s coming victory as a mandate for their “progressive” agenda. Conservatives need to begin telling the true story of McCain’s defeat, which must be admitted before it can be explained.
Would things have been different if John McCain had stood up with the House Republicans and come out against the bailout ?
Perhaps. I can certainly tell you how the Obama campaign and the media would have spun it. McCain would have been portrayed as an irresponsible demagogue willing to put his political fortunes ahead of the good of the country. If the stock market had crashed, he would have been blamed for it. And the Bush Administration would have been actively campaigning against him.
Where would the public mind have gone at that point ? Support for bailout might actually have turned around, and John McCain might have been branded as a new Herbert Hoover.
McCain was wrong to rally behind the bailout, but the problems with his campaign were and are far more severe than just his stand on that one issue.
