Joseph Marshall – Actually, I think you made many good points. There were a few underlying flawd to some of them.
McCain is required by law to put his name after any campaign ad he runs. He had no surrogates to run these for him. There were some independent groups, but the campaign laws forbade McCain from coordinating with them. McCain played by the rules.
There was some real evidence that Obama’s campaign manager and his promotion company actually made a lot of the videos that went viral on the net. No claim was made as to who created these spurious, nasty videos, but tracking back the URL’s eventually showed whence they came. Illegal, but it kept Obama’s skirts clean.
As for message, he had a message, but it simply didn’t resonate in these times. The Pub message is always the same: Those things that are good for the long-term (values). Obama lied his face off. The media refused to call him on it. When McCain tried, he gets blasted for “negative ads”. Besides that, the Pub message didn’t resonate this time, because people have become responsive to populist messages. McCain tried to out-populist Obama… an impossibility.
McCain was fighting with two arms and a leg tied behind his back: the media giving Obama a free pass; an unpopular Prez and wars, ’cause Bush refuses to defend himself; and fighting fair.
