A prediction for the election and a rundown of the campaign's biggest mistakes.

Here are my predictions for tomorrow’s US election

Popular Vote
Barack Obama 52.5%
John McCain 46.5%

Electoral Votes
Barack Obama 377
John McCain 161

Three Gaffes: Palin, The Suspension, Plummer Joe And Alternative Theories That Could Have Made The Result Different

Having written a review of ‘W’ for the team990.com,

(http://www.team990.com/blog/view/article/w_reviewed_by_jimmy_g/)

I decided to continue my political discourse a step further and discuss the American election.

To be more precise, I’d like to discuss the reasons why the pollsters suggest that John McCain will not be elected President of the United States.  The following isn’t meant to denigrate McCain, who is a true hero, but merely to highlight his campaign’s failures, all of which have led us to this point in time.

Picking A Vice President Is Really A Simple Task

When it comes to selecting a number two for the ticket, all the nominees have to keep in mind is a easy to remember formula: first do no harm.  Be as boring as you have to be, because nobody will pay attention to vice presidential pick anyway.  Just as long as they meet the only requirement: basic competency.

Forget the pundits and the bloggers and the talking heads.  They always talk about how a veep has to either appeal to independant voters or consolidate the base or, in a perfect world, guarantee electoral votes in a particular state or region.

History suggests that these factors are simply irrelevant.  So why do they get discussed every four years?  It beats me, I have no idea.

The biggest myth is that by selecting someone from a big state you’ll win that state and all it’s electoral vote riches.  If you don’t think it’s a myth, here’s a newsflash for you.

New Yorker Geraldine Ferraro was Walter Mondale’s running mate in 1984.  31 very crucial electoral votes were won by ...Ronald Reagan.

Texan Lloyd Bentsen was Dukakis’ choice in 1988.  Texas’ 34 electoral votes went to... the first George Bush.

How about 2004?  John Edwards was supposed to bring North AND South Carolina into the Kerry camp (combined 23 electoral votes)?  Result: Kerry did WORSE in those 2 states than Al Gore did in 2000!

How about the winners? Here are the two best examples.

Ronald Reagan selected the first George Bush, as boring a choice as can be who added no real electoral stronghold to the mix.  Reagan won.  Twice.

The second George Bush went with a very safe, very boring choice as well: Dick Cheney from the electoral wasteland of Wyoming (only 3 electoral votes).  No frills, no extravaganza, nothing fancy.  Bush number 2 won.  Twice.

There are only two words that mean anything to the voters when they think “vice president”: basic competency.

If you are a candidate running for president, the noise that you want to hear after you make your announcement is.....silence.  If the media and the voters aren’t talking about your pick, that means you made the right decision.

Barack Obama chose Delaware Senator Joe Biden.  In many ways Joe Biden is similar to Dick Cheney.  They come from states that have no electoral significance, and they’re both old, white, boring.  Another element they share is that after their announcement, they became irrelevant.

Biden is irrelevant? That means that Obama made the right choice.

Obama made the right choice.  Boring but correct.  This put the ball in John McCain’s court.

Sarah Palin?

John McCain picked Sarah Palin to be his running mate on a Friday afternoon in late August.  By the end of that weekend, I knew that picking Sarah Palin was most likely going to cost John McCain the election.

How did I know this?  Sarah Palin wasn’t giving interviews.  Sarah Palin wasn’t making any public statements. Worse yet, Sarah Palin was being completely shielded from the press, and by extension, the public. 

The question is why?  Why would the campaign hide Sarah Palin, their self proclaimed ‘best choice’? The critics were out in full force that weekend calling Sarah Palin ‘inexperienced’ and ‘dangerously unqualified’, and those were the nice words. The only reasonable solution to this problem was for  the McCain team to let ‘Palin be Palin’, a phrase that came to unfortunate prominence soonafter.

I knew then and there that Palin was going to bring McCain down.

If Sarah Palin was truly qualified, truly, truly ready to be president, (which is the main job of the vice president) the campaign would have made certain to highlight her in full force on all the talk shows immediately.  And if the McCain campaign thought that putting Palin on TV was too much of a risk, then selected stump speeches in front of appreciative audiences would have been a safer option.

So why didn’t Palin hit the talk show circuit right away, or the stump, prior to making her speech at the Republican convention?

Because Sarah Palin was simply not able to communicate at the  level required in American politics.  If you saw her debate with Joe Biden, you couldn’t help but notice that every question was answered with bullet talking points that sometimes had nothing to do with the question.  And in the second half of the debate, she just repeated many of the talking points word for word, using slightly different sentences.  Palin had run out of original material.

Say what you will about George W. Bush, but he was able to convey his message, whatever it may have been, in an effective manner. Bush knew enough about public policy to get a pass from the media and the voters.  Plus, as a two term governor of a huge state like Texas, he had built in credibility.   It also helped that W ran against a bunch of so called ‘elitists’ (Gore and Kerry) but that is another matter entirely.  McCain didn’t have the luxury of an opponent  with Gore or Kerry-like characteristics, just a juggernaut known as Barack Obama.

So Why Was Palin Picked?

Picking Sarah Palin was an unfortunate mistake.  Everyone is entitled to an error in judgement.

What surprised me however, was the process, not the actual selection.

Every four years, nominees announce that they have created a committee to investigate all those under consideration for the number two slot on the ticket.

This means that the paperwork will fly.  Of particular interest to the investigative team are (a)tax returns (b)personal indiscretions such as infidelity (c)voting record (d)business dealings (e)public statements and (f)family history.  Prospective candidates are asked to provide every little detail and to fill out reams of questionnaires.

From this information, the list gets dwindled down to a final group, and those lucky enough to survive will have been researched endlessly over the course of many months.

Having written all this, I have just one question: what happened to John McCain and his vetting team?

Case in point: on the afternoon that McCain introduced Palin to the world, I did a google search to find out who this Sarah Palin was.  What did I find? Pretty much everything that ended up being written about her in the following weeks, namely the negative stuff.  And apparently, the McCain team was not aware of any of these details, or, if they were, they didn’t know how significantly different the truth was compared to what Palin had told them.

A google search would have told McCain’s team that Palin supported the Bridge to Nowhere, that she was under state investigation for her role in ‘Troopergate’, that her ‘maverick’ status was mainly a mirage used as a branding tool, and that Palin had no substance on policy questions whatsoever.

You don’t believe me?  Her debates from the 2006 governor’s race were on YouTube that afternoon.  I watched the first twenty minutes and was horrified at how Palin finessed every question and gave  the most generic answers imaginable.

The situation reminded me the Simpson’s episode when Homer becomes the mascot for the Springfield Isotopes, a minor league baseball team.  Homer becomes such a smash that he ends up  getting a call to join the Capital City major league club.

But when Homer debuted his act in the big leagues, the crowd just yawned.  There was no reaction whatsoever.  Finally, someone says “that stuff might work in the sticks, but this is Capital City”.  The meaning is obvious. Homer’s dancing might be effective in a small crowd that doesn’t expect much of anything, but in the big leagues you need a more professional approach. 

Sarah Palin’s shtick might have been successful in a small state such as Alaska, but expecting that approach to translate at the national level was folly.

Now all this was information that anyone with a computer  could discover.  There was nothing secret about it.  Public record, it can be called.

So the question is: if I can figure out that Sarah Palin had huge holes in her resume and supposed talent within 24 hours, couldn’t McCain’s staff have done likewise?  And if they disagreed with my conclusions and still wanted Palin on the ticket, couldn’t they have done a better job in preparing her for the spotlight?

Couldn’t the McCain team have figured out how difficult, nay impossible, it would be to sell Palin as a legitimate selection?  Why did Palin announce straightaway that she would pick up the mantle that Hillary Clinton left behind?  How can an inexperienced, unknown governor from the state of Alaska (!) even compare herself to the well respected former First Lady and Senator?  Didn’t the McCain team realize that the comparison, though technically correct, was a non starter with Democratic women?  Ladies, you voted for Hillary in the primaries, now that she’s out, please vote for the next woman who’s name is on the ballot.  No thank you, women replied vociferously. 

Picking Sarah Palin as the vice presidential nominee was a monumental blunder on John McCain’s part. There’s no other way to say it. Calling the selection of Palin a ‘blunder’ does not make me unique among the punditocracy but it nevertheless is true.

Sarah Palin started out with a bang, that much is true.  A relative unknown on the national stage, she knocked them dead at the Republican Convention, an opinion shared unanimously by all her supporters and more importantly, her critics as well.

But something was wrong, and what followed her highly successful speech provided the evidence.

When the McCain team realized that they couldn’t hide Sarah Palin forever, they threw her to the wolves and hoped for the best.  The wolves were Katie Couric and Charles Gibson.

It became painfully clear that Sarah Palin wasn’t ready for prime time once she started to answer questions.  What was surprising was that Palin was treated with kid gloves by both network anchors.  Kouric and Gibson threw nothing but softballs Palin’s way in order to avoid charges of sexism.  They couldn’t have been more polite, which is why the complaints about liberal bias towards Sarah Palin fell on deaf ears as the campaign wore on. 
                                       
And yet, and yet, Palin still failed to give answers that had any type of substance.  It was quite clear that Sarah Palin knew absolutely nothing about foreign policy or John McCain’s record.

I chuckled when I saw Amy Poehler and Tina Fey’s Saturday Night Live parody of the Couric-Palin conversations.  It was  funny yes, however, they couldn’t even compare to the original.  The reality is that Sarah Palin’s actual talk with Katie Couric was much funnier than anything ‘Saturday Night Live’ could produce.

I hate using the word ‘simple’ all the time, but it really is that ‘simple’.  Sarah Palin’s experience wasn’t the issue.  Her age wasn’t the issue either. 

What mattered was how she was originally presented to the public.  It was all wrong.  Instead of having her give interviews to everyone in sight, thereby controlling her public image, the campaign tried to do it for her.  The McCain team decided instead to highlight Palin’s thin record, inflate her basic competence which appeared non-existent and made excuses for Palin’s lack of foreign policy experience: she was in charge of the Alaskan National Guard. 

If Sarah Palin wasn’t allowed to speak for herself for reasons that became clear as the campaign wore on, then the least the McCain team could have done was figure out how to both hide her weaknesses and bolster her strengths.

John McCain went for the quick strike by choosing an unqualified, unprepared neophyte and received a bump in the polls for doing so.  Until, that is, their project failed in public view.

There’s an old saying: long term pain for short term gain.  McCain did the exact opposite.  He scored the quick hit without realizing that a presidential campaign is a marathon, not a sprint.

Strike One for John McCain

McCain And The Financial Crisis

This was the nail in the coffin for the McCain campaign.  The economy is a mess.  The entire nation  is nervously worried about their financial security.  Noone knew how to fix the problem.  The polls had Obama and McCain tied, both nationally and in the battleground states.

So, at a time when leadership, or perception of leadership was at a premium, John McCain decided to.....wait for it....suspend his campaign.  Why?  McCain’s answer: so he can go back to Washington and bring everyone together to strike a government deal that would, presumably, solve everything.

I am not a campaign operator, just a political analyst, and maybe not even a good one, but I would never, never in a million years suggest to any candidate that they stop their campaign for any reason.

Voters may not trust their politicians but they still expect their leaders to lead in tough times.  Especially in tough times.  I  remember McCain’s Wednesday press conference vividly.  When McCain announced that he would be returning to Washington to strike a deal, I though to myself: good god, this election is over.  McCain proved  in one fell swoop that he was unable to, in purely political perception, walk and chew gum at the same time.  Unfair though it may seem, perception is everything.

And what made things worse for McCain, he went to Washington, sat in on a White House meeting, and did nothing.  He didn’t try to convince his fellow Republicans to sign on to the original Treasury Bill, nor did he propose any alternatives, therefore rendering his campaign suspension as a stunt, which is how the media filtered everything that followed.  Was it truly a stunt?  It doesn’t matter.  It just seemed like one, to the detriment of the McCain campaign.

Similar to the Palin pick, McCain tried to score a quick hit by creating a stir.  Unlike the Palin pick, which took a few weeks to fall apart, this strategy backfired very instantly and if the current polls are any indication, McCain has never recovered.

Strike Two for John McCain

Joe The Plummer

Maybe I’m an elitist but how can any modern presidential campaign use someone like Joe The Plummer as a positive symbol? Okay so he had a conversation with Obama in which he got Obama to admit that his tax plan is to ‘spread the wealth around’.  Great job.  I am not sure what that is supposed to mean, but it got on YouTube and now Joe is a celebrity.  Great for Joe, he’ll move up a few tax brackets if he uses his celebrity wisely during his 15 minutes of fame. 

But why is Joe a celebrity? Well, after his confrontation with Obama, John McCain decided to mention Joe’s name 18 times during the final debate.  No, seriously.  Here is a guy that McCain knew absolutely nothing about and his team has done no research on whatsoever.   This from the man/team who selected Sarah Palin (any connection there?) And yet, and yet...the campaign team was comfortable enough to make Joe the centerpiece for the culmination of John McCain’s lifelong ambition.

What does it say about John McCain that he has spent the last nine years (probably more) diligently plotting his ascent to the White House.  He has raised over 400 million dollars by travelling across the country sleeping in motels every night. He probably hasn’t had consecutive days of rest, he probably hasn’t slept past six am this past decade and yet...when it came time to find a centerpiece that would define his lifelong dream, he chose a guy he knew nothing about....Joe The Plummer.

Having said all that about Joe, I have to admit that the possibilities were there.  And that is what bothered me about Joe The Plummer.  It wasn’t how the McCain team used him, it’s that they completely misused him.

It’s really very simple: the McCain team should have taken Joe and created a character that could resonate with the public.  How, you might ask?
                                                       
Simple.  Find out everything there is to know about Joe, the good and the bad. 

Then you introduce Joe to the public in a way that makes him look like an independant thinker.  ‘Joe’s not a Republican, he’s not a Democrat, he’s just looking for the right President’.

Then, just as the introduction is made (via a friendly media outlet, say maybe Fox News) you make sure that the negatives are brought into the equation.  But in a way that makes Joe into a normal guy suffering from what normal people suffer from.  Yeah, he didn’t pay his taxes, but the economy has been tough for everyone.  Sure he’s not a plummer, but he can’t afford the license.  And so what if Joe don’t know foreign policy?  He’s still an American and he is searching for a President.

And then, as Joe is presumably given more attention because of his encounter with Obama, he will come out and say that he has not decided who he’ll vote for.  He’s still trying to make up his mind but he’s got problems with both candidates.

That is how you create a character than helps your campaign.  In many ways, it is the recreation of the plot from Gary Cooper’s ‘Meet John Doe’.  People start paying attention to this normal person who reminds them of themselves or someone they know, imperfections and all.

Finally, after much reflection, Joe steps up to the microphone and announces his decision: it was tough, both candidates are good and decent, but McCain would make the best president.

Now that is the proper strategy in create a positive character that will help your campaign.  Hollywood hogwash you might say, but if scripted properly it can be highly effective.                
Instead the McCain campaign did it wrong.  Before realizing that Joe was a tax cheat and not even a licensed plummer, they tried to turn him into an everyday hero for the working class.  Joe appeared at rallies and started giving interviews in which he expounded on his political beliefs.   Joe opening his mouth wasn’t the problem.

Joe sounding like a Republican was the problem.  If you’re going to create a character like Joe The Plummer you have to make sure that he is an independant thinker who doesn’t belong to any party.  Joe has to stand alone, sailing against the wind.   Independance equals impact.

When Joe all but comes out and supports John McCain from the get go, any potential positive effect on voters is lost.  It’s like reading a murder mystery where the writers tells us the butler did it on page one.  So why keep reading?

If McCain wanted to appeal to ordinary America, Joe as was was not the way to go.

Strike Three....John McCain is out.

The McCain team made many unfortunate decisions, three of which I tried to describe. The selection of Palin, the suspension of the campaign and the misuse of Joe the Plummer were all  strategic failures borne of a certain trait: the willingness to sacrifice the long term potential for victory in exchange for a few days of good press notices.  Hardly the mark of a successful campaign, which perhaps would explain why every pollster predicts a McCain loss tomorrow.