He starts off by admitting that the macro-conditions for Republicans are terrible this election year. He then asks, incongruously, whether the parties can "master" the conditions they find themselves in. It is at this point that his post goes south. Politicians can't master conditions, no matter whether the "explosion of information technology" provides them up-to-the-minute updates on whatever.
Cost writes:
The Republican Party seems to understand that it faces a bear market. After all, it has nominated a bear market candidate. John McCain is not the first, second, or even third choice of most Republicans. However, they believe he has cultivated a stable image as an anti-Bush Republican. Whether this belief is accurate, we do not know for sure. What we do know is that there is a non-trivial probability that it is accurate. Therefore, we can conclude that nominating McCain was the safe choice for the party, given the macro environment and the party's goal of electoral victory.
This is nonsense. First of all, groups don't have consciousness such that they "understand" this or that. What does a "bear market" candidate mean? Cost describes it as being an "anti-Bush Republican." I shake my head in disbelief--Cost is usually so careful to distinguish between the average level, even among voters, of political knowledge (extremely low) and the knowledge of those who study politics daily, in order to not confuse the two. Can he seriously tell us with a straight face that a run-of-the-mill voter thinks of McCain as "anti-Bush"? This is Karl Rove spin. Frank Rich in a Sunday NYT op-ed came much closer to the truth:
In the woe-is-us analyses by leading Republicans about their party’s travails — whether by the House G.O.P. leader John Boehner (in The Wall Street Journal) or the media strategist Alex Castellanos (in National Review) — Iraq is conspicuous by its utter absence. The Republican brand’s crisis is instead blamed exclusively on excessive spending, scandal and earmarks — it’s all the fault of Tom DeLay’s K Street Project, Jack Abramoff and that Alaskan “bridge to nowhere.”
This transcends denial; it’s group psychosis. Nowhere is this syndrome more apparent than in the profuse punditry of Karl Rove, who never cites Iraq as a problem for Mr. McCain (if he refers to it at all) and flatly assured George Stephanopoulos last Sunday that Mr. McCain has no need to make a “clean break” from Mr. Bush.
The whole strategy of the Democrats is going to be to paint McCain as BushIII, as has been documented here. Cost's conclusion that the Republicans "got lucky with McCain" is such a stretch I can't believe I'm reading it on his blog. As Rich points out, McCain is most identified with the number-one unpopular Bush policy, Iraq. And that's his strength. He's weak on everything except campaign finance reform (yawn) and immigration (for a voting block that won't vote for him anyway).McCain is not the strongest candidate the Republicans could have picked. A candidate who could pivot on Iraq would have been better. If that distinction is fudged, then the electorate could be willing to go GOP. But with McCain it's crystal-clear.
McCain did not win because of any Republican "thought process" such as Cost describes. He won by a whisker because he was the last man standing in a flawed field. Had he lost SC, it probably would have been Romney.
Cost then tries to explain why the Dems did not go with the "safe bet" Hillary. He never mentions the obvious--Obama did not vote for the war. What a chasm operating at the heart of Cost's analyses! According to Google, he's mentioned Iraq only 4 times on his blog in the last 6 months. His blog is not about issues, to be sure, but strategy. But this blog is too, and I've mentioned Iraq ten times more over the same period.
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