If McCain Loses

If Sen. McCain loses this race it won’t be because of Sarah Palin, it will be because of Senator John McCain. The top of the ticket is responsible for the message the campaign puts out, the people who run his campaign, who he chooses as his running mate, and everything else.

This election, excuse the cliché', has always been about big things. This election has always been about the economy hitting a down turn and us being in two wars with possibly a third (some say even a forth) on the horizon. Unfortunately all we've seen from the McCain Campaign is tactics without a strategy. We have not seen a single, cohesive, easy to figure out strategy. For a while there it was a new tactic every week, now it’s been a new tactic daily. No cohesiveness, no repetitiveness. On the flip side, with Mr. Obama, you've heard "McCain is Bush" to ad nauseum. You've heard it so much so that you catch Republican pundits on TV saying "Bush" instead of "McCain" when they're clearly talking about Mr. McCain.

The McCain camp was winning on the experience issue and they should've never left that topic but more importantly they should've been talking about the economy from the start. Now everyone knows that the economy is Mr. McCain's weak spot (as experience is Obama's) based on polling but that doesn't mean that he had to run from it. His tax rhetoric has been minute and said in an off-handed manner almost as if he wants to say "I'm a Republican, of course taxes are getting cut and none are being raised, why I even have to talk about taxes?” He has been so weak on the tax issue that polls have shown voters believing McCain will raise their taxes. How does this happen unless due to a bad campaign?

They were swinging the polls to there favor with the celebrity ads. Now it was obvious you couldn't simply hit Mr. Obama like that for 4-5 months but when those had traction is exactly when they should've brought in William Ayers. What those ad's could have done was give an opening for people who were starting to question what Mr. Obama was all about and really hammer on that feeling, on that wonderment.

Mr. McCain also simply failed to hammer President Bush. He could have and should have beaten Mr. Obama to this attack. No one who truly follows politics actually believes Mr. McCain and President Bush get along or like each other. While Mr. Obama hammered away at Sen. McCain voting with President Bush 90% of the time McCain could've pointed out all the Democrats who have voted with President Bush 70-80% of the time while highlighting his own staunch differences from our current president.

Time was also wasted, far too much time, on how right Sen. McCain was about the surge and failed to hammer home just how well things are going over there because of it. If they talked about it and hammered away about it, the media would've covered it. Now no Republican who supported going in and staying there without an end game was ever going to win that argument. Not with the poll numbers, in regards to Iraq, as they are. That only played to his base. What he should have done is instantly pivot to Afghanistan and own that issue. Afghanistan and winning there, getting Bid Laden, that is what has allowed Mr. Obama to at least hit par on foreign policy (again, based on the polling). His being against the war from the beginning simply helped him solidify his base.

Country First. We've all heard it right? Do you know what it means? Ah, it varies doesn't it? The McCain campaign never defined this. They never turned it into "Fixing our economy. Country First." They could've defined it and used it to describe everything. They made a veiled attempt to early on when they first started rolling the phrase out but they didn't ever make it stick.

In the end, if Mr. McCain looses it will be for these simplified and key reasons: 1) No strategy 2) Never a strong message 3) Too much knee jerking 4) They didn't own a single issue in terms of rhetoric 5) Horrid rollout of Gov. Palin and kept her far too controlled