#1 should be the inability to hammer home the Democrats culpability in the flawed policies that led to the mortgage mess in the first debate. That’s when everyone was watching and he showed his lack of depth on economic issues. He lost the election that night. How much did we hear about Jim Johnson and Franklin Raines the last 3 weeks of the campaign? Not nearly enough.
#1a Suspending the campaign without taking the lead on creating a true conservative alternative to a bailout plan that was rapidly losing credibility with the public. The Dems weren’t about to pass something without Republican votes, they were scared to death of the liability. We needed an alternative that would have put Bush and the Dems on the same side. We might have lost the vote, but he could have claimed a vision different from Obama’s and all of official Washington.
#2 Ayers would have made more of a difference in a normal year, but McCain never drove it home just what the Ayers of today represents…the radical politicization of our classrooms. He needed to read what Stanley Kurtz found out about the one thing Barack Obama has actually managed in his life, the Annenberg Challenge, and how badly it failed. I’m not sure he was even aware of it. We can’t count on the MSM to get the message out, nor get our information solely from it.
I give him a pass on the Wright issue. While I find the association reprehensible, there’s no way McCain could have made that an issue without being branded by the Obama-shilling media as racist. The deck was always stacked against him on that one and there was no way to win with it. It’s one area where McCain’s fundamental decency benefited rather than inhibited him.
This year, people voted their pocketbook, and Obama outbid us on the goodies. We’ll pay for that later.
