Tag: 2008 election

The professional malpractice of the 2008 John McCain campaign team, revisited.

This Breitbart article about McCain’s 2008 campaign team is infuriating me far too much for me to write coherently about it for very long, so let me be brief: speaking professionally, I agree with it.  The faction of Team McCain represented by Steve Schmidt and Nicolle Wallace should not be allowed anywhere NEAR a Republican Presidential campaign for the rest of their lives.

And I mean it: the main campaign was a collection of professional political malpractice that seemed content to merely put up enough of a fight to satisfy honor, then lose gracefully. While I like and respect most of the people who were directly involved in handling New Media aspects for McCain, it became incredibly clear by the end of the 2008 election cycle that the McCain campaign essentially treated those people with about as much respect as they did us; which is to say, none at all. The campaign would have happily ignored us completely, if they thought that they could get away with it; as it was, they made sure that we knew that our inclusion was both grudging and resented – and literally muted whenever possible.

How bad was it?  Let me put it this way: I’ve already gotten more out of Romney’s campaign than I ever have out of McCain’s – and Mitt Romney isn’t even the official nominee yet.  The bottom line is that it turned out that John McCain wanted to be the nominee a heck of a lot more than he ever wanted to be the President, and while I’m sure that McCain feels that his  team acquitted themselves well in the 2008 general election the rest of us are… somewhat unpersuaded. Continue reading The professional malpractice of the 2008 John McCain campaign team, revisited.

TIME, Marshall Ganz, Barack Obama, and 2012.

The Platonic Ideal of Burying the Lede.

(Fair warning: while the original H/T is via RCP, there are a lot of links to Left-publications and sites in this post. This was essentially unavoidable)

It was the funniest thing: I was flipping through this Michael Scherer article on the resumption of the Obama 2012 campaign (short version: “Getting re-elected is hard!” Particularly when the Democrats have to run on an actual record, instead of the record that they breezily assured people was waiting just over the electoral horizon*), when I came across this passage:

Some on the left have argued that the President dropped the ball by failing to keep his network of supporters engaged and by following his transformational campaign with a transactional governing style. “Fighting to make something happen is different than sitting back and trying to mediate something,” says Marshall Ganz, a supporter turned critic of Obama, who teaches at Harvard. “People can’t organize around that.”

I don’t know why that triggered something in my head; it just seemed a bit… off, somehow. Maybe it was because whoever this Ganz guy was, it was enough to make David Axelrod bristle in the next paragraph. Which means that Scherer must have gotten that Ganz quote first. Which meant that Marshall Ganz may have been important.

So I decided to look Marshall Ganz up. Continue reading TIME, Marshall Ganz, Barack Obama, and 2012.

I think that I have caught something.

I had an urge to write a book today on the 2008 Democratic primary. I mean, I have a thesis. I have an idea for a rough outline. I know the subject well enough to do the research. I even have a title: Power Gaming: How the Obama campaign ganked Hillary Clinton’s nomination.

Please tell me that there are shots for this.

‘He was supposed to be competent.’ Wait, what?

That’s the title of a Peggy Noonan piece, and Joy McCann (Little Miss Attila) has some comments about the stars – or scales – falling from Peggy’s eyes:

…she, Ann Althouse, and Megan McArdle will have to deal with it for the rest of their lives. Those three women have all been an intellectual blessing to public discourse in this country, but they all succombed to the same cult of personality two years ago, and we still do not know what the final price tag on that cult of personality is going to be.

Well, Megan’s off of my Elections Have Consequences list… but, yeah, Joy’s right: the people who bought into the President’s cult of personality are going to have to deal with that eventually.

Personal reminiscence after the fold. Continue reading ‘He was supposed to be competent.’ Wait, what?