This may have been the week that McCain lost the election. Bold? Maybe. But he had an opportunity to be presidential and made three major mistakes in areas considered his strengths.
1. He said on Monday that the economy was fundamentally strong. He had to backpedal by Wednesday when many analysts identified the current finanicial crisis as the worst it has been since the Depression and maybe even in U.S. history. Strike one.
2. He put out a sleazy ad accusing Obama of getting his advice on mortgages and finance from Franklin Raines, the former head of Fannie Mae who has now been discredited. In the very best case scenario for McCain it was a wild exaggeration (this according to the Washington Post, the source the ad cited). But by most accounts it is simply a lie designed to implicate Obama as somehow complicit in the current mortgage mess.
Oops! Big mistake! Why? Because that gave the Obama camp a chance to run its own campaign ad which was able to tag McCain on three fronts. Worse, the ad is accurate and cannot be refuted by McCain. The ad captured McCain’s resistance to regulation, his association with Phil Gramm who uttered the infamous “nation of whiners”, and his comments about the economy being in good shape. Strike two.
3. After Lehman Brothers failed and AIG was on deck, McCain decided the way to be presidential was to fire the head of the SEC. Never mind that the SEC could not do anything about the crisis because the subprime mess was outside of the SEC’s regulatory bubble. Why was it outside their jurisdiction? Because McCain, and conservatives in general, are allergic to the word “regulation”. Strike three.
In the meantime, Obama withheld comment until the President made his remarks. By all accounts, Obama was cool-headed throughout the week, even while his own campaign was urging him to jump on the issue.
The result was almost a reversal of what would normally be expected. McCain, the experience candidate, looked like a hothead who had no clue about what was really happening around him. When he did finally get that we had a real problem, his response was “ready, fire, aim”. Obama held back and assessed the situation. But really, this is not about Obama. It is about McCain leveling the “experience” playing field by proving that his brand of experience may be more damaging than helpful if he is elected.
With the experience issue off the table as a real differentiator, McCain has now managed to eliminate almost all of his appeal. He was the straight-talk guy – not anymore. He was the high-road, clean campaigner – he has fired some very low blows and lost the high road in a big way. He was the voice of experience, but his experience has him flummoxed and firing wildly looking for a target. He was the maverick who could buck his party, but that was apparently another McCain who left the building eight years ago. He has an “exciting” running mate that nobody knows and who is even more straight-line, right-wing Republican than McCain. Oh yeah, and she kept the $100M that she keeps taking the credit for rejecting. Of course, she is not the one who had “Straight Talk” painted on the campaign bus she now rides in.
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