It’s remarkable how quickly most of us forget how horribly the ’06 midterm election went for the GOP, and how clear it was that the Cheney/Rumsfeld administration was going to drag the party down with them in ’08 — that it didn’t matter who the candidates were on either ticket, the electorate was going to kick the warmongering cronies out.
In that context, McCain’s decision to run might be seen as him willing to take one for the team — he knew from the start that he was fighting a losing battle, but so be it. He was a soldier. I like to give him the benefit of the doubt when it comes to the Palin pick, because I imagine him believing that it wasn’t going to lead anywhere. Sort of like the Geraldine Ferraro pick — people knew at the time that it was more of a gesture than a tactic.
The election of ’08 was like one of those fluke finals in professional sports when one team is so completely favored by all of the odds-makers that they (the managers and the media) have to come up with some way of promoting the event other than high-level competition appreciation. That was part of the Palin calculation — it was a way to get eyeballs and clicks so the advertising/campaigning expenditure$ could be justified.
I remember watching the VP debate between Palin and Biden in a room with a cross-section of midwesterners (inadvertently, on my part) and how surprised and a little taken aback I was by how many of them seemed to think this was actually a VP debate by politicians who deserved to be on the same stage with each other, rather than a manufactured reality show to keep us entertained and excited about the larger horse race.
I also remember a discussion among campaign/advertising company executives in the winter after the ’06 midterms where they candidly acknowledged that the Dems will be able to ‘put up a refrigerator’ behind the lectern as their candidate for ’08 and win anyway. So that’s what they did — they took the opportunity to make history, as it were, with Obama.
Trump spotted a similar situation with HRC — it would have taken someone even worse, even more reprehensible, than him, to outshine people’s semi-rational abhorrence of HRC. Imagine how many more votes the Dems would have beaten Trump by if they had had a candidate who people don’t hate?
