Why is it that John McCain picked Sarah Palin?\u00a0 The answer lies in how George W. Bush won the presidency.\u00a0 President Bush jumped on a wave of conservative ire aimed at the Democratic Party and President Clinton on the heels of the Monica Lewinsky scandal.\u00a0 By driving a convincing message that he would realize the conservative agenda, Bush energized the huge electoral machine of right wing moralists.\u00a0 This shifted the field to the right, and required VP Gore to play a more moderate game than he would have otherwise played, and it just did not ring true to anyone.\u00a0 Bush didn’t really play to the moderates, except to be some sort of compassionate conservative.<\/p>\n
McCain argues that he is a moderate, and so he should have played to them.\u00a0 Instead, he tried to play President Bush’s game of driving to the right after the primary was won.\u00a0 The New York Times recently had an article that compares the campaigns to the faux campaigns found in the last two seasons of West Wing.\u00a0 In that series, at one point it is argued that the Republican candidate (Vinick) could wiin ALL fifty states by expanding the moderate base of his party.\u00a0 This is what McCain could have tried to do, but it is not what he did.\u00a0 Instead, he attempted to play to both bases, and he argued neither convincingly.\u00a0 By bringing in Sarah Palin he alienated the center.\u00a0 And it wasn’t enough to sooth the right.<\/p>\n
There was no way that George Bush’s strategy would work for John McCain.\u00a0 McCain is also the victim of bad timing, with regard to the economy, an issue about which the public as blamed the Republicans nearly exclusively.\u00a0 Barack Obama, merely has to mention the economy and McCain’s ratings drop.\u00a0 That is vaguely reminiscient of President Clinton’s old slogan, “It’s the economy, stupid.”\u00a0 Were it only the economy, perhaps McCain could have survived.\u00a0 However, the War on Terror also looms like an albatross around the neck of Republicans.\u00a0 People are sick of it.\u00a0 Finally.<\/p>\n
And so, before Democrats start to crow too loudly, one should point out that neither of these two problems, the economy or our current geopolitical environment, are simple problems, and both will require serious consideration and absense of hubris to repair.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Why is it that John McCain picked Sarah Palin?\u00a0 The answer lies in how George W. Bush won the presidency.\u00a0 President Bush jumped on a wave of conservative ire aimed at the Democratic Party and President Clinton on the heels of the Monica Lewinsky scandal.\u00a0 By driving a convincing message that he would realize the … Continue reading “Electoral Differences between McCain and Bush”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[198,200,131,130,493,199],"class_list":["post-479","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bush","tag-clinton","tag-mccain","tag-obama","tag-politics","tag-right-wing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=479"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/479\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":480,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/479\/revisions\/480"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ofcourseimright.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}