Ultimately, the Republican standard-bearer chose sensitivity over the presidency
http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4337
http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=5946
By Don Feder
…Now that the http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=5958 has happened, the blame game begins.
Some will fault the leftist media, which lost any sense of balance and objectivity and practically panted over the Kenyan-American.
Others will point to the huge disparity in fundraising. Obama outspent McCain by nearly three to one. Still, if it was only about money, John Forbes Kerry – who’s married to Ft. Knox – would have won the 2004 campaign. As a friend put it, “McCain failed to raise the money to project the message he didn’t have.”
There are those who will attribute McCain’s defeat to the unpopularity of outgoing President George W. Bush, or the financial meltdown for which Republicans unfairly took the fall, or the fact that only once in the post-war era has a two-term president been succeeded by a member of his party.
It also didn’t help that McCain resembled Methuselah’s grandfather, as presented by Madame Tussauds. We live in an age of image where how you look matters more than what you believe or what you’ve done.
But, in the final analysis, Republicans lost because they nominated their weakest candidate. And McCain lost because he’s McCain.Unquestionably, media bias was worse this year than in any election in memory. But that handicap could have been overcome, had McCain run a real race.
Like Bush Sr. in 1992, McCain was the victim of hubris.
…McCain did a poor impression of a conservative.
…In October, he offered socialism lite to rescue improvident borrowers and feckless lenders, proposing that $300 billion of the $700 billion bailout be used to buy the loans of people who took out mortgages they couldn’t pay, which would then be written down to affordable levels. The full impact of any losses would be borne by the Treasury (read, the taxpayers).
…There were issues McCain couldn’t use and issues McCain wouldn’t use.
Immigration – Americans overwhelming favor a crackdown on illegal immigrants — the carriers of poverty, crime and social fragmentation.
The Democrats are the party of porous borders. Barack Obama did signaled his support for alien lawbreakers.
Republicans could have appealed to middle-class rage over the failure to control our borders – if anyone but Senor Amnesty was the nominee. Along with his buddy, Ted Kennedy, in 2007, McCain was the co-sponsor of a bill to “regularize the status” of roughly 12 million “undocumented workers.” Talk about throwing away a winning issue.
Marriage – Here, McCain’s record was mixed. He voted against the Federal Marriage Amendment each time it came before the Senate, but said he supported state marriage initiatives.
But it was one of many social issues that McCain resolutely refused to discuss on the campaign trail – notwithstanding that his opponent promised to repeal the Federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which says states don’t have to recognize same-sex unions contracted elsewhere.
On Tuesday, state defense of marriage amendments passed in California by 52% to 48%, in Arizona by 57% to 44%, and in Florida –one of McCain’s big electoral losses – by a landslide vote of 62% to 38%.
…Alan Sears of Alliance Defense Fund notes that in California, there were 1.5 million more votes for marriage than McCain. Florida’s amendment got 779,000 more votes than the Republican ticket. And in McCain’s home state, the vote for marriage exceeded his total by 25,000. If McCain had increased his Florida vote by roughly 98,000 – in other words, if he’d picked up 12% of the pro-marriage votes he didn’t get — he would have won the state’s 27 electoral votes.
Think highlighting Obama’s stealth campaign for gay marriage might have helped McCain? McCain didn’t.
Rev. Jeremiah A Wright — The October 27 issue of Newsweek explained McCain’s refusal to discuss Obama’s racist, Marxist pastor: “Many senior advisors, as well as McCain’s running mate, Sarah Palin, believe the campaign should remind voters of Obama’s ties to Wright, whose inflammatory sermons emerged as a problem for the Democratic nominee during the primary. ‘If we were to go with an ad during the final weeks of this campaign showing excerpts of (Wright’s) sermons, we would probably win,’ says one senior McCain aide who declined to be named discussing internal debates on tactics. ‘But we won’t.’”
Imagine the following ad:
Announcer: “Listen to the man who was Barack Obama’s pastor for 19 years — the man whose advice Obama said he valued.”
Cut to clips of Wright: “God d*** America.” “We (the U.S. of K.K.K.) started the AIDS virus.” “Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run.” “White folks’ greed runs a world in need.” “The United States cannot do terrorism on other people and expect it never to come back on you.” “America is still the No. 1 killer in the world.”
Announcer: “For 19 years, Obama sat in Wright’s church and listened to this. He and his wife gave the church $26,000 in one year. How can we trust the judgment of a man who associated with an anti-American demagogue for almost two decades? Can we expect courage from a man who was afraid to confront the ravings of his own pastor, until he was forced to do so as a candidate?”
Obama’s association with Wright spoke volumes about the type of president he would make. It could have raised serious doubts in the minds of many about the Democrat’s competence to lead the nation.
But McCain wouldn’t touch the issue, for fear of being called racially insensitivity. Ultimately, the Republican standard-bearer chose sensitivity over the presidency.
http://www.donfeder.com/articles/0811%20whyNoJM.htm