I don’t know whether John McCain will win this election. I know he should win this election and there is no reason to risk the rule of Obama.
I’ve seen a lot of defeatism on here lately and it has been disappointing. You may compromise in moments of negotiations. You never surrender in the heat of combat, especially when you have opponents that want to destroy you.
In 1948 the media in this nation had turned on a sitting President and tried to elect a foggy-headed politician full of generalities and feel-good slogans.
In 2008 we have: “We’re the ones we’ve been waiting for.”
In 1948 we had: “You know that your future is still ahead of you.”
In that election Truman fought and won.
McCain can win this election without the media if he fights the unpopular do-nothing Democratic Congress and stands up for the working man. Here online we need to stop navel gazing and whining. We need to focus on attacking the Messiah™ and his corrupt lackeys in Congress and back in Chicago.
So for you whining defeatists, I’m going to ask you to show some guts. We don’t need another post or comment wondering if electing Obama is really acceptable. We need posts and comments that rip that lying scoundrel up one side and down the other.
September 30th, 2008 at 5:01 pm
Winners and Losers of the Bailout going down:
Winners:
The American People
John McCain
NEWT
Mike Pence
The GOP
Free market conservatism
Mark Sanford
Fred Thompson
The Losers:
Obama
Pelosi
The Democrats
Socialism
John Boehner
Mitch McConnell
September 30th, 2008 at 5:04 pm
#1 – how is John McCain and winner in the bailout going down?
September 30th, 2008 at 5:07 pm
Here is what McCain has to do to regain his Maverick and win:
McCain should come out vigorously against the bailout – contrary to all of the chicken little pessimists, the stock market rallied and came back strong after this bailout’s defeat, consumer confidence is up and dare I say, the fundamentals of the economy are indeed strong. McCain should call on Obama to suspend his campaign with him and go to Washington and fix the problems through bipartisanism by calling for a cut in the capital gains tax. Then McCain/Palin should propose to scrap the debates and instead have all 4 candidates for President and VP travel around the country and do a series of Town Hall style events. Then McCain needs to go on the attack.
September 30th, 2008 at 5:09 pm
Seth,
The bailout’s defeat gives McCain an opening to vigorously oppose it and garner the 70% support from American voters who oppose it.
September 30th, 2008 at 5:09 pm
Amen! Proclaiming defeat does no good, even if you turn out to have been right, however, if it turns out that you could have still on declaring defeat can be a self fulfilling prophecy.
September 30th, 2008 at 5:11 pm
In an amendment to comment #1, I would also suggest that Eric Cantor likely came out of this a winner and carved out a niche for himself as a future leader of the party.
September 30th, 2008 at 5:11 pm
Also someone should post some history of elections, where the candidate was down 5-8 points and still won, I think this has happened to Republicans before, but I don’t have anything to prove it.
September 30th, 2008 at 5:11 pm
Thanks, Doug. I was talking with a cousin who did 2 tours in Nam. He was a member of the unit referred to as “the Walking Dead”, because most of them didn’t come home. He told me that you never give up when you’re in a fire fight. Not even if the other side waves the white flag. Once you engage the enemy, you fight till the battle is over. Make no mistake, Barack Obama and his socialist pals are the enemy of true freedom. It’s a damn shame that there are so few true warriors left in this fight.
We have over a month. That’s a lifetime in politics. Quit thinking and start doing!
September 30th, 2008 at 5:17 pm
John Mark,
Dukakis was beating Bush by 17 points prior to the election in 1988. Polls this far out are notoriously unreliable. McCain is in the driver’s seat here.
September 30th, 2008 at 5:17 pm
McCain can’t come out against the bailout! The last thing he needs is Bush, Paulson and a bunch of people on Wall Street declaring he really doesn’t understand the economy. On top of that it would be a transparent political flip-flop. And calling for tax cuts just sounds crazy to me.
I don’t know if it has come out yet but I heard last week that Obama passed over Clinton because he believed McCain would overreach and pick a woman and Palin was the likely choice. In other words it seems Obama and McCain thought choosing Palin was their ticket to the white house.
September 30th, 2008 at 5:18 pm
Thanks, Doug. Great post.
We do still have 34 days to fight. Get out there and work your tail off to get John McPalin elected, because we can’t afford Barack O’Biden.
September 30th, 2008 at 5:21 pm
JA Pruce – Agree with Cantor coming out a winner (long term 2010 or 2012), but McCain has not yet come out as a winner. He has an opportunity to come out a winner before the election, but unless it is better executed than his campaign suspension he might be the biggest loser of this fiasco. Economic matters favor the Dems
September 30th, 2008 at 5:24 pm
“I heard last week that Obama passed over Clinton because he believed McCain would overreach and pick a woman and Palin was the likely choice.”
If there was an ounce of truth to that rumor the Obama campaign wouldn’t have reacted in the visibly panicked manner they did immediately after her nomination was announced. Also, a moment of reflection would have allowed them to realize just how badly their first line of attack — “she doesn’t have enough experience to be VP” — would backfire on them.
September 30th, 2008 at 6:25 pm
There is a difference between being a “whining, defeatist, navel-gazer” and telling someone who is headed in the wrong direction to change course.
If McCain were to keep conducting his campaign in the same way, he will lose. That is being realistic, not defeatist.
I saw some very hopeful signs in the latest ads that have come out. But McCain NEEDS TO FIGHT EVEN HARDER TO WIN THIS- and I believe that he will.
September 30th, 2008 at 6:32 pm
Kavon, consider me the Phil Gramm of race42008.
I’ve criticized McCain before. What annoys me is when comments or posts appear where we roll over and say “all is lost, woe is me”. When someone feels the urge to whine bitter defeatism, they need to grab a beverage and man up.
September 30th, 2008 at 7:14 pm
14, Calling Obama “president elect” is not, and talking about what we’re going to do after four years of Obama is not a conversation about changing course, it is however, a conversation about it’s to late to change course. I’m not asking for uncritical optimism
September 30th, 2008 at 7:16 pm
I am hearing that there is a poll that might be coming out tomorrow that is very positive for McCain.
September 30th, 2008 at 7:23 pm
I have to call it as I see it. Anything else, to me, is intellectual dishonesty. When I as a Rudy supporter in December of ’07 started predicting that McCain would be the nominee, I was savaged by the other Rudy supporters for being defeatist. But what I actually was was “right.”
That said, given that Obama would only win by six points if the election were held today demonstrates that, had McCain been running a sane campaign for the last few months, we would have a different race on our hands. McCain could have run as the Middle Class Hero who was a safer bet for America than Obama. Instead he ran as the war hero who we should all vote for because…well, he never really gave us a reason. And when he did, he kept changing it. That gave Barack Obama time to package himself as a moderate, reasonable fighter for the middle class, and that’s all people really want in a Democrat this year.
Therefore, I consider it realistic, and not defeatist, to say that I still think Obama will win because I see no evidence that McCain is aware of any of this. If I were in the upper echelons of the McCain campaign and could change the campaign’s direction, then yes, you could rightly tell me to man up. But when two trains are about to run into each other, it’s not defeatist to say, “Dude, check it out, trainwreck.”
September 30th, 2008 at 7:30 pm
DaveG, if you have any humility and perspective at all you know you could be wrong. So what good does saying the election is over do? What good does it do if you were right? And its not intellectually hones to claim to know the future, even if it were honest its not intellectual.
September 30th, 2008 at 7:34 pm
DaveG = Chicago Daily Tribune
September 30th, 2008 at 7:36 pm
Also there was good reason to talk about Rudy going down, because it gave Rudybots to go for a more viable canidate. Who are we supposed to dump McCain for?
September 30th, 2008 at 7:37 pm
DaveG, you’re right that McCain is making the election one about the person in question.
Obama, by contrast, is trying to make the race one about the direction of the country. It would be more constructive to ask whether or not the country truly wants to follow the neosocialist Pied Piper over the cliff, though.
Pure defeatism is anything but constructive. It only focuses attention on what the critic perceives as irrevocable errors rather than what could potentially be done differently.
September 30th, 2008 at 7:37 pm
At least the Chicago Daily Tribune didn’t claim to predict the election 30 days out. That’s the realm of fortune tellers.
September 30th, 2008 at 7:38 pm
Heh.
September 30th, 2008 at 7:40 pm
I certainly think McCain COULD give Obama a run for his money if he would follow my and Kavon’s recommendations, as laid out in several recent posts.
September 30th, 2008 at 7:49 pm
25, When the other canidate is president elect it’s time to give the concession speech.
September 30th, 2008 at 7:59 pm
#26, unless you’re Al Gore