Where McCain Derailed

It's too early to write a post-mortem of the McCain campaign. Obama's lead is not insurmountable, and two weeks is enough time for McCain to get back on track and make this thing close.

That said, in analyzing how we got to where we are in the race, I think a lot of pundits are missing a key turning point in the campaign. Most of the analysis I've seen has blamed McCain's fall in the polls on a combination of two things: the onset of the financial crisis and his pick of Sarah Palin as his running mate. There is no question in my mind that these two developments played a major role in turning the race in Obama's favor, but the focus on these two developments has obscured a really bad strategic decision that the McCain campaign made in the immediate aftermath of its remarkably successful convention.

Going into the Republican Convention, Obama was up by eight points (50-42) in the Gallup daily tracking poll. By the time the convention concluded, McCain was up by five in the same poll. At the time, most of this rather large bounce was attributed to Sarah Palin's much-discussed national debut. But, like Nate Silver, I suspect that McCain may have gotten a bigger boost from his own under-appreciated convention speech. The speech wasn't written or delivered particularly well, but I think it was very effective in tone and content. McCain told his very moving personal story and re-embraced his prior image as a maverick and a reformer, someone who could rise above partisan politics and get things done. Unlike the rest of the convention, the speech was aimed squarely at independents and swing voters. McCain spent very little time attacking Obama and presented viewers with a mostly positive (if not very specific) case for his candidacy.

The most worried I've been about Obama's chances was in the immediate aftermath of that speech. I thought it would play pretty well among up-for-grab voters and I worried that the McCain campaign--having attacked Obama harshly and effectively during the convention--would use McCain's speech as a pivot point and spend the rest of the campaign making a direct appeal to independents and swing voters.

But they didn't do that. In the days following McCain's convention speech, his campaign looked around at all the suddenly favorable poll numbers and made a completely inexplicable decision. They decided to pick an unnecessary fight with the media by suddenly and dramatically ratcheting up the dishonestly level of the campaign. Instead of quietly conceding that many of Governor Palin's initial claims about her record had been false, the campaign doubled-down. Despite widespread debunking of these claims by the media, Palin insisted on repeating them--verbatim--in all of her appearances. McCain himself waded in, adding the claims to his own stump speech. Campaign ads were released touting the same debunked claims. At the time, I wrote this:

John McCain clearly had a very successful convention, and his choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate, while risky, appears to have paid off in the near term. Most surprising to me has been his ability to grab the "change" mantle for himself and breath new life into his maverick/straight-talker persona from 2000. I think the rehabilitation of this maverick image is largely responsible for the fact that McCain is now tied or leading in nearly every national poll.

If I were running the McCain campaign, I would be very protective of that brand and would be trying very hard to get the press corps to roll with it the way they used to. But that's not what the McCain campaign is doing. Instead, they seem determined to provoke a reluctant press corps into calling McCain and his new running mate liars. They seem determined to push the bounds of decency to a point where most reporters feel the need to defend Obama from obviously scurrilous attacks and brazen lies.

Around this time, the McCain campaign released a seemingly endless string of deeply dishonest ads, many of which seemed to serve no purpose other than alienating McCain's remaining allies in the media. The culmination of this bizarre strategy was the release of an ad that all but implied that Obama was some sort of sexual deviant who wanted to teach explicit sex ed to kindergartners. That ad prompted me to write:

McCain's on a roll right now. Why would he want to risk that by releasing such a desperate and scurrilous ad? McCain clearly eschewed that kind of approach in his convention speech last week--which seems to have been effective. Why concede the high ground so quickly and so completely? I would expect this kind of ad from a candidate who was down 10 points, not one who's up by a few.

Sure enough, by the end of that week, a narrative about the McCain campaign's mendacity had formed and both McCain and Palin were pilloried in a series of op-eds from formerly sympathetic pundits. By the next week (well before the onset of the financial crisis), McCain's lead had completely evaporated in every tracking poll, as had his standing with nearly everyone of significance in the media.

The decision to go harshly negative and abandon all standards of honesty made no sense. It was an act of extreme hubris and astounding political tone deafness. It was unnecessary and counterproductive. And it was an incredibly predictable and fitting way for a campaign run by disciples of Karl Rove to derail itself.

Like I said at the beginning, McCain still has time to get back on track. But if he doesn't, I think his campaign's inexplicable post-convention strategy is largely to blame.