The reason McCain lost is that he didn’t stand for anything. He decried earmarks and threatened to use the veto pen as President, but then uncritically accepted and signed (lemming-like) the $700 billion bailout. Philosophically acrobatic, yes; conservative, no.
On so many issues, McCain showed himself to be too unfocused and unclear. Even on the surge, he couldn’t dent Obama. All he had to say was that he would be willing to concede that the original intent for the war was mistaken if Obama were willing to admit that his objections to the surge were equally mistaken.
Also, McCain showed he lacked political toughness by not going after Obama on character issues till too late. By the time Ayers was brought up, it was in the context of the economic meltdown, where such an issue could be rightly described as a distraction.
And now we learn that McCain’s campaign was chaotic and undisciplined, reflecting what the Dems accurately described as Mac’s erratic nature. This character flaw of McCain’s can’t be attributed to his being a Moderate, but a principled Conservative wouldn’t have made a tenth of the mistakes that McCain made and would have had ten times the weapons.
