Some thoughts on the failure of John McCain

I knew it! Just as surely as water is wet I will be disappointed at the presidential campaigns in the last weeks before the general election. However, I'm more disappointed at McCain than I expected to be. It feels like things went downhill from the Palin nomination and took a turn for the worse in his response to the financial crisis. My impression of McCain from the 2000 primaries and onwards is that he would be a republican for thinking voters that wasn't stuck in an unholy alliance with the christian right. Someone that with experience that had taken fights with lobbyists, earmarks and someone that had not always chosen the path of least resistance. To me that image was reinforced in the republican primary this spring, when he won against Mitt "Double Guantanamo" Romney and Mike "amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards" Huckabee I interpreted that as a mandate to run a campaign not on fear of terrorist attacks or the promise of a christianist theocracy.

And yet we are here. McCain choose a running mate in Sarah Palin that is just too much. She refuse to have any press conferences, she obviously has a problem with abusing power as has been shown in the state trooper firing investigation and the little we know about her policy stances she is as far out on the right wing side as any of the people that actually lost the republican primary. McCain apparently chose Palin without any serious research. That's a bit scary.

What is more scary, I think is that he managed to look everything but presidential when the recent economical crisis showed it's ugly face. He claimed to suspend his campaign (which he didn't) to get the republicans in congress to support the bail-out bill (which he failed at) only to go on with some really bad suggestions on how to solve the crisis. He managed to miss completely to point out that he had opposed the political decisions that started the suprime mortgage lending which is arguably the biggest single reason we're in this mess. From what I've heard Obama's positions on government mandates telling Fannie and Freddie to lend to people with poor credit ratings is not something to be proud of.

When things began to look bad in the polls, McCain did what may has done before. He went 100% negative in his ad buying, using all of his TV ad budget to attack Obama, and he didn't do it very well at that. I think that most people see through trying to the attempts to tie Obama to the 70s terrorist Ayers. Even if it works it distracts McCain from getting out his main message. He can not not expect to win only because Obama seems scary, he needs to get his own message out as well.

So now almost everything points towards Obama as the next president. Let's just hope that he isn't against free trade as he pretends to be in his campaign. If he is, then this recession might very well turn into an ugly depression.

For a more insightful text on the failure of the McCain campaign in the longer perspective, I must recommend Ezra Klein's excellent article McCain's Anger problem.

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