Sarah Palin was important. If McCain didn’t select Palin, he’d have lost by even more. He needed someone to jazz the base, and Palin certainly jazzed the base. All the sniping out of the McCain camp about Palin is short-sighted and it doesn’t help party unity. If anything, it helps fray the cohesiveness that McCain and Palin built over the past few months.
Let’s face it– McCain lost because the media anointed Obama. The LA Times sat on a tape of Obama palling around with some anti-Israelis. The SF Chronicle sat on a tape of Obama saying he wants to destroy the coal industry and make energy prices skyrocket. It’s no wonder Palin thinks the Media needs to be more objective.
McCain lost because McCain & Palin were relentlessly hammered by the media, and Obama & Biden were given a huge pass. And if you hear nothing but negatives about McCain, and nothing but positives about Obama, who the heck is the ordinary person going to vote for?
As much as we in the blogosphere like to say we’re important, we’re still a very small minority. And as much readership as the newspapers are losing, they’re still read by far more than the folks who read Politico.
Maybe.
IMHO, McCain lost because he’s McCain. Note that (R) voters declined this year. No surprise: McCain made it a point to alienate them, and not even Sarah could pull his ass out of the fire.
Sarah helped, but come on– they was nominated by a 20% block that was better organized than the other 20% blocks. Talk about backing into the nomination. But the party rallied around him, but only when they realized just how bad Obama was, and by that point, it was too late.
You state “the party rallied around him” while the exit polls contradict that. In fact, Republican turnout was LESS than prior years.
McCain lost because 1) his platform sucked; 2) he alienated the Conservatives; and 3) he was playing by ‘rules of the Senate’ rather than rules of real-life elections.
Reduced: McCain was McPain, the idiot.
[Doc-- I agree, but the turn out would have been far less had he not had Palin with him. Can you imagine if he had Rudy, Romney or Huckabee as a running mate? It would have been a total landslide. As it was, Palin brought some of the base with him.
We were in trouble when he was nominated. He totally backed into the nomination.]
Yup.