| halogamer1989 said: You can't freaking win for losing. With McCain it was a damned if u do, damned if u don't deal with the right wing evangelical base of our party and the disdain from ind. and liberals. Don't get me wrong, I love that base as I am a part of it but the way he went about it was just tacky. We should have nominated someone else but hindsight is always 20/20 I'm afraid. |
This is why the Republican Party is in shambles, because the vocal minority has complete control over the party. You can't win a national election just by pleasing your party base, a trap McCain fell into. The far right of the Republican Party has far too much power over the entire party's agenda, which is one of the reasons why things have gone so poorly for the Republicans the last few elections. They have a "You are with us or you are against us," kind of attitude. Its extremely childish and has even divided Republicans as a party.
There are just as many loonly people on the far left, but they aren't in the driver's seat of the Democratic Party. Obama has been incredibly wise to move to the center during the election and to remain near the center after he won. Sure your party may not always like it, but what are they gonna do, vote Republican? Just imagine somebody like Rush Limbaugh going to vote for a Democrat, its not going to happen. If you piss a few people off, so be it. You are risking a lot more by abandoning the center than by moving toward the extreme end of your own party.
This was one of the fatal mistakes McCain made, running a traditional Republican campaign in a time when the Republican brand name was having a "going out of business" sale. Did he really think he could win a national election by moving further to the right, especially considering it is completely against his nature to do so? I'm still baffled by his choices. Republicans can complain all they want that McCain needed to please the base, but statistically Democrats are more likely to abandon their candidate than Republicans (who tend to be the "fall in line" kind of party). Did that worry Obama? Nope, because he knew how to run a national campaign, which is why he won Virginia, North Carolina, New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado, Indiana, Ohio, Florida, and he almost won a few more safe red states like Missourri and Montana.
And as several top Republicans said after McCain lost, if McCain couldn't have won the election, then none of us could in this political climate.
We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. –Raoul Duke
It is hard to shed anything but crocodile tears over White House speechwriter Patrick Buchanan's tragic analysis of the Nixon debacle. "It's like Sisyphus," he said. "We rolled the rock all the way up the mountain...and it rolled right back down on us...." Neither Sisyphus nor the commander of the Light Brigade nor Pat Buchanan had the time or any real inclination to question what they were doing...a martyr, to the bitter end, to a "flawed" cause and a narrow, atavistic concept of conservative politics that has done more damage to itself and the country in less than six years than its liberal enemies could have done in two or three decades. -Hunter S. Thompson
