ike | McCain Can't Win

If "Why John McCain Can't Win the Presidency of the United States in 2008" were a book, Chapter 1 would be called "Katrina." While I hesitate to take the Bush-like (Bush-ian sounds weird, doesn't it?) long-view of history, they'll write books about the fallout from the hurricane. It was, and I apologize for the pun in advance, the perfect storm. First off, the country got to see the fundamental and profound incompetence of the Bush administration. But the implications run much deeper; it killed the Republican brand for the foreseeable future. There before us, on national television and on repeat, we saw how the other half lived. I was working on a campaign at the time. "Oh my god," a co-worker of mine said. "It looks like a third-world country." And there it was--the flip side of the last twenty five years of economic policy and the unconscionable income disparity and cuts in domestic programs that came with trickle down economics: tax cuts for the wealthy; ballooning deficits; and a baby boomer culture that put a priority on amassing personal wealth and material possessions above all else. With whom was this resonating? I'm very glad you asked. Mostly the kids of that unfortunate and aforementioned generation, a group of new or soon to be voters who grew up more interconnected, more plugged in, than any generation in the history of the world. A generation that witnessed first-hand the priorities of their parents and asked, like Tony Montana in Scarface, "is this it?" This is a group that supports stem cell research, doesn't care if gays marry and understands that rounding up millions of people living in the United States and deporting them is impossible. So it disagrees with the GOP on the three seminal domestic issues of the past five years and then got to watch its administration perform what probably was the greatest act of domestic governmental incompetence in the history of our nation. Abraham Lincoln would have a hard time winning a national election if a big "R" appeared next to his name. And John McCain is no Abraham Lincoln.