Robert Stacey McCain makes the case for the fundamental mistakes that put the McCain for President campaign in the position it is today:
What went wrong, then? I’ve explained this several times, but now — as the campaign nears its end — I want to reiterate the narrative once more:
- On Sept. 16, John McCain said the cause of the financial crisis was “reckless conduct, corruption, and unbridled greed . . . on Wall Street.”
- On Sept. 18, John McCain said the cause of the financial crisis was SEC Chairman Chris Cox.
- On Sept. 21, John McCain said he would replace Cox with Andrew Cuomo.
- On Sept. 24, John McCain suspended his campaign, called for postponing the first presidential debate, and said he would go to Washington to push for the the bailout bill.
- On Oct. 2, the McCain campaign announced it was pulling out of Michigan.
- On Oct. 7, John McCain proposed a $300 billion plan to buy up bad mortgages.
From a 1-point Gallup lead on Sept. 16, McCain went to a 10-point deficit by Oct. 10 — a period of time that covered all three Obama-McCain debates. And it was during that same time period that McCain repeatedly endorsed a big-government approach to the financial crisis.
Might the McCain campaign have done better if John McCain had come out against the bailout and against a big-government solution to the financial crisis ? Perhaps, but then, it wouldn’t have been the John McCain for President campaign.
Let me explain that.
There was absolutely nothing surprising about John McCain’s reaction to the financial crisis, because it was completely consistent with what we’ve been hearing from Senator McCain for years now. He’s never been a champion of the free market, he’s consistently sided with government bureaucracy and with the basic idea that government even needs to step in to situations like this — a position he reiterated in his interview on Meet the Press last Sunday. For John McCain to come out against the bailout and suddenly become a champion of the type of libertarian populism and advocate of the morality of markets that R.S. McCain talks about would have been entirely inconsistent with his entire career in Washington.
And the Republican Party knew this when they nominated him. John McCain responded to the financial crisis the only way he knew how, and if that’s what led to his defeat then it basically means he was never meant to be President.
November 13th, 2008 at 12:26 pm
[...] After the general election loss by McCain, many political analysts ask “What went wrong and why?” [...]