Krauthammer 11/7/08

The Campaign Autopsy

My take on Charles Krauthammer's latest. His column was published in the Washington Post.

Summary: It was the economy that did the Republicans in. Palin was a mistake, too.

Quote:

In my previous life, I witnessed far more difficult postmortems. This one is easy. The patient was fatally stricken on Sept. 15 -- caught in the rubble when the roof fell in (at Lehman Brothers, according to the police report) -- although he did linger until his final, rather quiet demise on Nov. 4.

My Views:I agree that it was a crash that spelt doom for the R's this year. Nine consecutive months of job losses. On election day, the market was down by the greatest number of points since 1937. This was a fall of a high magnitude. And it was unprecedented. Never has there been a crash just before an election. Even Reagan couldn't have pulled this one out.

But wait! What's all this about Sarah Palin? Mr. K says that her nomination undercut the R's case against Barak Obama's lack of experience. The campaign became about her inexperience instead of Obama's. Okay, I'll agree with that.

But it wasn't the nomination that was wrong; it was the follow through. There could have been more interviews. She could not have blown two big ones. The R's could have compared her resume to Obama's. There did not have to be the staff back-stabbing. And what was with the $150,000 shopping spree?

At the time of the nomination, all this lay in the future. And all of this was not preordained. They could have made other choices.

The thing is that on the day of the crash, McCain was actually ahead!! This is what did him in.

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Charles Krauthammer is a more establishment columnist. I am drawn by the substance and the thinking than any particular writing flair.

He appears on TV where you never see his wheelchair. He used to be an MD and a psychiatrist.

Here's his Wiki bio.

His latest book is at the right.