In less than two weeks, the conservative camp appears to be reduced to shambles. Polls are cruel, of course, but the amount of finger-pointing, and the speed of defections from the McCain campaign are nevertheless astonishing. It started in September with several voices critical of the choice of Sarah Palin (most prominently, George Will). In October, we already reported the grumbling on the Right after the second debate, with writers from the National Review and the Weekly Standard clearly distancing themselves from John McCain.
Last Saturday, it was the turn of Christopher Buckley, booted from the same National Review that his father founded because of his endorsement of Obama, and Monday Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, proposed quite seriously of firing the entire McCain's team.
The same day, former Bush's speechwriter David Frum had this to say in his blog: "Do my correspondents truly believe that - but for my pitiful media and social ambitions - nobody in America would have noticed that Sarah Palin cannot speak three coherent consecutive words about finance or economics? In the past month, Sarah Palin's negative ratings have risen by 12 points. She briefly boosted the McCain ticket, but that effect subsided by the end of September. Blue-collar white women (!) now reject Palin as unqualified for the presidency 48-43, according to the Wall-Street Journal/NBC poll.
On Tuesday, Matthew Dowd, a political consultant and former chief strategist for George W. Bush's in 2004, proclaimed during the Time Warner Summit panel that, in his heart of hearts, McCain knew he put the country at risk with his VP choice and that he would "have to live" with that fact for the rest of his career. And the show goes on.
Actually, Dowd said something very interesting: "They didn't let John McCain pick the person he wanted to pick as VP, when Sarah Palin got picked instead of Joe Lieberman." His idea is that a candidate must trust his own instincts, and not let his handlers take vital decisions. This is precisely what reporter Joe Klein wrote a few years ago in a book about the rise of political consultants,a process that trivialized American politics and debased the democratic process.
In Politics Lost, Klein wrote that in 1976, when he tried to snatch the republican nomination from Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan hired a consultant named John Sears, whom he didn't know and who didn't share his right-wing instincts. But when he ran for president again in 1980, Reagan fired Sears, trusting his gut when it mattered most. By contrast, Gore in 2000 and Kerry in 2004 lacked the self-confidence to fire the consultants who kept them from saying what they really believed. Gore, a passionate environmentalist, wanted to talk about global warming. But when he did, he was sabotaged by his own advisers, who forced him back to poll-tested standbys like Social Security and prescription drugs -- and, in the process, turned him into a robot. Kerry's anti-Vietnam activism went to the core of his political soul. But high-priced consultants such as Bob Shrum considered the subject too risky to mention. So Kerry didn't tell Americans about this crucial aspect of his political and moral development and left the so-called Swift Boat Veterans who smeared him to do it instead.
Gore and Kerry paid the price for not being true to themselves, and so will John McCain, who never was a right-wing nut like George W. Bush and his cronies. He understood that in a year when the winds blow in the Democratic sails, independent voters will be a key constituency. He appealed to them, and Lieberman, a Democratic turncoat, would have been the natural choice to give the ticket a coherent profile.
It's not his fault if the Republican political machine is dominated by zealots, who never loved him and imposed a Karl Rove protege, Steve Schmidt, as chief of his campaign. It was Schmidt, who only knows Rove's strategy of "mobilizing the faithful" who vetoed Lieberman and picked Sarah Palin, with the effect of energizing the base... and alienating everybody else. But it was his fault to accept Schmidt and let him manage the campaign.
John McCain should have trusted his instincts: maybe he would have lost anyway, but he would have spared himself, and the Country, the sight of angry mobs chanting "Kill him! Kill him!," not to mention the embarrassment of someone like Sarah Palin in the spotlight.
