Why McCain Lost

"The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime."

--Edward Grey, 1st Viscount Grey of Fallodon (1862-1933)
On the eve of WWI


Re: “Change”:

“The mad mob does not ask how it could be better, only that it be different. And when it then becomes worse, it must change again. Thus they get bees for flies, and at last hornets for bees.”

--Martin Luther



How to assign blame for the Great McCain Debacle of 2008?. Ross Douthat and Rush Limbaugh have argued, respectively, that the McCain loss didn’t represent a failure of moderate conservatism, or that it did.

Let’s sort this out from my point of view.

Obviously McCain tried to woo moderates, the theory being that for a Republican candidate to win a majority, he must win not only the base, but also moderates. These moderates, though, would be frightened off by the “right wing red meat” of an explicitly conservative campaign.

But what is a moderate, anyway? A moderate is a person who is either uninformed, confused, or for other reasons cannot decide between the alternatives. The flaw in the McCain strategy was to assume that this hypothetical moderate person holds to his moderation as a matter of principle rather than as a weakness.

A moderate is a person who is looking for leadership. A moderate is looking for someone to stiffen his spine; to give him a pep-talk; to give him something to believe in. Appealing to “moderateness” as if it were a doctrine someone would be willing to fight and die for represents a fatal category error.

Coaches give pep talks to get languid players to get them to stop being "moderates" out on the field.

The problems that vex us will generally be solved by employing solutions that have some inspiring content that is either left or right of center. Splitting the difference between the two is a recipe for confusion and despair, not principle. Granted: extreme, wild, nutty, or incoherent solutions will turn off moderates as well as any other thoughtful people on either side of the divide. But trying to turn an arbitrary compromise into a rallying cry of principle is a mistake. Principled compromise is something that is achieved only after true ideological adherents find they are at loggerheads after the kind of spirited fight that could have left one side utterly vanquished, obviating the need for any compromise at all.

The kind of ideological compromise we’ve seen the McCain campaign try to sell, though, from it’s inception, is “compromise” in the negative sense of the word, as in compromising one’s principles, which is what senators too often do. This explains a lot.

Imagine a failing football team looking for a new coach. One candidate for the coaching position advocates the west coast offense. Another emphasizes an old-fashioned Bo Schembechler-style running game. In this example, a moderate would be a person who couldn’t decide which approach held the most promise for success. I submit that this moderate is definitely NOT someone who firmly believes that some muddled hybrid combination of the two holds real promise. This moderate is someone who doesn’t know the right answer and is looking for a leader. The leader could strongly in favor one approach or the other, or some third thing. But not some mushy combination or compromise between the two positions.

When, say, a Ronald Reagan comes along, a typical moderate could be persuaded to follow such a relatively conservative candidate if that candidate appeared to be strong, persuasive, winsome, self-confident, and the timing was right for his message. A moderate candidate in the same election would not fare any better among moderate voters just because he was, well, “in the middle” ideologically. The moderate voter looks at the moderate candidate and subconsciously thinks, “This guy is as confused as I am,” or, “This guy isn’t offering any leadership.”

McCain in 2008 made a fundamental error in assuming that a majority coalition could be amassed trying to add some mushy middle to the Republican base. That middle looked at McCain and thought that while McCain was heroic in Vietnam, he certainly was not much of a leader in the ideological battles of 2008. That moderate looked at Obama and saw a self-possessed, reasonable-looking “leader” with a seemingly consistent message and a vision for solving America’s vexing problems. Never mind that Obama is a socialist. That wasn’t going to get out in 2008 with the mainstream media “in the tank” him. The moderate voter just saw a candidate with a consistent commitment to well-being of the middle class and the poor.

And it may be that it could have been difficult for any Republican to prevail in 2008 considering the damage done to the Republican brand over the last 8 years. But considering that George W. Bush did the limbo dance since 2001 trying to be a moderate, it isn’t surprising that the brand was damaged with moderate-seeking muddleheadedness. W a moderate, you say? Why yes; what else do you call “compassionate conservatism” but mushy moderation? What else do you call conducting a war that included trying to reconstruct a whole society, rather than just blowing up stuff and killing people, like armies are supposed to do? (If we were afraid of a power vacuum in Iraq, we should have just occupied the place. If we didn’t want to do that, we shouldn’t have gone in). What do you call coercing taxpayers to pay for other people’s prescription drugs? What do you call record expenditures for social programs? It certainly wasn’t conservatism. Whoever warned that those who remain in the middle of the road will get run over, was right. Just ask W (Never mind those who argue that Bush’s moderate initiatives were more popular than the times he was more traditional in his conservatism. I would argue that good old fashioned “smiting and wrath” conservatism wins respect, because it honestly says, “These things are True. These truths are permanent.” --- “‘Laissez-faire, c'est fini’; Sarkozy, I disagree”)

Trying to be a moderate, Bush’s numbers tanked. Trying to appeal to moderates as a moderate, rather than providing leadership and direction to moderates, McCain was unable to beat the leftward most presidential candidate in history.

Losing his base halfway through the campaign, McCain chose Sarah Palin as a running mate. Despite being rough around the edges, she was a sensation. She had the guts to stand up to Obama and Joe Biden. Her critics weren’t going to vote for her anyway. Do I think she should spend some time reading Kirk and Hayek and Friedman (and Whittaker Chambers and Buckley and Adam Smith and the whole Regnery stable) in the next year or so? Sure. She should have performed much better in the gotcha interviews. But she should study intellectual conservatism so she can grow in intellectual depth, not change who she is. She was just fine as she was, and she was more inspiring to moderates because she showed the classic virtues of strength, courage, self-confidence (including ideological self-confidence), humor, and compassion. In fact, I think she showed a particularly feminine brand of self confidence, that je ne sais quoi that Camille Paglia and others were trying to describe. We’re used to male self-confidence, in our sports heroes, for example. But genuine female self-confidence, while common in our mothers and grandmothers, for example, is rare among famous women, such as movie stars, with their eating disorders and other neuroses. Many moderates who were not snobs were turned on by this self-confident woman, even if they were not as conservative as she was.

In the last two weeks of the campaign we heard cries from the McCain campaign that Sarah was “going rogue” by speaking off-message (as if their message had been particularly effective). Would that the whole McCain campaign had gone rogue from the campaign’s management.

Palin showed the kind of guts and leadership that was more persuasive to moderates than the pabulum otherwise served up by the campaign. Sure some moderates were lost, but those particular moderates would have been lost anyway. And many others were inspired to be supporters.

The lamps are going out all over America. We may not see them lit again in my lifetime. Time to join the Resistance. But if there’s still a free country left, there’s “next time”:

“Palin-Jindal ’12”!