Ross Douthat, on why McCain’s campaign advisors actually are to blame for McCain’s (predicted) loss this year, and not just the victims of an inevitable Democratic landslide:
Maybe I should insert a caveat here, something along the lines of “if McCain wins on Tuesday, Schmidt and Co. are geniuses after all.” But the only way McCain wins, so far as I can tell, is if Russia invades Western Europe on Monday, or if the America that shows up to vote next week looks and votes not at all like the America that’s been showing up in polls and surveys and every other indicator that political professionals have to work with. Maybe it will: Maybe there are unmappable effects at work in this race, and maybe after Tuesday the entire polling industry will have to close up shop in disgrace. But the job of a campaign is to put their candidate in a position to win with the electorate as it’s possible to understand it, not with some hypothetical electorate that might emerge to save you from the fate that all the indicators predicted. Rove succeeded at that task; the McCain campaign appears to have failed. Which means that if they win on Tuesday, it won’t be because they were better than we thought they were, but because they were luckier – luckier than we thought, and luckier, as well, than basically every Presidential campaign in the modern history of America.
I think this is right. Remember in the Democratic primary when it truly looked like whoever we chose–Hillary or Barack–the race would be really, really close? Remember the fear we felt when the GOP actually did pick McCain–the candidate all on the left recognized as the only one who could beat us in a Dem-friendly year with an amazing Democratic candidate–instead of the more likely Huckabee or Giuliani or Romney? This was not Obama’s race to lose all along. There was a good case to be made against “liberal elitism” and on the basis of all the good will McCain had built up with the electorate over the years. But McCain and his advisors did not make this case.
It’s possible, of course, that their biggest problem was an inability to make any case consistently; that McCain’s fighter-pilot temperment predisposes him to move in such erratic ways. (Try this! This didn’t work. Try that! That didn’t work. Try the other thing! And so on.) It’s surely a failing of the campaign staff if he is allowed to act in ways that clearly send him off message. But it’s the candidate’s job to hire people who can protect him from himself. It all comes down to the leadership decisions of the man in charge. And McCain made the wrong ones. His (predicted) loss was never inevitable. He simply did not run a good campaign.
