Bush ran a lousy campaign in 1992. Talk about uninspiring ... Dole, much the same way, though it is telling that about 100% of the undecideds broke for Dole on election day. Bush ran a good campaign in 2000, good, not great. It should never have been as close as it was, though. Bush has the superb Democrat GOTV efforts to blame for that.
Bush's campaign in 2004 was just about the best campaign up there, and still it failed to produce a landslide victory. He won, however, with some seats in Congress to boot.
The problem wasn't with the campaign; the problem was with the product.
McCain may have run a nice-guy campaign, but the GOP ran the nasty Atwater/Rove style of campaign... and the more the GOP ran that campaign, the better Obama did. The idea was to cast Obama as an extremist -- which worked very well for LBJ against Goldwater or Nixon against McGovern. It failed badly when the Carter campaign tried it against Reagan -- because Reagan turned on the charm and showed himself too pragmatic to be an extremist. Obama has much the same political skills as Ronald Reagan, and he did much the same as did Reagan.
The schizophrenic Party-nominee divide works -- to bring defeat. I don't say that McCain would have won; without it; I just think that the election of 2008 would have been far closer, and the GOP might not have lost some of the Senate seats that it lost.
Poll
