2008 election

This is the anniversary of a tragic day, September 29, 2008. That was the last day I believe John McCain could have salvaged the 2008 Presidential election.

The McCain campaign started losing altitude following the mid-month collapse of Lehman Brothers, leading McCain to leave the campaign trail to stay in Washington to respond to the crisis.  This led to a confusing set of events surrounding whether McCain would attend the first debate; which he did.  By Monday morning, September 29, it a ppeared a deal to approve the $700 billion bailout was in place and the House was supposedly in line to vote "aye".

Assuming the time had come to return to the stump, McCain left Washington to join Sarah Palin at a rally in Columbus, OH.  This decision doomed his chances.

Many argue McCain was politically dead for even supporting the unpopular bailout , but if there's one thing worse than being unpopular, it's' being both ineffective AND unpopular.  Having chosen the unpopular path, McCain had to, as an absolute necessity, get the bill passed and gotten back on the trail arguing the crisis had been addressed and he helped promote a solution..

While McCain was in Ohio that morning, Speaker Pelosi decided that insulting the Republican party was a good way to spout off when she needed their votes. Enough bailed to scuttle the bill. Many flipped back to support a somewhat amended version a week later. Many of these folks are no longer in Congress.

John McCain faced incredible obstacles in 2008 ...a popular opponent, having to defend an unpopular incumbent President from his own party, and a weak economy. Given this, he needed to maximise his own assets. And he absolutely needed every possible day to draw the contrast with Barack Obama. One rally, even in Ohio, wasn't worth the risk he would lose the chance to punch through with his own message nationally because of events in Washington.

We don't know if McCain whipping the House Republicans would have gotten TARP passed a week sooner, but by failing to put his shoulder to the wheel (and not "assuming the second out of the double play"), McCain cost himself two things he could never recover--he lost a week of the campaign and he lost credibility for returning to Washington only to see things fall apart anyway. The split in the polls reached  double digits in early October, never to fully close.

There's a lesson here somewhere, not that I expect the Beltway brain trust to figure it out. 

My only comment on this sad event is had the GOP national braintrust followed this sort of advice. It would not have happened

Sarah Palin barnstormed across Iowa in the closing days of the 2008 election. Accomplished a lot, didn't it.

Get back to me when the GOP leadership attains a modicum of competence, please.

For a guy out of office and not going to seek any, people are paying an awful lot of attention to Colin Powell.

And they shouldn't.

This puts me at odds with folks of the right who are irate at Powell and those who welcome his continued participation.

Hey, if Colin wants to stay a Republican that's fine. The bottom line is he never was a very partisan Republican and I don't think we should lose any sleep if he disagrees with much of what the party is doing. (as an aside, lets also not scream in horror everytime some Republican says he's not a Rush fan.   Makes us look rather thin skinned) 

Powell is one of those folks who although they emerge from humble beginnings are now firmly entrenched in the D.C. establishment. He has never sought elective office not campaigned much for others. and indeed suggested in 2000 he would have been willing to serve in a Gore administration. Nope, he's the inside guy to staff the less partisan levers of the federal government.  An establishment guy.

And from 1980 to 2008 that was usually a place where a Republican was pretty welcome, since we either held the White House or Congress for 26 of the 28 years.  And now it isn't.

Powell may use the rationalization that the party drifted to the right, though clearly it was more vocally conservative on many issues prior to George W. Bush's definition of the party. And using Sarah Palin as an excuse won't wash.  Evidently the equally derided Dan Quayle was insufficient reason for Powell to search for the exits back then.    

I also reject the charge by Limbaugh that Powell was solely motivated by racial kinship in his Obama endorsement.  Had Obama been unacceptable to the Beltway bramin, he'd have been unable to gain Powell's support.

Nope, this was all about Dr. Gallup. Powell is a symptom of much of what defines a moderate--they are dyed-in-the -wool frontrunners. Had McCain been leading Obama into the homestretch I have no doubt the General would have been side-by-side with Mac singing his praises.

The argument being made now by the Beltway establishment is that we need to cater to the interests of folks like Powell to gain back our path to elective success.  I'm not for RINO bashing as a path to power, but let's be real. This proposal is simply backasswards.

Moderates won;t come back to the ranks of the Republican party because we beg them. They will come back because we look like we are going to win some elections and we make the otther guys look extreme or incompetent. The DC press has cause and effect reversed.

Indeed consider this. If Powell was convinced that the GOP couldn't mount a comeback he wouldn't leave the door open to come back in.  A general always thinks strategically.

Colin Powell endorsed and worked for Reagan, Bush 41 and Bush 43, all of whom were to the right of John McCain..  It wasn;t the policies that drove him off in 2008, it was the popularity. Powell's influence would have sunk with the ship had he endorsed McCain.

I think the Republicans should be a "big tent" party. My point is the first thing to do is to build the tent, not worry so much about the folks who will always stand around the periphery waiting to be cajoled inside.

Let’s take a glimpse at the evolution of the role of technology and so-called “new media” in politics. In the early years, there were “Web” departments — for example, my colleague Patrick Ruffini served as the “webmaster” for Bush-Cheney ‘04. The new jargon for this role has become “new media,” which typically serves as an umbrella for all forms of “new” communication, such as the Internet and mobile technology. The problem lies in the fact that we are still using the adjective new, which inherently distinguishes it from other forms of traditional media (i.e. TV, radio, and so forth). Accordingly, the people who oversee new media are called “New Media Directors” and work in “New Media,” while the people who oversee traditional media are given the title of “Communications Director” and work in “Communications” or something along those lines. The bottom line is that not only is “new” media no longer new, but even more importantly, “new” media is rapidly replacing “traditional” media. If the right is going to become the side on the cutting edge, then right-of-center campaigns and organizations must ensure that the separation of traditional and new media comes to an end.

The decline of traditional media becomes clear when you look at recent polling trends. For example, a substantially increasing percentage of Americans turn to the Internet for their news. Moreover, a poll taken in 2008 indicates that nearly 70% of Americans consider traditional journalism to be “out of touch,” and as a result the plethora of respondents use the Internet as their primary source of news and information. Twice as many Americans said they “regularly learn[ed] something about the [2008] campaign from the internet” as they did in 2004. And of course, millennial voters almost universally turned to the Internet as their primary source for 2008 election news.

In addition, there were two Presidential campaigns whose profoud impacts demonstrate the importance of integrating all forms of media. It goes without saying that President Obama ran an incredible web-based campaign, raising two-thirds of its money online and peer-producing 200,000 offline events, 400,000 blog posts, and 3 million phone calls. Likewise, Ron Paul’s campaign was almost entirely organized and built around the Internet, using existing tools like Meetup.com to build an incredible yet extremely low-cost national infrastructure. What was the differentiator between these two campaigns and most of the others from the past cycle? They didn’t separate “new media” from their other operations; instead, they allowed it to serve as a sort of circulatory system that fed and empowered every other part of their organization. “New media” wasn’t a part of their campaign; it was their campaign.

The line between traditional and new media is disintegrating, and therefore, separating the two puts the right at a disadvantage. So let’s embrace this change. “New media” must become “media,” and must be embraced as the heart and soul of our campaigns and organizations.

Crossposted at NextGenGOP.

I saw a post on thenextright the other day that linked to a DontGo article on how conservatives need to collaborate more.  One of the suggestions was to get 500+ people to drive certain stories to the top on Digg.com.

I had never paid must attention to these rating tools like Digg, Reddit, or Buzz, but thought that to the extent that these sites drive traffic, there could be some value there, so I signed up for a Digg account.

I saw a Digg icon at John Ziegler's http://www.howobamagotelected.com that exposes the result of the media bias during the 2008 election.  So I Dugg it.

Ziegler's YouTube video had been Dugg 1967 times, which should be plenty to get it up on the most Dugg list.  I looked at the most Dugg stories in the Political News section for the past 30 days (it had first been dug 8 days ago) and went to the second page and found where it should have been, right between "Bush Regrets Comments During Presidency" with 2058 Diggs and "Chris Matthews: My Job Is To Make Obama Presidency A Success" with 1797 Diggs.

Ziegler's video was no where to be found.  It is on Digg's site, but conspicuously missing from the "front page" where people visiting Digg might spot it.

Is Digg spiking stories it doesn't like?

(cross posted from the designated conservative at http://dcon2012.wordpress.com/)

So I'm sitting on a folding chair in an undisclosed location of a small Michigan downtown commiserating with 40 fellow republicans last week....  

After spending much of this year holding the keys for the McCainiacs and my Democrat friends who drank the Obama Kool-Aid, I was thrilled just to be in the same room with other designated drivers conservatives of the Party.  Here are a few snippets of the conversation:

• “The Democratic tsunami was larger in Michigan because the Michigan Republican Party wasn’t ‘there.’”
• “25% of the people in the room are Ron Paul ‘true believers’.  The Party leadership deliberately ignored Ron Paul - remember, he’s been right about everything he said.” 
• (of course, a non-Paulite in the crowd pointedly noted that Ron Paul himself supported a third-party candidate in the general election instead of the Republican standard-bearers!)
• “The Republican candidates that were successful in the last election did so despite, not because of, our party.”
• “You cannot be successful if you’re telling your (volunteers) to start fighting now and we’ll tell you what you’re fighting for later!”
• "The reason Republicans stayed home and only 20% percent of precinct delegates actually volunteered is because we didn’t have an actual Republican at the head of the national ticket!"
• “The Party needs to teach Econ 101 - socialism removes checks and balances from government and leads to corruption.”
• “Fight with everything you have not to become Canada (so said a Canadian expatriate and local businessman); the government makes money disappear!”

For the rest of the story, visit the designated conservative.

NOTE:  Originally posted at Political Capital

On the eve of an expected landslide sweeping Barack Obama into the Oval Office and congressional Democrats to majorities in both houses of Congress, many pundits have predicted a long period in the political wilderness for Republicans in national politics.

Not so far away in the UK the British Conservative Party has only recently recovered from its own journey to the dark side. In 1997 the Tory party was destroyed at the polls after 18 years in power and has been out of power ever since.

Whilst there are obvious and clear differences between the two sister parties, and the nations they aspire to govern, the circumstances of the 1997 and 2008 defeats are remarkably similar.

In the late ‘90s Tories were tempted to believe that the public were duped. That an inexperienced and inspirational young left wing leader had taken advantage of the divisions of the governing party and the credulity of the electorate to instigate what would become a far left regime.

A more sober assessment is the successes of the 1980s Thatcher revolution led to hubris and terrible mistakes. The party survived divisions over European policy and riots that followed the idiotic introduction of the Poll Tax through the dramatic defenestration of Margaret Thatcher, allowing the genial John Major to win an unexpected General Election victory in 1992.

It was the financial collapse of Black Wednesday in September 1992, when the pound crashed out of the European Exchange rates mechanism, and the ensuing recession that really killed Conservative hopes. Combined with party wars over its approach to the European Union (a relatively trivial matter compared to the 3 million unemployed) the recession not only tore the party away from the centre of political discourse but also created a massive rift between the modern British nation and the world the Conservative Government lived in.

To compound the matter there was the ever present “sleaze”, a string of Conservative MPs were exposed in sex scandals that would have made Larry Craig and Mark Foley blush, reaching its apotheosis with the strange autoerotic death of Stephen Milligan.

Even worse was the grubby stain of corruption, in 1994 it emerged that lobbyist Ian Greer had bribed Conservative MPs to ask questions in parliament on behalf of Egyptian retail mogul Mohammed Fayed. To compound matters a cabinet minister (Jonathan Aitken) was accused of conducting secret deals with Saudi princes, Aitken was later jailed for perjury – unlike Scooter Libby, Aitken did not get his sentence commuted.

So many of the ingredients are the same that it becomes difficult to see how the Republicans can avoid the fate of their transatlantic colleagues. Sometimes parties just deserve to lose, but that is far from being the bad news.

The disaster that the GOP of 2008 and the Tories of 1997 share is the fundamentals of the political background, both fell massively behind their opponents in levels of support from younger voters and crucially struggled to deal with the changing mores of a modern nation.

One of tomorrow’s most interesting results will be the outcome of California’s Proposition 8 on marriage equality. The idea that by 2008 there would not only be legally recognized civil unions in the UK but openly homosexual cabinet ministers would have been an anathema to many Conservatives, but not to the British public. One of the ways in which British Conservatives have begun to turn the page in recent years is making peace with issues such as this.

The issue of gay marriage matters not just because of the dangers of leaving behind an increasingly socially liberal electorate, but because of the fundamental contradiction in the modern conservative movement that it exposes. In a time of increasing family breakdown Conservatives should be promoting marriage as the primary family unit because of the legal and public commitment that it entails. Yet conservatives have pandered to their religious base in the search for easy votes, somehow the GOP has become a party at ease with telling people what to do.

It is when parties deviate from their fundamental intellectual core that they suffer the most. The most important example of this in the current administration is public spending. Whilst tax cuts helped to keep the American economy growing their pre-requisite – low public spending – was ignored. It’s harder to demonise big government liberals when you have spent eight years turning a health budget surplus into a massive deficit, a deficit which represents a massive tax burden on future generations in the form of interest payments to Chinese bankers.

In Britain the ideological departure had serious underpinnings and serious consequences. The pragmatic conservatism of the previous 150 years was eschewed in exchange for the dynamic monetarism, privatisation and market liberalisation of the Thatcher revolution. To succeed once more the GOP must rediscover its own ideological core, an ideology that is found not in the anti-intellectual city-dweller baiting of Sarah Palin but in integrity in government, individual freedom and not just low taxes but low spending.

The Tories have, recently, appeared to turn the corner, and are now consistently ahead of Labour in the opinion polls. Following their third consecutive election defeat in 2005 they nominated a young, modern leader in David Cameron. In the past three years the Conservatives have ‘decontaminated’ their brand, a focus on environmental issues and a rejection of upfront promises of tax cuts drew the headlines but the underlying change was more important.

The British Conservative party has changed, not a shift in policies but actual change. It has become a party that loves the country as it is now, and not as it wishes it was in 1983. The right-wing talk radio blowhards who think the answer is simply to hate the modern world more and scream at it harder are not part of the problem, they are the problem. If Republicans are to avoid the fate of their British counterparts then they need to develop a narrative for modern American that places the one true conservative principle – that of liberty – at the heart of the nation’s future.

EDITORS NOTE:  Edward is a guest columnist, sending us his thoughts from the United Kingdom.  He is a member of the British Conservative Party, and has witnessed first hand the destruction of the British Right, and how it has rebuilt itself from the ground up.  We are grateful to him for his perspective, and hope to bring you many more articles from our friends across the pond in the future.

"jro" wrote some good responses in the comments to my last post on the decline of the GOP in Colorado Springs, my hometown. I was going to post this in the comments section as well, but it grew too large. It ends with some broader-rebuilding thoughts, which are what I'd really like to hear bandied about.

Good questions. Here's my brief synopsis:

1. The military will come out strong for McCain, no question. I think that they will always be around as a viable base for GOP activity. It's in the other categories of voters we're suffering.

2. Ted Haggard is distant memory. Pastor Brady Boyd is pretty popular, as well as Pastor Ross Parsley. The evangelical community is diverse enough and has enough church outlets that the one case at New Life Church shouldn't affect it much.

3. I agree wholeheartedly that enthusiasm from the base isn't very strong. A lot of my evie friends were Huckabee supporters (barf!), and as a brief aside, anyone who thinks that Mitt has a future in the GOP party needs to spend more time looking at some in the Christian movement: anti-Mormonism is quite strong and doesn't seem to be fading anytime soon.

I think you touch on some parts of the issue with the 4-8 year window of change. I think no small part comes from some dissatisfaction with the GWB administration. For many thirtysomething evangelicals, he was their first political candidate in their lifetime to closely identify with them. To see his second term devolve into a wimpfest of moderate gestures and unconvincing speeches was disheartening. But I also think there's part of this that is more personality than politics. For many evangelicals, their issues are strictly social (marriage and abortion, mainly, with some other things like homeschooling and God-in-the-public-square stuff), and they are downright squishes when it comes to economics.

We can definitely talk about this more, but I think a key part of the Righting the GOP Ship (as good a pun as I've seen yet. Pass it on!) will be addressing the need to have more of our public officials acting as advocates for freedom/conservatism, even to our own partymembers. We can't have Denny Hastert types in leadership, who might be great at playing the game in D.C. but are enigmatic, surly, or awkward when given the chance to talk. The Left has such control of MSM that it takes special communicating talents to cut through the b.s.

Howard Dean, 2008:

Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean said Monday that he’s looking forward to one party controlling all aspects of government, despite GOP charges that it would be a disastrous Nov. 4 outcome.  “Republicans had a chance to rule. They failed miserably. I think it’s time to give the other party a chance,” Dean said on MSNBC.

Howard Dean, 2005:

We need more than one party in charge. And the vote on Tuesday is going to be critical to decide whether American democracy still allows those of us who didn't vote for the president to have any say in running the country whatsoever.
[...]
Someday, the Democrats will be back in charge again. Do we want a Democratic Party that's in charge of everything? Well, you know, I suppose it's my job to say yes. But the truth is, as an American, it's better when parties share power. It's better when even those people who didn't win the election have something to say.
[...]
[There] is a culture of corruption and abuse of power in Washington. This is what happens when one party is in charge of everything.

Change! 

Sarah Palin decisively won the VP debate tonight.  And no, it wasn't due to Biden's annoying smirk, or his claim that he understands our needs because he's always at Home Depot, or his condescending "Let me say it again!" attitude that persisted throughout.  Rather, quite simply, Palin connected with every day, middle-class voters in a way that none of the other candidates could.

Hugh Hewitt points out that, "The Luntz focus group picked up the decisive Palin win, and Luntz is predicting a move towards McCain in the polls as a result."  I articulated this same thought right after the debate on Twitter.

In the last debate, Obama seriously solidified his position in the polls on the point of which candidate better "understands their needs and problems."  With the economy in the tank, this is going to be a critical factor when people come out to vote – and so McCain cannot afford to have tepid numbers in this area.  And unfortunately, I don't think there was much McCain himself could do to improve these numbers.

Enter Sarah Palin, the only one of the four Presidential and VP candidates who currently has actual ties to average middle class Americans.  For this debate to have been success for McCain, she needed to connect with these voters and demonstrate that the McCain-Palin ticket understands their needs.  She did so in a knock-out fashion.  For his part, Biden looked, well, Senatorial, boring, and uninspiring – all the while, Palin came across as a regular, hard-working American, a mother of five – certainly not as a politician.

Her immense success in tonight's debate will re-energize the Right, but more importantly, it will also reassure many Americans in two ways:  first, that she is absolutely, unquestionably ready to, if called upon, step up as President; and second, that the McCain-Palin ticket understands and will fight for everday Americans.  As a result, I expect to see a modest boost in the polls for McCain over the next few days.

The critical question, however, remains:  can McCain maintain this momentum in the last two debates?  The answer is yes, but McCain will need to drive home the points raised by Palin in tonight's debate.  He needs to continue to demonstrate that he understands the middle class' needs and problems, while at the same time showing that Obama does not.  But McCain the Maverick should not have much trouble doing that.

So much for people criticizing Sarah Palin for not being ready for the spotlight.  Tonight, she had a chance to talk directly to everyday Americans – and she shined like the star she is.

Aaron Marks is President of Three Group, LLC, a Pittsburgh-based new media firm that focuses on providing technology-based solutions for Republican candidates and organizations, and in particular has built Web 2.0 campaign management software called Mission Control.  Aaron also worked in new media and voter outreach on Senator Rick Santorum's 2006 re-election campaign.