Right Campaign, Wrong Environment

With a week to go before Election Day everyone but Senator John McCain has written off his chances. The major networks are talking about calling the race early in the evening while promising to be 'thoughtful' before letting America know that Senator Barack Obama will be our next president. No doubt, McCain's path to victory is narrow and allows no room for mistakes. And while the post-mortems already abound, let's not forget that just about four weeks ago, the McCain campaign enjoyed a small and tenuous lead in the polls. Regardless of the outcome next Tuesday, several key events tell the story of Senator McCain's campaign.

Nine months ago, John McCain stood atop the heap of Republican hopefuls. Having secured the party's nomination, the campaign's fundraising picked up precipitously. But the structural, logistical and message advantages of running unopposed for four months were allowed to slip away. With Obama and Hillary Clinton dueling during their tortuous and increasingly vitriolic primary campaign, the McCain campaign allowed week after week to pass without providing for the structural needs of a modern get-out-the-vote program or properly positioning their nominee for victory against either of his potential opponents. Additionally, there was little-to-no effort to substantively, but diplomatically, separate themselves from President Bush on any range of issues. In retrospect, this is not much of a surprise: John McCain's campaigns are marked by being emotive rather than efficient and driven by biography rather than message. Add to this a cultural inability (or unwillingness) of doing anything that resembled running a campaign like that of President Bush, regardless of past results.

The long and winding spring of the McCain campaign reached its nadir as the candidate stood before his now-infamous green backdrop and gave a speech with which he was clearly not comfortable. While the event spawned a spate of process stories, it also marked a point at which the McCain campaign buckled down, found its voice and displayed as yet unseen discipline. Throughout the summer they clawed their way back into contention. As the Democratic Convention approached and Senator Obama prepared for his coronation, his supporters panicked that he was becoming the next incarnation of Al Gore or John Kerry. In fact, Obama's vaunted acceptance speech was overshadowed completely by the news that Governor Sarah Palin had been chosen as John McCain's running mate.

Many look back on the pick of Palin as the beginning of the end of the campaign. This is over-stating it to the extreme. It was absolutely imperative that John McCain galvanize base Republicans who to this day don't completely trust him. While he has always been popular with independents and some Democrats, in the end a campaign can't win with only the middle. Palin brought the base home and they have fallen hard for her; there's a reason why tens of thousands of people show up to her rallies. Senator Lindsey Graham's assertion that the ticket would have been better off with Joe Lieberman as running mate is both false and ignores a simple fact: Lieberman never would have survived the Republican convention's nominating process. While a class act, Lieberman has openly admitted the only issue he shares with Republicans is national security. On a side-note, that a senior counselor to a Presidential nominee would criticize the pick of a running mate while the campaign is on-going shows a shocking lack of discipline on Graham's part; he could have at least waited until November 5th.

In the end, though, it will be the economy that provided Senator McCain's biggest obstacle to the White House. Bookended by his statements that economics aren't his strong suit and that the fundamentals of the system were strong on the same day the melt down began, it may have been a hole he could never have climbed out of. His much-maligned campaign suspension was brought about by the fact that everyone in Washington, from Harry Reid to John Boehner said that a deal couldn't be struck without his presence in the Capitol. When he did show up, though, by all accounts, the Senator didn't add much to any discussions in which he was involved; either unwilling or unable to take a more active role. The defection of House Republicans, never a real constituency for him anyway, served only to cement the public perception that McCain was out of touch with what was really happening.

As the McCain campaign spends the next week looking at an increasingly difficult map, the outcome will most likely be decided by events outside their control. Surely, they would have preferred not to run in an environment where the incumbent president is below 30% and the economy is in its greatest crisis in 80 years. Ultimately, a campaign is a mirror image of its candidate. Senator McCain, win or lose, got the campaign, but certainly not the environment, that he wanted. We can now only wait and see if Americans believe, despite indications to the contrary, he's convincingly made his case.