McCain Was Stuck

TW: Much has been written already and much more will come diagnosing McCain's loss. From my perspective he was stuck, his "maverick" brand does not reconcile with his party's base. He had a choice embrace the base or remain a maverick. He chose the base. Could he have won the nomination without doing so, absolutely not. Could he have tacked away from the base post-nomination, perhaps.

Tacking away from the base carries a heavy price, in particular demotivation of the core group of folks who create the ground organizations with which any candidate funds and operates a campaign. When you are not adored by the base you make moves to appease the base, such as selecting a Sarah Palin. Such moves carry offsetting costs in the form of ruining one's reputation for competence and scaring independents.

I think McCain chose the wrong election to tack right during the primaries, had he won the Republican nomination in 2000, he might have won the general election with ease. John McCain as POTUS post 9/11 would have been a major improvement over the actual occupant.

This is not to say he would have been a great POTUS. The media has been very kind to McCain relatively speaking given his reckless and irresponsible VP choice, his erratic behavior during the initial finanical bailout negotiations, his well-documented temper issues and his running of a campaign rife with scattered focus, back-biting and leaking.

The core question remains how the Republicans will address the disconnect between their base and the political center. After all, the Dems have now obtained more votes in four out of the past five Presidential elections.

From Economist:
"...Mr McCain’s strength in an anti-Republican year lay precisely in the fact that he is not a blood-and-thunder Republican...The state of the economy was surely Mr McCain’s biggest problem, but he was also doomed by two other factors. The first was the impossibility of appealing to both Republican activists and independent voters...today’s Republican activists live in a different mental world from the rest of the electorate: a world in which Mrs Palin was a good choice, in which their candidate has been too mealy-mouthed in making his case, and in which the Republican Party needs to move to the right to win elections...
http://www.economist.com/world/unitedstates/displaystory.cfm?story_id=12560505