Essay: Pulling Out - 10/3/2008
Just not in reality. My guess is that the McCain camp’s decision will turn out to have been an appalling blunder for reasons that stretch far beyond Michigan. First of all, let’s look at what happened.
Yesterday, the McCain campaign told reporters that they were canceling their TV advertising and were moving paid staff members to other states, such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and tiny Maine.
The fact is that McCain was increasingly unlikely to win here anyway. The last time a Republican presidential nominee carried Michigan, the World Wide Web hadn’t yet been invented.
George W. Bush made major efforts to win this state in both 2000 and 2004, and lost both times.
Since then, the administration has gotten steadily more unpopular, and economy has gotten much worse, a factor that almost always works against Republicans. Recent polls have shown Barack Obama with a lead of as much as thirteen percent here.
Still, pulling out of a key state sends a chill of desperation not only across the state, but around the nation. It carries with it the scent of inevitable political death. I first saw this twenty years ago, when, in late October, Michael Dukakis decided to pull out of Florida.
Suddenly, the press corps was all over his wounded campaign, like wolves on a wounded elk. Stories were written, with headlines like “Is Dukakis doomed?” His aides put a brave face on it.
They had a new, eighteen-state victory strategy, they said. But what everybody heard was that they were retreating to the bunker.
In the end, they won only ten states. And that was a case where they pulled out of a major state at the end of October, not at the start of the month. Eight years ago, Al Gore pulled major resources out of Ohio late in the campaign, but did so without much fanfare.
My guess is that the stigma of having publicly conceded a major state a month before the election will far outweigh the advantage of having an extra staffer or two in Florida or being able to show a few ads in Maine or Ohio.
Closer to home, this will have a devastating effect on Republican morale. Democrats will now have a far greater chance of knocking off the two vulnerable GOP Congressmen, Joe Knollenberg in Oakland County and Tim Walberg in south central Michigan.
It probably means the GOP now has no chance to win the state house of representatives, and will see most or all of their nominees for boards of education swept away. The only likely survivor: Mitt Romney’s brother Scott, who sits on the MSU board.
Even before the selection of Sarah Palin, some Michigan Republicans had worried about John McCain’s tendency to sometimes shoot from the hip. You don’t have to try hard to imagine what they must be thinking now.
McCain is history..Obama getting ready to make it...
Posted by: Thrasher | October 03, 2008 at 02:59 PM