Frum on McCain
David Frum explains why Sarkozy won, and how the failure of Republicans to reckon with the failures of the Bush years and a Kerry-like focus on biography undermined the McCain campaign.
It’s been evident for a long time, for example, that the average American worker did not benefit much from the Bush economy. Real wages stagnated between 2000 and 2006, while prices of essentials, such as food and fuel, rose. But the Republican party and the conservative movement asserted against the facts that everything was fine — that the Bush economy was the “greatest story never told” and that those who thought otherwise were “whiners.”
Had McCain attempted a more innovative and responsive economic policy, he would never have won the Republican nomination. By the time he got the nomination, he had so firmly locked himself to the Bush economic legacy that he had no space to pull off a Sarkozy. In the same way, had McCain chosen the running mate he wanted, he would have faced a walk-out from the floor of the St. Paul convention center.
Over-attached to old policies, Republicans could not develop an interesting new platform for McCain.
You said it, sir.
Too bad McCain is, you know, an actual Republican. Not one of those fancy Democrats with all their policies the electorate’s taken a shine toward.
— talboito · Nov 3, 07:52 AM · #
McCain undermined his own campaign, Reihan.
This is probably outside your experience, but here is a deeply american folk aphorism that has passed into our culture— here’s one version of a 1888 poem called “Casey at the Bat.”
from memory…..so old i don’t remember where I heard it…. ;)
“when the Almighty writes your name in His book
In that eternal Hall of Fame
It matters not if you won or lost
but how you played the game.”
This is an old deeply embedded meme handed down from a description of the first Olympians, i think.
In 1927 sportswriter Grantland Rice wrote “For when the Great Scorer comes to write against your name, He marks not if you won or lost, but how you played the game.”
This embedded American concept of sportsmanship and fair play has simply turned a lot of the electorate off to McCain, and that is why the dirty Rovian tricks aren’t working.
— matoko_chan · Nov 3, 03:44 PM · #
Reihan, I liked GNP as much as the next guy, but do you think that a lack of creative domestic policy proposals is what doomed McCain? I agree they might have mitigated the damage, but even then the type of targeted tax cuts proposed in GNP lack the blunt simplicity of ’95% of you are getting tax cuts’.
Maybe Yglesias over-emphasizes the impact of fundamentals, but it is a pretty persuasive argument from my vantage point. All Obama had to do was not screw up; the financial crisis and the argument that McCain = GWB delivered the election. It seemed to me that the Biden pick was a terrible mistake by Obama, but the political climate (and the media) were so favorable that his mistakes didn’t even register. Obama was up 4-8 points from mid-June through mid-August, and he’s up by about the same margin now. Was it really a failure to make certain policy arguments that doomed McCain? I believe it might have helped for him to have a coherent strategy, or to be able to talk about something other than foreign policy or earmarks coherently, but I am unconvinced it would have significantly altered the outcome.
— fus01 · Nov 3, 08:43 PM · #
and……thank you for returning to election blogging, Reihan.
I agree with cw that you are probably unsuited for it.
;)
But it was getting pretty dark around here for the rest of us.
— matoko_chan · Nov 4, 06:04 PM · #