How McCain Lost Himself Before He Lost the Election
Esquire‘s Chris Jones offers his assessment of what causes historians will attribute to the collapse of the McCain campaign in 2008. Of course there are numerous causes for the McCain/Palin loss to Obama/Biden, but Jones tracks a personality transition following the Republican’s surprising primary victory in New Hampsire.
For Jones, who had extrordinary access to the campaign throughout the primaries and general election, the final straw was McCain’s selection of the governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, as his running mate.
From Esquire.com, posted by Chris Jones, 5 November 2008:
(emphasis added)…Then he picked Sarah Palin as his running mate. I’d like to think someone else picked her for him, but how’s that the better option? She represented everything wrong with the Republican Party — the same intolerant elements that McCain had fought so hard against years earlier — and now there she was, smiling on the stage beside him. Historians will no doubt cite the collapsing economy and the legacy of George W. Bush as impossible obstacles for McCain to overcome. But for me, he lost the election when he picked Palin, because he lost the last vestige of his former self…
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