openmissoula.org

As anticipated, Sen. McCain’s choice of Gov. Palin created problems for the Republican campaign. The Republican VP candidate was not ready for the job and blundered repeatedly during the campaign. Her candidacy was a divisive factor, not only for the national electorate, but for the Republican party itself. Moderate Republicans defected from the party while the evangelical base drifted further into irresponsible hate speech and deluded statements about the economic downturn and foreign policy issues.

And now that the election is over, the Republican base has declared open war on the rest of the party:

For example, Oliver Burkeman reported for The Guardian:

. . . Rush Limbaugh, behemoth of rightwing radio, took to the airwaves to declare war on two enemies: Barack Obama and the Republican party. Bloggers at FreeRepublic.com, an internet hub for conservatives, announced a boycott of Fox News and John McCain’s aides fell over one another to leak embarrassing details about the campaign to the press.

Liberals, indulging in what the writer Andrew Sullivan termed “Palinfreude”, were presented with a smorgasbord, ranging from the tale of how McCain’s pro-Palin foreign policy adviser had his Blackberry confiscated in the closing days of the race, to how the party had paid for Todd Palin’s silk boxer shorts.

The fighting consuming the McCain and Palin camps threatened to derail broader efforts to overhaul the Republican party after Tuesday’s decisive defeat, for which some insiders blamed Sarah Palin. Veterans of the right gathered in the Shenandoah Valley, Virginia, on Thursday for a summit on the movement’s future, but even as they did so, the blame went on.

“Ladies and gentlemen, it is worse than I thought,” Limbaugh told listeners. “What the Republican party, led by disgruntled and failed McCain staffers, is trying to do to Sarah Palin, is unconscionable … There are country-club, blue-blood … Republicans who want nothing to do with a firebrand conservative [who] can fire up people.” He added: “We’re going to be taking on two things here [over] the next four years: Obama, and our own party establishment.”

complete story

Anne E. Kornblut
Washington Post

Sen. Barack Obama, so steady in public, did not hide his vexation when he summoned his top advisers to meet with him in Chicago on Sept. 14.

His general-election campaign had gone stale. For weeks, he had watched Sen. John McCain suction up the oxygen in the race, driving the news coverage after the boisterous Republican convention in St. Paul, Minn., and suddenly drawing huge crowds with his new running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

Convening the meeting that Sunday in the office of David Axelrod, his chief strategist, Obama was blunt: It was time to get serious.

“He said, ‘You know, maybe we can just win it on the issues. But I don’t think so,’ ” recalled senior adviser Anita Dunn. With the debates approaching and just seven weeks until the election, “his charge to everybody was ‘Guys, we’re back in combat mode,’ ” Dunn said.

And then, the next morning, a global earthquake hit: Lehman Brothers, the giant investment firm, filed for bankruptcy, triggering the biggest corporate collapse in U.S. history and an international financial meltdown, and transforming the presidential race.

It was a moment neither the senator from Illinois nor his advisers had anticipated, but one for which they were uniquely prepared. In the days that followed, the newly chastised Obama team became more aggressive, with a message they had refined over the summer. The candidate himself, criticized as too cool, too cerebral and too detached, suddenly had the opportunity to show those qualities to be reassuring and presidential.

For McCain, already struggling with the economic issue, the Wall Street meltdown became part of a much different narrative. By the time the senator from Arizona made the surprise announcement on Sept. 24 that he would suspend his campaign, a powerful image had been framed: of an “erratic,” older Republican who could not be trusted to handle a crisis, economic or otherwise.

In a race that had been thought to be even, the polls showed Obama to be pulling ahead, a lead that he would not relinquish through three debates and the election’s closing weeks.

“It was a pivotal two weeks of the election,” Axelrod said today. “. . . It changed the structure of the race, in that it just never went back. Once people had rendered that verdict, it just didn’t change.”

In the end, both the candidate and the campaign lived up to the challenge Obama outlined that Sunday in Chicago. They benefited from a dose of what his staff called “Obama luck.” But to paraphrase the famous adage of Pasteur, it was the kind of luck that favored only a prepared candidate.

If Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) had been a formidable primary opponent, McCain seemed to present another challenge to Obama — as one of the few Republicans who could potentially slip the damaging shackles of his party and run on his compelling biography as a former prisoner of war and as someone with a record of working with Democrats.

“John McCain had the potential to be the toughest Republican opponent we could have drawn,” said Dan Pfeiffer, Obama’s communications director. “Although his record told a different story, his national celebrity was based on his opposition to President Bush and his reform credentials. On paper, McCain was perfectly suited to run a very strong campaign that nullified some of our strengths and exploited some of our weaknesses.”

Complete Story