The half hearted McCain and Romney campaigns paved the way for Trump. Trump is a fighter who was not going to leave anything on the table, and who was running to win and not to be liked.
Down Memory Lane
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
McCain, especially, was there to take a dive, ensuring History(TM) would be made.
You can’t convince me that someone didn’t get to Romney after the first debate in 2012 and put him into Washington Generals mode.
The Legacy Media picked both of those candidates. And as soon as they were nominated, they got Savaged like every Republican or Conservative candidate. They always do. I voted for both of them because I didn’t have any other choice but it was beyond holding my nose. The American aristocracy as embodied in people like both of them is why Trump was elected. Trump told the Legacy Media to go hang themselves. And they did. And now they’re surprised that no one listens to them. I stopped listening back in the late seventies. Unfortunately, a large segment of the American populace still listens to them. If I had to pick one thing that was the biggest problem in this country and why we are where we are now, it would be them.
It has usually been the case during the post-war period that two-term presidents were succeeded by a member of the opposite party. This happened in 1960, 2000, 2008, and 2016. The exception was 1988. Economic conditions in 1960, 1988, 2000, and 2016 were better than they were in 1988. The smart money would have been on the proposition that any Republican would lose. Adding to the headwind was the ongoing grind of the Iraq War, which hand no analogue in any of these other contests. Then right in the middle of the campaign the financial sector went into crisis when eight major institutions were revealed to be insolvent and a scrum of others were vulnerable to panic generated by that. The bipartisan grifter caucus had thwarted efforts by the administration (and McCain himself) to improve accounting practices at the mortgage maws, but no matter. The public did not blame the responsible parties (a number of whom were part of the Democratic Party insider nexus) but blamed the Administration and the Republicans. It would have been most extraordinary if McCain had defeated BO.
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Robert Stacy McCain began making the case in short order the John McCain had hired grifters to run his campaign, namely Steven Schmidt and Nicolle Wallace. Their conduct in the intervening years has sustained his thesis. Supposedly, Gov. Palin distrusted Wallace and wanted to minimize any interaction with her. The longer John McCain was in office, the more unworthy he seemed. His wife appears to have had a catty hostility to Gov. Palin and gave vent to that after he died.
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Romney has a great deal of organizational talent and energy. He’s also an unpretentious man. However, there are what are meant to be friendly accounts of him in the media which also reveal him to be remarkably silo’d and clueless. A curious mix of virtues and shortcomings.
IIRC, McCain was initially helped in the polls after he picked Palin. I came to know McCain in the 90s as the press’s favorite ‘See, even a Republican admits the GOP stinks’ goto interview. Which could be why support for him in 2008 was so tepid. I’ve never quite understood how he got the nomination. Palin did herself no favors, unfortunately, in the ensuing months. Sometimes it was hard not to shake your head as she refused to learn how not to live up to the personal attacks. But the one thing that shook me from that time was how, in the first days after her nomination that clearly caught the MSM off guard, you had leftwing activists attacking her for running for office when she had a special needs kid at home. You know, because a woman staying home where she belongs to take care of the kids was such a staple of progressive feminism in those days. And earlier indicator of what we would see more of in the next decade or so.
Economic conditions in 1960, 1988, 2000, and 2016 were better than they were in 1988.
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Correction: better than they were in 2008.
Palin did herself no favors, unfortunately, in the ensuing months. Sometimes it was hard not to shake your head as she refused to learn how not to live up to the personal attacks.
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This is a nonsense statement.
McCain’s actual home was in the Navy until age 44, official Washington thereafter. Arizona was a convenience constituency. Not sure why Arizona accepted him, other than an abnormally high share of its residents are people from somewhere else.
I think the major media exist nowadays to reinforce the biases of the Democratic base. They also have a disproportionately geriatric audience. Essentially, they’re bucking up retired NEA members. I doubt they’re all that decisive.
Candidates usually get a boost from the convention. Gov. Palin was appealing, but, like any VP candidate, it’s a reasonable wager she did not make much difference.
This is a nonsense statement.
What’s so nonsense about it?
Glad for this post, Don. I sometimes wondered if I was the only one who liked (and believed in) Palin more than McCain.
The man generated zero excitement in me, like other GOP go along to get along types, but since I want going to vote socialist…
“Romney has a great deal of organizational talent and energy. He’s also an unpretentious man.”
Mr. “Pierre Delecto” (Delightful Peter) himself.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-50122183
He is not a good guy. He is a big government / control man. He was the replacement thorn / knife-in-back once John (Judas) McCain went to his final reward.
https://www.deseret.com/utah/2019/10/16/20918103/conservative-group-calls-mitt-romney-a-democrat-secret-asset-in-tv-ad/
He also voted to impeach Trump on bogus, false charges.
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I also voted for Sarah Palin and not McCain. I respected his service and his time as a POW. But not his morality. He and Cindy were dating behind his first wife’s back. The senior wives of his squadronmates couldn’t stand Cindy. My husband and I are USN veterans, conservatives and vote GOP. We had a family member, a staffer on Senate GOP committee who thought McCain was too much of a maverick and hot head. After the election that McCain lost it was his vote that enabled OBama Care to become law. McCain who hated Trump also went to China and paid $7,000 for a copy of the Russian Hoax. That trip was not widely publicized.
As a governor Sarah Palin accomplished much for Alaskan citizens. She was and is plenty smart, She doesn’t mince words when she speaks. A conservative with Christian values, a mom, and at that time happily married. I saw her twice at McCain/Palin campaign rallies. It was apparent that McCain had lost his fire.
Palin was young. Cindy McCain was middle-aged. As women my friends and I could tell that Cindy was jealous of Sarah’s youth and popularity. She started wearing designer clothes with mini skirts, more make-up and long Barbie hair.
Sarah was always appropriately dressed. As the campaign headed south because of McCain’s mistakes and inept advisors as noted in other comments the insiders started attacking Palin. The drive by media viciously attacked her and her children.
It is still going on.
The Democrats were terrified of Palin after her 2008 acceptance speech. They sought to destroy her, just as they sought to destroy Nixon, Reagan and Trump. There were countless ethics charges brought against her in Alaska. She had to defend herself out of her own pocket. It is worth mentioning that Palin defeated the Murkowski machine in Alaska as well.
Saturday Night Live and David Letterman were relentless in attacking her.
Trump stood up to all of them…the DNC, Pelosi, Biden’s Justice Department, the dossier hoax, Jack Smith, Fanni Willis, Letitia James, the joke that is the New York State legal system.
In the end, Trump rubbed their noses in it.
I came to know McCain in the 90s as the press’s favorite ‘See, even a Republican admits the GOP stinks’ goto interview. Which could be why support for him in 2008 was so tepid. I’ve never quite understood how he got the nomination.
As I recall, he backed into it by default. He started the ’08 season as the frontrunner, but his support of W’s attempted amnesty backfired, and he quickly sank in the polls.
That would have been the end for him…except that every single one of his fellow Republican candidates–Giuliani, Thompson, Huckabee, Brownback, Romney, all of them–flopped. They all tried to seize the opening he’d left, but for various reasons, each of them imploded.
In the end, simply by doing nothing, McCain was the last one left standing.
As a governor Sarah Palin accomplished much for Alaskan citizens. She was and is plenty smart, She doesn’t mince words when she speaks.
Palin was certainly the target of multiple attacks, and some from her own side of the aisle. That was when the press was trying to build the ‘GOP = Stupid’ narrative, and the ‘pop quiz interviews’ were becoming a thing. Couric’s question about what Palin reads being a famous example. The problem is, Art’s observation notwithstanding, I always felt Palin was smart, but she seemed to drift into living up to the stereotypes by how she conducted herself. For instance, my wife and I watched her interview with Bill O’Reilly after she was tapped to be on Fox News way back in the day. He threw her every life line he could so she could debunk the charge of being shallow and only capable of repeating her endless catchphrase about being a ‘Mamma Grizzley’. Instead, that’s pretty much what she kept doing through the interview, giving 101 variations on “I’m just a Mamma Grizzley.’ I remember that we could see O’Reilly’s frustration. And that’s one example I recall. Again, not that she wasn’t unfairly attacked from multiple sides, but I stand by the observation that some of her problems were ultimately self-inflicted.
I was a Palin fan, but in retrospect she was not ready for a national race. I don’t think she was very well read, but that is true for most politicians. (As Buckley noted about Adlai Stevenson, “Mr. Stevenson keeps threatening to read a book.”) What she did understand was that in order to be competitive the GOP needed to morph into a populist party. In that, she was Trump before Trump. It is instructive how campaign thieves like Nicole Wallace, Steve Schmidt, et al, despised her. They sensed that if the Republican party went in a populist direction, they would no longer be living on the fat of party donations.
What she did understand was that in order to be competitive the GOP needed to morph into a populist party. In that, she was Trump before Trump.
That’s a good point. But she lacked Trump’s ability to take the lemons his opponents hurl at him and throw them back by the bushel. I think Trump is the only one to use the ‘I’ll be a thousand times more than you accuse me of’ tactic and come out winning. The press still doesn’t know how to handle him. I have always felt, however, that a big problem with the GOP is that it is what the Democrats claim to be but aren’t – a mixed-up party with a variety viewpoints and agendas and beliefs, rather than the party that demands conformity in the name of diversity.
Though I began voting when first eligible, I’d say the ’08 election was the first I had the age, opportunity, and “political savvy” to genuinely assess the nation. I recall the first(?) Republican debate for President in ’08, and having serious misgivings. Though Thompson et al had decent ideas, the debate struck me as a Senate floor debate, nobody seriously contending for the Presidency. Accordingly, McCain/Palin and Romney/Ryan tickets both suffered… lack of guts. In general, from Presidential candidate on down, Republicans have too often fussed incessantly over polls and not on leadership. They too often allow Democrats and media to set the narrative. ..Thus they get pounded at the polls. Democrats see the “weakness” and pounce. If I wasn’t ecstatic about Trump during the primaries in ’16, he at least had the fire I hadn’t seen in others.
I think I voted for that in ’16 in the general election as much as for anything else.
I do hope some Republicans will adopt a little more of Trump’s attack-dog style. They’ll need every bite of it.
The sales pitch for McCain was that most Republicans might not be thrilled with him, but he was the “most likely to win” so shut up and vote for him.
In retrospect it is very suspicious that the GOP establishment didn’t do damage control for Palin, if the goal was really to get the most “generally electable” candidates.
But it was a sham anyway, as shown by people who made that sales pitch ended up becoming Never Trumpers, even after he won the nomination and in many cases even after he won.
I don’t recall any particular sales pitches for McCain. AFAICT, about 1/3 of the GOP electorate during the years running from 1976 to 2012 had the same candidate every year, ‘the-guy-whose-turn-it-is’. That amounted to (1) the incumbent President, (2) the runner up in the last competitive contest, and (3) the son of the most recent incumbent. The one exception was Pat Buchanan, who was displaced by the runner up in the penultimate competitive contest. The people who fancy ‘the-guy-whose-turn-it-is’ resist someone with astringent convictions.
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McCain was ‘the-guy-whose-turn-it-is’. No one else ‘flopped’ any more than other candidates generally did in the face of ‘the-guy-whose-turn-it-is’. In 2016, the closest thing to ‘the-guy-whose-turn-it-is’ was Jeb Bush, who took his large pile of donor money and set fire to it. Not only did he lose to Trump, he lost to Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, John Kasich, and Ben Carson. That’s an actual flop. What the Capitol Hill / K Street nexus learned in 2016 was that they were rejected by 3/4 of the GOP electorate. About 70% of the voter ballots went to two candidates (Trump and Cruz) they abhorred and another 5% went to a scrum of minor candidates quite distinct from them. (Their biggest vote getter that year was John Kasich, who has since burned his bridges completely).