Why McCain Lost

The morning of the third presidential debate, a friend of ours in Landrum, South Carolina, conducted an informal survey of voter sentiment in this rural town in the heart of Dixie. He pulled over at a convenience store-cum-coffee shop, and walked in with a wad of McCain/Palin stickers. “Don’t you bring those things in here,” said the man behind the register. Our friend strolled around among the regulars sipping their coffee, most of them retired, and could find no takers. “Not one, and these were people who voted 100 per cent for Bush in 2004. They’re angry.” Why? After a terrible summer of soaring gas prices and plunging stock portfolios, “a lot of them have lost their retirement funds and health savings.” Our friend said that at local nursing homes – an upscale place near Tryon – some residents are telling staff they can’t afford to stay. He added that all the talk about Obama’s links to terror, to Islam, to bombers has also had the effect of intimidating elderly Republicans from even putting McCain/Palin signs in their yards.

Our friend’s experience in Landrum came amid the inglorious tailspin of the disastrous strategy of trying to sink Obama by hanging former Weatherman Bill Ayers round his neck. When Republican consultants like Mary Matalin and Steve Schmidt first pondered this tactic in the late summer, it must have seemed to them like a no-brainer – a reprise of the way George H.W. Bush finished off Michael Dukakis in 1988. Lee Atwater, Bush’s smear manager, picked up Al Gore’s use of Horton – the black rapist furloughed for a weekend, under a law passed by Gov. Dukakis – and retooled it, throwing in slurs about Dukakis as being some foreign outsider. So, in the final weeks of Campaign 2008, Barack Hussein Obama would be hit with similar accusations (actually, first aired by Hillary Clinton last April) of being an alien radical, with intimate ties to a man who had tried to blow up Congress and the Pentagon.

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