Rising From the Ashes

“Victory has a hundred fathers, but defeat is an orphan.”
--Thomas Campbell, The Battle of the Baltic; as quoted by President Kennedy

In every war, after every hard-fought battle there is that period of mourning, blame, and recrimination, or as the Japanese so eloquently put it, “biting one’s navel.” In contemporary terms, we call it “the morning after.” For American conservatives, the early hours of November 5th found them, for the first time in 16 years, in a position to be virtually shut out of the political process. So flushed with victory was Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, that she was already promising to begin implementing the President-Elect’s policies as soon as congress returned in mid-November, two full months before his inauguration.

On the Republican side, the public recriminations were already starting. Sarah Palin became the target of John McCain’s handlers, blaming her for the defeat. For the Alaska Governor, it had been an uphill fight from day one. The systematic trashing of her and her family undertaken by the media and the blogosphere was both brutal and utterly unprecedented. Some may roll their eyes at that statement, but let’s face facts. If Geraldine Ferraro, the Democrat candidate for Vice President in 1984, had been subjected to this level of scorn and ridicule at the hands of the Fourth Estate, feminists would have had the heads of every guilty political pundit impaled on the point of a spear and paraded down 5th Avenue.

The fact is, this defeat was in the cards from the beginning. At the start of the primaries, the Republicans had three leading candidates. Mitt Romney, Fred Thompson, and John McCain. Among the base, McCain was the least favorite. He was older than the other two, and had a history of giving in to Democrats. Romney and Thompson were candidates with solid conservative chops. Democrats and the media fawned over McCain, even suggesting that he run as a Democrat. That should have been a huge red flag right there. The media coverage was massively one-sided, as outlets such as the Washington Post are now sheepishly admitting. The interrogation of McCain and Palin was brutal and intended more towards tripping up the candidates rather than the elicitation of information that might actually have been useful by voters. In contrast, Obama was never asked the tough questions. So soft-handed was the media's treatment that in the days following the election, after a campaign that lasted the better part of two years, Tom Brokaw and Charlie Rose mused that they really did not know Obama's position on key foreign policy issues.

As the primaries got underway, stories from the front lines began to seep into the reportage. Throughout those early states, County Clerks and Voter Registrars were commenting how surprised they were at the large number of Democrats who were crossing over and voting Republican. It now appears that those voters may have manipulated the primary process, giving a boost to a candidate they felt could be defeated in November. In the context of modern political processes, primaries are no longer stand-alone events. The perception of momentum early defines the results of the later votes. By the time the primary season was half over, it was clear that McCain would be the eventual nominee.