4. A Republican candidate could have won the presidency this year.
I doubt it. In the hastily penned postmortems of campaign ’08, much of the blame for McCain’s loss seems to have fallen at the feet of the candidate and his advisers, who (so the narrative goes) made a series of lousy strategic decisions that wound up costing the Arizona senator the White House. There’s little question that some of the choices McCain and his team made — the most obvious being the impulsive decision to suspend his campaign and try to broker a deal on the financial rescue bill, only to see his efforts blow up in his face — did not help. But a look at this year’s political atmospherics suggests that the environment was so badly poisoned that no Republican — not Mitt Romney, not Mike Huckabee, not even the potential future GOP savior, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal — could have beaten Obama on Nov. 4.
Why not? Three words (and a middle initial): President George W. Bush.
In the national exit poll, more than seven in 10 voters said that they disapproved of the job Bush was doing; not surprisingly, Obama resoundingly won that group, 67 percent to 31 percent. But here’s an even more stunning fact: While 7 percent of the exit-poll sample strongly approved of the job Bush was doing, a whopping 51 percent strongly disapproved. Obama won those strong disapprovers 82 percent to 16 percent. And Bush’s approval numbers looked grim for the GOP even before the September financial meltdown.
Just one in five voters in the national exit polls said that the country was “generally going in the right direction.” McCain won that group 71 percent to Obama’s 27 percent. But among the 75 percent of voters who said that the country was “seriously off on the wrong track,” Obama had a thumping 26-point edge.
Those numbers speak to the damage that eight years of the Bush administration have done to the Republican brand. It’s a burden that any candidate running for president with an “R” after his — or her — name would have had to drag around the country.
I agree with #1 and #5. To say the GOP is “dead” is too silly and I wish serious journalists would avoid such hyperbole, but they do it all the time. I’m neutral on #2. But I disagee with #4. His assessment is fine except that the margin of victory was way too narrow. If the MSM had paid attention to the many skeletons hiding in Obama’s closet or if they had paid attention to the fact Republican efforts to restrain Freddie Mac & Fannie Mae were thwarted by the Democrats we could easily be seeing a different result.
I agree with the earlier comment that more complete coverage of Obama might well have resulted in a different outcome. My only difference, however, is that I don’t think the MSM were guilty of not paying attention. Rather, I believe the evidence is clear and convincing that the media deliberately did not pursue leads that might have resulted in uncovering facts unfavorable to Obama. One of the most significant casualties of this election cycle (in addition to the end for all time of public financing of Presidential campaigns) is the credibility of the mass media. As the data comes out revealing the pro-Obama bias more and more starkly, such worthies as the NYT and WaPo are shown to no longer even pretend to objectivity. Those outlets that do try to be fair and balanced are vilified as right-wing house organs.