Did McCain had a chance or was he doomed

[Mechavada]

Are you kidding?  He was doomed.  Here's why:

1. For the reason a lot of people say he would have been a good contender: he alienated a lot of the GOP base.  Hell, his first big idea was to nominate JOE LIEBERMAN for the VP spot.  Even with a big scary "radical Marxist Leninist Muslamic Atheist" (ie a black man) on the Democratic ticket base turnout out would have been massively depressed.  By this point while you did have a lot of stubborn war hawks there were many people even in the GOP who were turning mad hard against the Iraq War.  You also had McCain's massive disagreements with the base on issues like gun control and immigration, the latter of which he made a point of being very public about.  Anyone who was awake at all during the 2016 election season should know why this wouldn't help him at all and why many Republicans sat out 2008 while Democratic turnout was THROUGH THE ROOF.

2. Going back to the point about the War in Iraq.  Yeah, most candidates outside of Ron Paul on the GOP side were pretty pro-war but let's take away for a moment the media love of John Sidney McCain for just a second and remember that this guy was the Warhawk of all Warhawks.  In a year when everybody and their grandmother was yelling from the rooftops to pulls us out of Iraq what does McCain do?  He starts joke singing about "Bomb Bomb Bomb Bomb Iran".  Maybe in an alternate reality where the War in Iraq is a smashing success in mid 2008 and everyone likes it he would have a shot at parlaying this expansionist mentality but IRL most everyone who wasn't a bitter Republican partisan disapproved of it.

3. People say McCain had a "lead" in the polls.  At best it was a couple of points and it was for like five minutes.  Those kind of random poll results happen more often than you think even in elections where one side is definitely favored to win over the other.  If there are literally hundreds of polls released in an election year with increases and decreases as candidates make statements/gaffes and immediate responses are recorded of course there's going to be an anomaly that over represents a candidates chances.

4. Even if the markets didn't crash in September 2008 the economy still was far from friendly for Republicans.  The economy had been going down for awhile before that and gas prices were sky high.  At one point I was paying $4.50 a gallon and that was in Oklahoma!  Imagine how high it got in Santa Monica or LA or wherever.  Add this on top of the issues with the war in Iraq and Bush's nuclear approval ratings then yeah no Republican would have a shot in 2008.


Now, I wouldn't debate the idea that McCain was a better candidate than the holy rollers and insert wall street talking point here candidates that he ran against in 2008.  However, the man has always been a very overrated politician largely due to his relationship with the media.  A relationship he cultivated after he ratted out his fellow con artists in the Keating Five scandal because he was so desperate to be a "Great Man" of society.  That doesn't mean he's completely politically inept, after all if he was he wouldn't have armchair news watchers on random forums swearing to the high heavens he was the "perfect Republican" presidential nominee.  Of course there's a reason the media does this, and that reason is WAR.  The media loves it, can't get enough of it, and that's the one thing that Bomber McCain always promised them.  The man hated gay marriage, was totally committed against expanded abortion access, and even opposed the creation of MLK day but you would never know these things because of how much a compliant and syncopathic media went out of it's way to cover these things up by gushing at how good McCain looked in 196whenever in his Navy Blue overalls and how manly he looked when he criticized Religious Right extremists who get disturbed by females in shorts.  But the media and establishment shitlords who want to criticize tax cuts but benefit from them, who want to criticize oil exploitation at the cost of the environment but support foreign policies that expand the pocketbooks of BP and Exon Mobil, who want to cry loudly about how the system favors white men but then promote candidates who are proud wannabe cop lawyers who have an extensive record of supporting policies that imprisoned thousands of minority men and women, have seemed to largely been successful in convincing millions of people that John Bomber McCain was a decent moderate Republican man who would have been good for this country and had the widespread support of everyone despite being everything that tens of millions of Americans hate about the political establishment.

So yeah, this was a bit of a rant.  I'm sorry if I offended anyone's feelings but John McCain was the Audacity of Hype.  You put him in any election besides maybe 2000 (when his image had recovered from the Keating scandal and his FP was popular) he would have been a gigantic epic fail.  That is all.