I have noted four elements of the Republican loss this year: flawed candidates, the flawed campaign, George W. Bush, and the garbled message(s). There is one final element which perhaps is the overarching reason that McCain lost, the reason that subsumes all the other reasons: the Republican Party is in disarray, its ideology bankrupt.
We see the signs of a party self-destructing even now. The McCain advisors and staff are attacking Palin and her staff. She is being accused of gross stupidity as well as being off message and spending too much money on her family. One staffer, not recognizing apparently how badly this reflects on McCain for choosing her, called her a "Wasilla Hillbilly."
Whoa! They talk about circular firing squads in the Democratic Party, but I don't think one Democrat ever called any other Democrat something that insulting. No one wants to take the fall for this loss, and who can blame them? The Republican candidates and campaign this year were disasters. But that is only because the Republican Party, after eight years of Bush, is discredited and ideologically bankrupt.
Every idea the party has had over the past twenty-eight years was trotted out this election season, and none of them gained traction with the majority of the American people. McCain used the National Security argument, the tax and spend argument, the trickle down argument, the soft on terror argument, the drilling for oil argument, the anti-liberal argument, the anti-socialist argument, the anti-abortion argument, the not Christian enough argument, the not one of us argument, and none of them worked - except with Joe the Plumber and his Joe six-pack cohorts.
For decades the Republican Party has been a conservative party, defining itself as a party of low taxes, deregulation, small government, individualism, small business, strong military, and "Christian" values. And while these descriptions sound good, they never really materialized, at least not in any way that was beneficial to the American people.
Low taxes under Bush became low taxes for the wealthy and large corporations, even those that sent jobs overseas, and higher fees for everyone else.
Deregulation under Bush led both to the collapse of greedy banks and increased pollution of the environment.
Small government became the biggest government ever, but also the most inefficient and unsuccessful. Small government became spying on citizens, creating watch lists of Americans, torturing and imprisoning people without benefit of trial, deficit spending beyond anything we have seen, and indebtedness to the Chinese to pay for ill conceived wars and an economy that crashed.
Individualism meant you were on your own as you stood on your rooftop in New Orleans as the waters rose, and you were without health care when Insurance companies wouldn't cover you, and on food stamps because your unemployment insurance ran out.
Small business meant nothing, as many small businesses closed their doors because their customers disappeared in this terrible economy and more and more shoppers tried to survive by shopping at Wal-Mart with goods imported from China where near slave labor produced them cheaply.
The military, once strong and ready, became tired and depleted, with soldiers serving three and four tours of duty in Iraq or Afghanistan, as Bush's ill conceived wars continued on.
And "Christian" values became reduced to oppposition to gay marriage, abortion and science, and support for wars, capital punishment, flag pins, the teaching of creationism in schools, and greed (christened the "gospel of prosperity").
Republican ideology has either failed or been proven to be a sham.
It was rejected outright this year, its only symbol the person of Sarah Palin. Even John McCain couldn't bring himself to wholeheartedly support some of its tenets.
No wonder the party is in disarray. What it once stood for has been discredited. Its very soul has been tainted. And the American people have gotten wise to the reality that a party that wants to shrink and then drown the government, as Grover Norquist said, is not the party that should be trusted with that government.
In the end, a bankrupt party cannot win elections. It never really had a chance in this one, which is why John McCain, a non traditional republican, won the primary, and why the message was so muddled. When you no longer have a solid core, you come across as confused, and in the end desperate.
And Americans don't usually elect desperate candidates to the presidency.
