From the responses in this thread, the answer is an uncategorical yes. The problem with liberals is that they live in a bubble-world where everything they perceive is reality, and when confronted with the facts they answer, "Reality has a liberal bias." The myth that "Sarah Palin destroyed the McCain campaign" needs to die. Palin single-handedly saved the McCain campaign and attracted unprecedented crowds for a vice-presidential candidate. When Palin was picked, the donations to the McCain campaign wouldn't stop coming. For once, the attention was on the Republican candidate, and the playing field was leveled. The real damage to the McCain campaign came when the economy collapsed and he could not distance himself from Bush.
The fault isn't her intelligence; the fault is her lack of political maturity. She was able to appeal to the base, as is shown in the fundraising. John McCain was close to winning the election going into September -- one big goof by Obama from winning. Nothing says that such a goof was forthcoming, but nothing says that it wasn't. She became a brittle target for the Democrats due to her Kerry-like statement in which she said "Thanks but no thanks" to the funding of the so-called "Bridge to Nowhere" as evidence of fiscal restraint... only to show that she found other uses for the budgeted funds. Her "Real America" nonsense energized the opposite base. Sure, there was more that wrecked McCain's candidacy, including the fervent right-wing rhetoric during the Republican National Convention, rhetoric more strident than anything before associated with McCain. People had to wonder whether they were voting for John McCain or for a maintenance of a Hard Right ideology -- but Sarah Palin didn't know when to shut up. Some things are best left unsaid.
A wiser Republican nominee for Vice President -- let's say Richard Lugar -- would have made far fewer mistakes, would have delivered a state that McCain absolutely had to win (Indiana), and might have played well in some states fairly similar to Indiana in their politics -- Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, and perhaps Iowa and Wisconsin. He would have been fare more effective as a campaigner because nobody would have had to keep him from saying something unwise.
Ronald Reagan is a good parallel.
She got her fifteen minutes of fame and mishandled it. She showed her level of incompetence as a leader. She left no doubt about her inadequacy for the greatest responsibility as Vice-President: to be ready to take over the Presidency in the event of the Unthinkable.
That was a whopper! Even if it were a joke, she created more questions about her wisdom and the relevance of any claims to any special expertise on foreign affairs. It had been shown that she had little experience in foreign travel. Had she ever visited Russia? No. Did she know any conversational Russian? No. Had she ever hosted a Russian delegation in Alaska? Never. About the only cultural connection that she could have had to Russia was to have heard some music by Tchaikovsky. She probably believed that Fyodor Dostoevsky was a KGB chief and that Lev Tolstoy was a political associate of Lenin. She has probably never been inside a Russian Orthodox Church -- in a state that was Russian territory until 1867.
See above.
No, she is a mediocrity. You can tolerate a mediocrity doing a very routine job -- but nothing so complicated as surgery or diplomacy.
In every 'quiet time' immediately after a Convention, the Party that just held the convention gets a so-called "bump". During the week of the convention, the other Party gets little attention while all journalistic attention is focused on the Convention. There was no gap between the Democratic National Convention and the Republican National Convention, so the Democrats never got the "bump" in which they looked as if they were about to make Texas a swing state, but the Republicans got theirs.
But let's remember the definitive answer to the question of how and why Obama won. It was number 43, and that is not a reference to a highway between Green Bay and Milwaukee. After eight years of the most deceitful, corrupt, incoherent, and incompetent President in American history we were ready for the antithesis.
Liberals are more tolerant of liberal bumbling and bromides; conservatives are more tolerant of conservative bumbling and bromides.
Obama now has the tools with which to make electoral dominance of the Democratic Party possible. He controls the agenda, and he seems to handle that role far better than did Dubya.
Huckabee is a right-wing populist at a time in which such can win only in the South. Romney is a corporatist whose cultural ties mostly are to parts of the country in which he has little chance of winning in the general election. Palin can win the Republican base of Christian Fundamentalists, but that is not enough.
We won't have a five-year economic meltdown. Obama is likely to get political capital from an economic turnaround that cannot quickly return America to the heady days of a speculative boom again. Obvious economic progress from a lower level -- mostly the result of people doing things that create wealth before they create the possibility of personal indulgence -- will be enough. High inflation? We have no chance of an overheated economy for the next few years. International turmoil? A reduction would aid Obama greatly, and his administration began with international turmoil at a very high point (our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; genocide in Sudan; and nuke programs in Iran and North Korea).
True! Ideological warriors are always high-risk propositions.
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