I think McCain did better than pretty much any other Republican candidate could have. But I think the McCain campaign didn't do as well as they could have. I think McCain could have won. They blew an amazing number of opportunities. They mishandled Sarah Palin horribly. They were obsessed with unfair media coverage while doing very little to take advantage of it or even do anything serious about it. They inherited an enormous number of problems not of their own making, but they made even more problems for themselves than they needed to.
There will be much more said about this, but in short I think John McCain biggest problem was that the GOP had lost any sense of intellectual or ideological definition and John McCain didn't bother to offer any definition of his own until helped by Joe the Plumber. And by then it was too little too late.
— Jonah Goldberg is the author of Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning.
Greg Mueller
Tuesday night’s defeat was no surprise. For Republicans, the politics is not that difficult to understand. Republicans win elections when they govern and run campaigns as advocates of limited government, strong national defense and speaking out on cultural issues. We lose elections when we cut deals in the name of pragmatism or try to out liberal the liberals. The Republican brand is deeply damaged. The GOP is no longer trusted by the American people to serve as the party of fiscal discipline. It has lost a willingness to debate cultural issues such as life, gay marriage and cloning — winning issues in past elections for Republicans. The immigration issue, big government Republicanism, the financial crisis which led to a 700 billion dollar bail out and failure to emphasize Obama's extremism on cultural issues proved to be turning points against Republicans this cycle.
Exit polling conducted by the conservative American Issues Project in key battleground states shows that voters in those states entrust Barack Obama and Democrats on taxes, spending, and the handling of the financial crisis. The only issue voters in key states said they trusted McCain and Republicans more on was the war on terror. Data also shows that the country remains conservative, but lacks a populist conservative party, a brand the GOP has shed in the last two cycles. Unless the Republican Party returns to the across the board conservative agenda that wins elections, it will remain a minority party. At this point the best and only hope for the GOP to gain back traction is a far left wing Obama Administration and Congress imposing various forms of failed socialist policies. To the wilderness we go.
— Greg Mueller is a Republican strategist and president of CRC Public Relations based in Alexandria, Va.
John J. Pitney Jr.
John McCain made mistakes. But even if he had run a brilliant campaign, the result probably would not have been much different. With a worsening economy, a protracted war, and an unpopular incumbent at the end of an eight-year tenure, it would have been extremely difficult for any Republican to win. Political scientist Alan Abramowitz has an
election-forecasting model that takes such conditions into account. Several months ago, before the start of the fall campaign, his model predicted that Obama would win the two-party popular vote with 54 percent to McCain's 46 percent.
But Republicans are hardly blameless. Fourteen years ago, they took control of Congress on the strength of their ideas. Over time, though, they put the retention of power ahead of the advancement of principle. They squeezed campaign contributions from interest groups while they neglected the grassroots donors who believed in conservative ideals. They abandoned belief money in order to get access money, and they ended up with neither.
If they want to reconnect with their supporters, they should spend less time at the Capitol Hill Club and more time at Sam’s Club.
— John J. Pitney Jr. is Roy P. Crocker Professor of American Politics at Claremont McKenna College.
Mark Steyn
I congratulate Senator Obama on a remarkable and decisive victory. It was in many ways the final battle in a war the Republican Party didn’t even bother fighting — the “long march through the institutions.” While the Senator certainly enjoyed the patronage of the Chicago machine, he is not primarily a political figure: Whether “educators” like William Ayers or therapeutic pop-culture types like Oprah, his closest associations are beyond the world of electoral politics. He emerged rather from all the cultural turf the GOP largely abandoned during its 30-year winning streak at the ballot box, and his victory demonstrates the folly of assuming that folks will continue to pull the lever for guys with an R after their name every other November even as all the other institutions in society become de facto liberal one-party states.
Bill Bennett asked me on the air the other day why voters were so hot for this hope’n’change mush, and I suggested that it’s the dominant vernacular of the age. Go into almost any American grade-school and stroll the corridors: you’ll find the walls lined with Sharpie-bright supersized touchy-feely abstractions: “RESPECT,” “DREAM,” “TOGETHER,” “DIVERSITY.” By contrast, Mister Maverick talked of “reaching across the aisle” and ending “earmarks,” which may sound heroic in Washington but ring shriveled and reductive to anyone who’s not obsessed with legislative process. This dead language embodied the narrow sliver of turf on which he was fighting, while Obama was bestriding the broader cultural space. Republicans need to start their own long march back through all the institutions they ceded. Otherwise, the default mode of this society will be liberal, and what’s left of the Republican party will be reduced (as in other parts of the west) to begging the electorate for the occasional opportunity to prove it can run the liberal state just as well as liberals can.
— Mark Steyn contributes to National Review, among other publications. He is the author of America Alone.
Richard Viguerie
In the 2008 elections, Voters did not reject conservatism. They rejected Big Government Republicanism in all its forms, including the Bush administration and the Republican leadership in Congress.
The McCain campaign represented many things Americans do not like about politics. Senator McCain spent more than a quarter-century in Washington as a moderate and insider, and his campaign was run by longtime Washington insiders and lobbyists for Big Government.
This disastrous defeat can and will be laid at the feet of the Big Government corporate Republicans who abandoned the Reagan Coalition, massively expanded government, and ignored the needs and values of regular, grassroots Americans. They protected Wall Street and K Street, and forgot about Main Street.
Republicans will make a comeback only after they return to their conservative roots. That process starts with the replacement, with principled conservatives, of all of the Republicans’ elected congressional leaders, as well as most members of the Republican National Committee and most state party officials. It’s time for new leaders, from top to bottom.
The battle for the heart and soul of the Republican party begins now.
— Richard A. Viguerie is author, most recently, of Conservatives Betrayed: How George W. Bush and Other Big Government Republicans Hijacked the Conservative Cause.
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