Has John McCain Run A Good Campaign?

Regardless of who you support, would anyone care to defend the effectiveness/tactical thinking of John McCain's campaign? (I'm almost 62 years old & I can't remember a worse candidate or campaign for the Presidency in my lifetime)

Time to move on. (checks his watch)....Yup the McCain campaign is now off the "Obama Is planning to crash an airliner into the Capital Dome" story & is now on the "I'm really a nice guy & an underdog" talking point........Try to keep up will you!!!

Yes

Yawn. I liked it better when you were taking a break... damned trolls...

Mike Wilson wrote:Yawn. I liked it better when you were taking a break... damned trolls...

21 days to the election!! (& then I can get back to the point of this forum.....What was it again??.....Gardening??)


Supposed to get much cooler this weekend & into the foreseeable future!!

Oh how wonderful it will be when the election is over and we can talk about burning coal.

I have to say no. He has flipped flopped so much over the last month it's ridiculous, how is anyone suppose to really know what this man truly believes in? My wife is a die hard republican and she can't stand him and may not even vote this year becuase she is having a hard time liking anything about this man. Of course she hates the other guy even more

I was hoping for a little more meat from the campaign,all I see so far is a pile of potatoes. Not even the potatoes are fully cooked,haven't had enough heat put to them .

We'll know in three weeks (hopefully, the last thing this country needs is another 2000 fiasco).

I guess he's not reaching these well informed voters.

ErikLaurence wrote:We'll know in three weeks (hopefully, the last thing this country needs is another 2000 fiasco).

Fiasco!?!?...You mean the fact that, for the first time in American history a man became President who had fewer votes than his rival? (look how well everything turned out though )

Quick point, it wasn't the first time in history that a person was elected president in an electoral college/popular vote mismatch. 1876 and 1888 also had this outcome. It had been a while, but not the first time in history.

McCain's campaign has been thrashing in search of a resonant set of messages in the last three weeks. There also appears to be an unwillingness to commit to anything even moderately aggressive on the part of McCain. They've been unable to hit any kind of stride really since maybe 1-2 weeks after the Palin pick. It's been disheartening and perplexing to see. I'd say it was the credit crisis and it's sudden onset that threw the campaign for a loop, but it was floundering even before that.

I thoroughly disagree with the claims that McCain's campaign is calling Obama a terrorist or anything like that, nor are they being overly "harsh" in their criticisms of Obama. This line of attack is all a smoke screen by the Obama campaign and their allies in the press to distract from any sort of serious voting public introspection on Obama, to get His people back to the feel good platitudes, obfuscated liberalism, and mindless populism that His campaign is peddling.

We'll see what the rest of McCain's campaign will look like tomorrow night. He's got a make or break event and he has to perform. It doesn't need to be a blow out win, just a decisive win. Something to cause the voters to do a serious double take and reconsider (or perhaps consider for the first time) what they're really voting for if they continue on the Obama bandwagon. He has to close the deal with independents, not from a place of squishiness on the issues or out populisming Obama, but from a clear description of goals, center-right solutions, and the reasons why Obama's plans will cause more harm than they are worth. Then and only then will the Ayers, Wright, Rezko, etc. stuff really kick in. McCain needs to break the Obama spell with a mix of mostly intelligence, rationality, and sound judgement and argument, along with a mild dose of the alliances and associations. Only then will Obama's past be given the serious consideration is deserves and be the political bludgeon it absolutely would be with any other politician.

pvolcko wrote:Quick point, it wasn't the first time in history that a person was elected president in an electoral college/popular vote mismatch. 1876 and 1888 also had this outcome. It had been a while, but not the first time in history.

I stand corrected Paul. (Thank god it just all worked out so well for this country though!

& for the Republican Party I might add!

spc wrote:I guess he's not reaching these well informed voters.

There ya go....pretty much sums it up.

av8r wrote:There ya go....pretty much sums it up

Stephen already posted that...Scroll up

McCain's tough-mommy figure, Palin, has been rabble-rousing against the terrorist Obama so much that McCain has had to tone it down a little, by actually saying that Obama is not a bad guy and we don't have to be afraid of him. McCain is old enough to remember the assassinations of the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, George Wallace (almost), and so on. To his credit I think he was concerned about the lynch-mob mentality that she was fostering and felt he had to cool it off a bit. Sarah, of course, in her junior-high-school-cheerleader role, is totally oblivious to such subtleties and knows no more of history than that the universe was created 6000 years ago.