Posted on 04/23/2009 8:14:26 PM PDT by Big_Monkey
NEWARK, Del. – The men who ran the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and John McCain appeared together on stage for the first time Thursday at the University of Delaware to complete a pair of tasks: To articulate their (remarkably similar) views of the election, and to hash out the details of continuing coursework so that they can, at last, graduate.
McCain chief strategist Steve Schmidt and Obama campaign manager David Plouffe seemed to agree on a central point: McCain was always the longest of long-shot candidates. (You would not have known this from hearing either of them talk during the campaign.)
Schmidt, the father of hundreds of attacks on Obama, spoke of the president’s political skills with unabashed admiration.
“This was, in my view, the unfinished Bobby Kennedy campaign – the idealism, the passion, the inspiration he gave to people, it was organic and it was real and it wasn’t manufactured at a tactical level in the campaign.”
(Excerpt) Read more at politico.com ...
I'm getting the feeling that a lot of these hired-gun, campaign managers aren't true-believers in either ideology, with perhaps the exceptions of Rove and Carville.
I don't know exactly how much Schmidt made, but it had to be north of $4 million. When Hilary fired Mark Penn in the middle of her primary run, she already owed him $8 million.
Schmidt in this interview all but says that Obama is dreamy. And as someone pointed "a fool in paradise" pointed out, Obama was anything but an organic, grass roots candidate. He was incredibly well funded, well scripted and had overt and covert peripheral support from sources both foreign and domestic. Schmidt is either too stupid to understand this, or too in love to care.
Nevertheless, he almost pulled it off.
If it weren’t for the escalating economic crisis (the timing of which I find highly suspicious) he would have made it.
Nice to know that McCain was going to pick a Guaranteed Loser for the Number 2 Spot and had picked this LOOSER to run his campaign! May GOD HELP US!
Ho hum. Were they lying then, or are they lying now?
I don't even care anymore.
Agree on all counts.
“I hate to say this, but McCain is a loser.....If not for Palin he would have lost by twenty points.”
Don’t hate to say it, it’s the plain truth. And I’ll see your 20 points and raise you five.
I wonder how much of the "crisis" would've materialized if Juan had chosen a non-threatening, uninspiring running-mate?
Apparently a lot of Democrat campaigns allow the campaign managers to take a cut of the total amounts spent on advertising. That was part of the downfall of Howard Dean. I never heard anything about the Obama campaign doing this though.
I agree: the economic downturn, facilitated by Soros, Buffett, MSM, Hollywood and who knows who else behind the scenes, was the reason for the downslide of McCain. He
made a bad decision by rushing back to DC and putting
his campaign on hold.
But in retrospect, upon seeing how the mindless drones
in our country have hypnotically followed the Socialist One, maybe noone could have beaten him...
One thing is for sure; McCain is a war hero: and deserved to win just for that reason, if nothing else.
I voted for Sarah.
...And will again.
JacksonCalhoun, I must be a moron with you. I did not think the majority of this nation would put the most liberal Senator on record, with his puny experience, in the nation’s highest office. I figured he’d get support, and votes from reactionary backlash type folks, and very liberal folks.
I also thought McCain would be reasonably well trusted, and respected for his extraordinary service.
I guess I thought better of this nation.
I didn’t expect McCain to get fawned all over. But he was so obviously the better choice on every level that I had to believe at the end of the day, he’d win.
You do realize that McCain didn't pick Lieberman, right?
Obama appeared -- and has been -- a certifiable catastrophe.
That said, a McCain administration offered a high probability of disaster.
CFR betrayed a willingness to abridge free speech and promote incumbency. McCain-Kennedy betrayed a desire to discount the value of citizenship. McCain-Liebermann betrayed an abject failure to understand a capitalist economy (even after 12 years as the Chairman of the Commerce Committee). Et cetera, et cetera.
Plus, there is this little matter of "presidential temperament". McCain tends to be a vengeful and vindictive man -- not the best temperament for a President.
What we have instead is most certainly worse. But McCain was no day at the beach -- the worst GOP presidential nominee since Tom Dewey.
Yes. I do recall that. Don't you think it's troubling that McCain didn't just think about Lieberman, but he actively entertained the idea and actually explored the possibility with GOP leadership?
It's not at all dissimilar from asking your wife it would be OK to have an affair. Somethings are just too stupid to be asked - asking if it would be OK to put a Democrat on a GOP ticket is one of those things.
bookmark
actually it was engineered by Ted Kennedy
more amazing and never mentioned except a zillion times by me is the fact the power of Washington and NY money and electeds........not anymore......that power and money is in mafia Chicago
Tell me again why we are even paying attention to S**t and Pouffe?
Six weeks before the election McCain-Palin were ahead in the polls. One week later they were five points behind and never recovered. What happened? The late September financial crisis, that's what happened. The media blamed the whole crisis on the Republicans and Wall Street, and McCain initially agreed with that assessment. Millions of voters changed their minds and their votes from Republican to Democrat.
The people who say McCain never had a chance are reluctant to explain why he was leading in the polls up to the crisis. That doesn't mean I believe he for sure would have won, but Obama certainly wouldn't have won by seven million votes and might have lost. Three and one half million votes kept the election from a tie. That number represents about one percent of all votes cast. I'd wager that easily more than that number of voters changed their minds against McCain thanks to the late September crisis.
It might’ve won him the election, but at what cost?
And it would’ve exposed the rabid antisemitism in the DNC left wing base. Instead, they managed to avoid charges of sexism in their attacks on Sarah Palin (even when they called her a c*n*).
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