The appointment of Sarah Palin as his VP was the kiss of death to McCain's run for the US Presidency.

"If only this guy would have run for President rather than the pseudo-McCain we saw months ago! He might have won!"

That is wrong both ways. He was not a "pseudo". You just decided he was because you weren't paying attention. He got blasted by the hard right for being too moderate, and he won the nomination despite that.

The reason he lost was because Bush sucked so much, voters threw out the incumbent party. McCain could not have overcome just by being what he was, because he was what he was.

I just hope McCain can take a bit of control of the Republican party and turn at least a decent portion of it into his ideals.

Also on the subject of the 'big three' the reason why they need to be rescued is because them failing will cause major problems, the amount of jobs lost and industry screwed over is scary. Personally I think it serves them right if they fail and it serves the American economy right too, still the economic effects of them failing will be felt worldwide.

There is always 2012 for McCain to win the next election, assuming Obama stuffs up more than Bush in the next four years. There is still hope for President McCain in 2012.

He will however be 76 at that time as will Dr. Paul.  I took it that this past cycle wants "fresh faces."  I always liked McCain (heck I worked for the campaign for months) but he is actually running for the R-AZ Senate seat in 2010.  Sorry!

Very true.  There are many at fault here.  UAW, the companies' management, Congress, incentives for Japanese and European carmakers to build plants here, some unfair trade deals (the current Korea deal with regard to cars comes to mind), all of these have had roles to play in making today's situation reality.  That's why it's so tough.  But really, if these companies had a good plan to return to profitability, don't you think someone would lend them $14 billion?

Funny, the Economist agreed with me when they endorsed Obama.  Do you seriously always have to play devil's advocate?  I've seen you defend a point after I have proved in wrong in multiple different ways seemingly just for the sake of argument.  Just because someone says something negative doesn't mean it isn't true. 

I've always liked McCain, but I certainly didn't like the fact that he was running a campaign as someone different than himself.  Its still probably unlikely that he would have won, but he was doing pretty well until the economy buckled under.  Stranger things have happened.  We did elect Bush twice.

http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=12511171

If only the real John McCain had been running

That, however, was Senator McCain; the Candidate McCain of the past six months has too often seemed the victim of political sorcery, his good features magically inverted, his bad ones exaggerated. The fiscal conservative who once tackled Mr Bush over his unaffordable tax cuts now proposes not just to keep the cuts, but to deepen them. The man who denounced the religious right as “agents of intolerance” now embraces theocratic culture warriors. The campaigner against ethanol subsidies (who had a better record on global warming than most Democrats) came out in favour of a petrol-tax holiday. It has not all disappeared: his support for free trade has never wavered. Yet rather than heading towards the centre after he won the nomination, Mr McCain moved to the right.

Man, it's like poetry!  I couldn't have said it better myself!  I guess you are going to call The Economist biased now, even though they are a relatively conservative magazine.

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.

"You can't win a national election just by pleasing your party base, a trap McCain fell into."

He did not. He pissed them off. He did not move to right. You just assumed he did. McCain fell in the polls when the economy tanked, not when the news media twisted his words to make him look like a neo-con.