Why we lost

The election of 2008 is over and now conservatives can begin their real battle. There is a war going on for the soul of the Republican party and the moderate/centrist/liberal wing of the party is going to do everything in its power to cement their control and drive out social conservatives, gun owners and religious believers.

You might think that this will be difficult for them since their chosen candidate, John McCain, just went down to a humiliating defeat. However defeat doesn't bother this bunch. They KNOW that if they get their way that the Republican party will be a permanent minority and they are fine with that.

They will have enough power on the fringes to get the things they really care about done, like having loopholes inserted into the tax code so that they can hide their personal wealth and they will be invited to all the right cocktail parties and they won't be embarrassed by having people at those parties ask them to "explain" Jerry Falwell or Sarah Palin.

One of the tactics that the Defeat Wing of the Republican party is going to use is the attempt to make any rational analysis of the Republican defeat off limits by disallowing any effort to blame McCain. The next thing they are going to do is attempt to destroy Sarah Palin because they see in her another Ronald Reagan who has the potential to capture the heart and the imagination of the nation and pull the party and the nation back to the right.

I The following article by George Neumayr from the American Spectator's website touches on the truth about why the GOP lost this election and reveals some of the Defeat Wing's opening salvos against Governor Palin.

According to Newsweek, "On the Sunday night before the last debate, McCain's core group of advisers -- Steve Schmidt, Rick Davis, adman Fred Davis, strategist Greg Strimple, pollster Bill McInturff and strategy director Sarah Simmons -- met to decide whether to tell McCain that the race was effectively over, that he no longer had a chance to win. The consensus in the room was no, not yet, not while he still had 'a pulse.'"

This spirit of defeat explains why McCain staffers spent the last week or so of the campaign leaking against Sarah Palin. By the end of the race, the choicest pieces of inside-the-beltway elitism were coming not from Barack Obama but from McCain's own staffers. Palin and family, the staffers let it be known, were clinging to their God, guns, and newfound Neiman Marcus items.

"Wasilla hillbillies looting Neiman Marcus from coast to coast." That is the description Newsweek received from an "angry aide."

That the staffers had given up by October also explains why the most potent attack on Obama came not from the campaign but from pure happenstance outside it: Joe the plumber's accidental meeting with Obama.

McCain acted like that was the first time he had ever heard Obama's thoughts on economic redistribution. Had the campaign exhausted its opposition research budget at Neiman Marcus? To anyone even remotely paying attention, Obama's understanding of taxation as tool of economic redistribution was clear long before Joe the plumber arrived on the scene. Obama had used the word redistribution repeatedly in his writings and speeches.

McCain's last-minute reliance on the gimmick of Joe the plumber made it easy for the media to dismiss his charge of "socialism" against Obama as feeble name-calling. Many months early, the McCain campaign could have been developing that case, and it wouldn't have taken much effort: Obama had let slip socialist, even Marxian, assumptions in his thinking several times, from his Marxian description of religion as an opiate for the masses to his bald calls for "confiscating" the profits of oil companies to his open class warfare.

By the end of the race, the McCain campaign seemed to depend on the latest Drudge Report links for the few talking points it could rouse itself to make. Obama's casual comment about bankrupting the coal industry had been gathering dust for months, only becoming an issue via Drudge at the last moment.

Even when the campaign occasionally stumbled down a promising avenue of attack, it would stop and dart down a new cul-de-sac. Take the ad it ran early on about Obama's work with Planned Parenthood to spread sex-ed propaganda in elementary schools. That ad hit its target squarely enough to generate days of grousing from Joe Biden and, in a rare moment of irritation, Barack Obama. Obama's surrogates in the press also spent days frowning over the ad, another measure of its effectiveness. But where was the follow-up?

The McCain campaign could have rolled out a series of such ads. Instead, social conservatism was henceforth treated by the McCain campaign as a no-go area. For example, the day after the Connecticut Supreme Court imposed gay marriage on the people there, McCain said nothing about the decision. Not a word as far as I could tell was even spoken during the campaign about Obama's de facto support for gay marriage.

Meanwhile, Obama was running ad after ad about his belief in "parental responsibility," crafting an unchallenged image of himself as a centrist. Accidentally, Obama ended up doing more to pass the traditional marriage initiative Proposition 8 in California than McCain: the high turnout of blacks to vote for Obama meant they also voted on Proposition 8, which they supported overwhelmingly.

That McCain lost while traditional marriage amendments across the country, no thanks to him, won is a fitting final note to the haplessness of his campaign. The media perked up briefly in October at the possibility of a rift when Palin strayed from the McCain script by endorsing the marriage amendments. But that quickly passed and the campaign staffers got back to topics of more interest to them, such as, if Newsweek is right, Palin's jackets and John McCain's inevitable defeat.

Of course the Defeat Wing's attacks against Sarah Palin are nothing but a pack of lies. The unfailingly cheerful and energetic Sarah Palin the nation saw on the campaign trail bears absolutely no resemblance to the fictional construct of the Defeat Wing's diseased imagination.

This is an attempt to be the first out of the gate with an "official narrative" of why McCain lost and to have the blame fall squarely on the conservative Palin rather than the RINO McCain.