McCain’s Bad Luck
At least one MSM writer gets it. Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Jonathan Last recognizes that McCain has suffered some of the worst luck a presidential candidate can suffer.
Furthermore, with one exception (Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel), no Republican in Congress had been more critical of President Bush’s administration than McCain. He was the only Republican to seriously oppose Bush in 2000, and the two had never been personally close.And yet the Obama campaign, with some success, has depicted McCain as Bush’s heir. And it wasn’t just Bush who was being hung around McCain’s neck. In September, the Obama campaign ran ads tying McCain to Rush Limbaugh.
Limbaugh, of course, detests McCain, having said during the primaries that he would vote for Obama or Hillary Clinton before casting a ballot for the Arizona senator. McCain had always worn this scorn as a badge of honor. But now he was getting it coming and going.
Had Wall Street not melted down over the past month, or had some foreign policy crisis arisen, McCain would have surged even with the majority of the mainstream media working against him. But economic trouble traditionally leads to Democrat surges – unless the Democrats are in power in which case, like Jimmy Carter in 1980, the Republicans benefit.
John McCain deserves better than this. If anyone deserves blame for the failure of John McCain to achieve the presidency, it’s the Bushes. McCain’s best shot was in 2000, and had he survived the Super Tuesday hit by the Bushes, I believe that he would have handled things much better than the ultimate winner, George W. Bush.
But we will never know.
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