Thread: MSM/McCain camp blames us in part for his defeat

By "us" I mean the majority of Americans who oppose illegal immigration and are not anti-immigrant nor against Latinos or other ethnicities. Anyway, note how are they are interpretting and spinning the results:
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Los Angeles Times
How the election was won -- and lost
John McCain never recovered from his uneven response to the economic collapse. Barack Obama pounced, and he never looked back.
By Bob Drogin and Maeve Reston

November 6, 2008

Reporting from Phoenix and Washington — On Sept. 21, six days after the stunning collapse of Lehman Bros. Holdings Inc., one of Wall Street's largest and oldest investment banks, John McCain devoted a total of three sentences to voters' economic worries in his only campaign event of the day, a speech at a National Guard convention in Baltimore.

Three days later, the Republican presidential nominee pronounced the financial crisis so dire that he needed to suspend his campaign, cancel the first presidential debate and rush back to Washington to help forge a solution to a national emergency.

McCain's dramatic move not only failed, his baffling shifts in tactics and message backfired so badly he lost his lead in national polls and never recovered. Both sides now say Barack Obama essentially clinched his victory in late September.

"Images of the two candidates changed dramatically," said David Axelrod, Obama's chief strategist. "Obama came across as commanding and knowledgeable, cool, calm. McCain seemed a little bit unsettled, moving from pillar to post."

As dispirited Republicans sift through the wreckage of Tuesday's results, many argue that McCain was crippled by public anger at President Bush's failures at home and abroad. McCain echoed the claim in his concession speech when he said he didn't know what else he could have done to win.

But if McCain was dealt a bad hand, experts say, he often played it poorly. In decision after decision, he and his aides created problems for themselves and failed to press the advantages they had.

High among them was McCain's inability to connect with Latino voters.

McCain had hoped Latinos would reward his efforts in Congress to help the nation's estimated 12 million illegal immigrants get on the path to citizenship. But under pressure from his party's right wing, McCain had abandoned his own proposals during the primaries and instead stressed increasing border security.

The result: He won support from less than a third of Latinos who voted, far fewer than President Bush did four years ago. The difference helped doom McCain in Florida, New Mexico, Colorado and Nevada, all states that Bush had won.

Steve Schmidt, one of McCain's top aides, blamed the Republican Party, not the candidate. The GOP "has done all that it can possibly do to antagonize Latino voters in this country," he complained.

He called it "one of the great ironies or tragedies" that McCain "wound up being punished by Hispanic voters furious at a party they view as hostile" by "taking it out on the candidate who was their best friend."

The Palin problem

McCain's choice of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his running mate helped him with social conservatives. But her views and her performance in interviews alienated many of the independent and swing voters he most needed, and she became a drag on the ticket.

Palin's aides blame McCain's staff for constraining her on the stump and exacerbating her problems. They cited a daily struggle between staffers at headquarters and those on the plane, with little cohesion or communication.

"I don't know if you can honestly say things went wrong," said a senior aide to Palin. "I just think they were probably mismanaged."

Exhibit No. 1: the decision to buy $150,000 in clothes and accessories for Palin during the Republican National Convention. Three fashion consultants showed up, the aide said, and "decided, 'Well, we're going to go out and dress you up.' They were with us three times. By the third time, she did not like them. . . . No one liked these women."

McCain's aides, not surprisingly, blame forces outside their control.

Charlie Black, one of McCain's top advisors, argued that McCain's tactical missteps, even on the economy, were "not very important" compared with the brutal political environment that any GOP candidate faced.

"We had an unpopular Republican president, an unpopular war, a financial crisis, and the press was more against us than at any time in my lifetime," he said.

The Bush problem

But Obama made sure that voters linked McCain inextricably to Bush and his policies. From the start, Axelrod said, the election always was "going to be about George W. Bush."

At every stage, Obama's speeches, interviews, mailings and paid advertising reinforced the message that McCain, who had voted for 90% of Bush's policies, essentially represented a third Bush term.

McCain only formulated a strong response in the third presidential debate with Obama, on Oct. 15, when he memorably declared: "I am not George Bush. If you wanted to run against George Bush, you should have run four years ago."

It was too late. Anxious not to antagonize the core Republican base that still backed Bush, McCain had labeled himself an independent "maverick," and rarely mentioned Bush's name on the campaign trail. But he never openly broke with the president.

At the same time, McCain's campaign tried out and discarded a series of contradictory arguments, never settling on a single compelling narrative.

McCain would tout his four terms in the Senate, but insist that he represented change. He would boast of seeking bipartisanship in Congress, then deliver a roaring attack on congressional Democrats.

Obama's aides, in turn, argued that McCain's experience made him appear a creature of Washington. They saw Obama's campaign, in contrast, as sufficient qualification for most voters in and of itself.

"Campaigns are essentially trials," Axelrod said. "They're endurance contests to see who has the stamina and fortitude. If you pass that test, you've gone a long way."

But to prove himself on the world stage, Obama took a weeklong trip to the Middle East, Europe and Afghanistan in July. He met heads of state and spoke to an estimated 200,000 cheering fans in the streets of Berlin. McCain's team pounced, quickly unveiling an ad that mocked Obama as a "celebrity" like Paris Hilton.

It turned the Democrat's strength into a weakness. As gas prices soared, McCain went on the offensive, calling for a resumption of offshore drilling. With Obama on the defensive for the first time, McCain began to creep up in polls, taking the lead in early September.

The biggest problem

Then the bottom fell out.

Early on Sept. 15, as Americans were absorbing news of the Lehman Bros. collapse, McCain told a crowd in Jacksonville, Fla., that the "fundamentals of the economy are strong."

At McCain headquarters in Arlington, Va., an aide interrupted Schmidt in a meeting. Schmidt grabbed the first plane to Florida and, hoping to limit the damage, booked McCain on TV shows, where he tried to reframe his comment as a defense of the American worker.

But the damage was done. McCain compounded his problem by calling for creation of a study group one day and the firing of the Securities and Exchange Commission chief the next, discarding his ideas as quickly as he unveiled them. He appeared unsure and unsteady.

Finally, on Wednesday, Sept. 24, McCain assembled his economic team in New York City. The White House was trying to build support for a $700-billion bailout of financial institutions, and Bush aides were signaling that Republicans would follow McCain's lead.

McCain's aides saw two choices -- stay out of the negotiations and get blamed if the deal collapsed, or return and try put a more palatable package together.

"Either way, we were in a truly terrible position," Schmidt said. Returning to Washington at least offered "control over our destiny."

But McCain's appearance at the White House meeting proved a disaster. Afterward, Bush began appearing on television, day after day, seeking to calm the nation. McCain's poll numbers fell almost as fast as the stock market.

"It was devastating," a senior McCain aide said. "Devastating."

Drogin and Reston are Times staff writers.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld ... 4655.story

The problem was that the RNC thrust McCain at us as the GOP candidate, THAT'S the reason for the loss. McCain was NOT the best GOP candidate, by far.

Oh no, it couldn't be that McCain screwed up by promising Amnesty could it? Oh no, that could not be! lol

The LA Times at it again. McCain's campaign manager is an idiot.

W

Connecting to the Latino vote! Oh brother... A lot of the Hispanic voters are Democratic ballot cattle and their churches and orgs are telling them to vote strait ticket Democrat, despite the abortion issue. Yea, we know. McCain couldn't reach any of the Strait Ticket Democratic Sheepole.

Dixie

The Reign of Lame Falls Mainly on McCain: www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=29385

What would the numbers have been if McCain got the entire number of Latino votes that Bush did, but did NOT get ours. He might have won the 4 states mentioned, but he would have lost the election anyway. I agree with William. McCain's campaign manager is an idiot, and the tepid, un-focused, off-point, meandering McCain campaign proves it. For crying out loud, McCain goes to Ohio, where they are bleeding jobs, and brags about supporting CAFTA. This is political savvy? At least when Obama said he would bankrupt the coal industry, he didn't say it in Pennsylvania and Ohio.

Macshame did not even have the base of his own party behind him could that be the reason he couldnt win ? hmm

This is what really concerns me. Now both parties will vie for the illegal vote. What the republicans do not understand is that the "poor" hispanics, those that are here illegally, or the anchor babies of those, will ALWAYS vote Democratic. The republicans need to realize that just as the Black vote will always be democratic so will the hispanic vote. It is true that many hispanics, those who were born here are conservative and many are republicans. I think these "campaign" people do not understand,have not lived among these people and are naive if they think they will get hispanic votes. The big irony is they LET THEM IN!!!!Instead of protecting our borders they opened them to the Democratic Party. Amazing. Truly remarkable and I fear for our future.

Here is a related story. Note part where it looks like Jeb Bush (wrongly)appears to be equating principled opposition to amnesty and illegal immigration as somehow being "anti-Hispanic." Expect to see more of this.

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Politico
GOP in dire straits
By JONATHAN MARTIN | 11/6/08 4:29 AM EST

Thumped convincingly in consecutive election cycles, the Republican Party now finds itself in its worst straits since the rise of the conservative coalition — a minority party without the White House, fewer seats in the House and Senate, only 21 governors and full control of just 14 state legislatures.

Most ominous for Republicans, the GOP is increasingly becoming less grand than old — and outdated. As reflected in Tuesday’s results and exit polls, it’s a party that is overwhelmingly white, rural and aged in a country that is rapidly becoming racially mixed, suburban and dominated by a post-Baby Boomer generation with no memory of Vietnam or the familiar culture wars of the past.

Beyond demography, the party is now, thanks to the outgoing president and some members of Congress, perceived by many voters as either incompetent, corrupt or just not standing for much.

Even on fiscal issues — for decades central to the GOP’s appeal — Republicans now lag.

In an election focused on the economy like none since 1992, Democrats had the advantage on which party would best address the current financial crisis, limit spending, reduce the deficit and cut taxes for middle-class voters, according to a pre-election survey taken across four battleground states — Virginia, Florida, Ohio and Colorado — by the American Issues Project, a conservative third-party group. Not coincidentally, each of those states — red in 2004 — flipped to the Democrats on Tuesday.

Intermingled with the cries of anguish in GOP circles this week — as well as a few choice words aimed at the McCain campaign — there is a common mantra: What do we do now? Interviews with some of the leading figures in the party, many of them representing GOP hopes for a future restoration, answer that question with a consensus that Republicans need not undergo major ideological shifts. Instead, these governors, former governors and members of Congress say the party must re-embrace its small government roots while striving to embrace the reform mantle and become relevant to the day-to-day concerns of average Americans.

All concede that the party’s once pristine brand name has been tarnished during the Bush era.

“I don’t think we’ve done a good job in the last two cycles of defining what Republicans are,â€

They had information on Obama's comments about bankrupting the coal industry for weeks and they didn't use it until the last 3 days before the election. What he thought the coal miners in Ohio, PA, VA, W.VA, Missouri, and in other states were watching TV at work?

It wasn't the Latino vote at all. Let's face it, it 80% of the population, Democrat, Republican, Independent does not want amnesty then that wasn't the downfall at all. It was in inept campaign that didn't know how to utilize the internet, didn't know how to connect with those who's jobs were in jeopardy, and didn't know how to translate that to the youth vote.

Not to mention using public funds.