even as campaign 2008 entered its final week, many had already come to what looked like a foregone conclusion: the election was already over. one candidate stubbornly maintained a wide lead while the other only marginally crept forward. thus many felt no need to wait until wednesday morning for the obvious postmortems.
while many seemed to agree that we had a clear loser, some also, to be expected, begged to differ about exactly why the loser lost. it's worth examining one particularly prescient enumeration of the tragic flaws in that doomed campaign:
when mccain cruises to an easy, early victory tuesday night, the pundits will be in disarray. they will be left scratching their heads ...
... in order to win, zero [obama] had to do better among democrats than did john kerry. he didn't. here's why:
1) zero never secured the democrat base. his first decision was fatal to his candidacy — he chose a bumbling, mediocre biden over party unity. had he selected hillary as his running mate, the ticket would have been a juggernaut. this fateful selection created the puma movement comprising — who knows? — thousands, millions of disaffected hillary supporters. this is the greatest unreported political fallout in media history.
2) zero was a weak, unknown candidate propped up by the compliant bsm [biased socialist media]. all the evidence you need is this: no bounce from his thirty-minute infomercial that was intended to "close the deal." further, after spending more than $600 million dollars, he was still campaigning on the monday before the election in iowa, a neighbor to his home state of il, which he should have won by 20 points. a strong democrat candidate with a $600m warchest and this economy should win walking away. there'd be no chance for a mccain surge in the final days. give me a break.
4) race. some democrats will reject their guy based on his race, or at least the black half of it. face it. it's a small percentage of the democrat party but, in order to win, zero had to hold onto every dem voter and he failed to do so.
5) the bsm failed zero. as they always do, they went into protect mode, trying valiantly — if not honestly — to shield their chosen one from harm. had the media first done its job of vetting zero and, had he survived the vetting in the primaries, he would have been tested by fire and ready to win. instead, by treating him with kid gloves, the republican opposition was free to explore zero's past associations, his voting record, his years of drifting and lack of accomplishment; all raised doubts in the general election that should have been vetted long before it took place. unknowns like zero don't benefit by not being challenged.
thus in conclusion:
we are witnessing the greatest collapse by a major party candidate in history. now you know why it's happening.
i agree wholeheartedly. we just witnessed a collapse of historic proportions, not just of a candidate, but of an entire party and its ideology. barack obama never really had a chanc—
huh?
(updated to include definition of term "bsm")