Did John McCain lose the 2008 U.S. Presidential election because he was not conservative enough?

[LoZoccolo]

[billyoc]

1. DEFINITELY.

:evilgrin:

[Gabi Hayes]

2. he lost it because he is a fucking

REPUBLICAN

no pug in that sorry field could have won in 08

[SemiCharmedQuark]

3. He needed to listen to Joe the Plumber more.

It's not too late!

[graywarrior]

4. He lost because he sucked.

[Adsos Letter]

8. Short and to the point!

[Jack Rabbit]

5. Absolutely not

1. It was not going to be a good year for the GOP any way.
2. Sarah Palin was a further drag on the ticket, as any other right wing moron would have been. If there could have been anything worse than a right wing moron, it was a particularly clueless right wing moron.
3. All the chickens that McCain and other Republicans released on the American economy since the beginning of the Reagan error, er, era, came home to roost right after Labor Day, augmenting point one.

[NeedleCast]

6. He Lost Because he was too strong handed and had a terrible VP pick

McCain's campaign reminded me a lot of Kerry's campaign in that he seemed to be playing defense the entire time. He never really mentioned who McCain was, just that he wasn't Obama and that he wasn't a socialist and that he wasn't this and he wasn't that. Problem from my perspective was that I already liked Obama a lot and McCain going out of his way to tell me over and over that he wasn't Obama just solidified my desire to vote for Obama. He also screwed the pooch on his VP pick. She could have been a tipping point because at first her favorables were off the charts. But once the RNC was over, it was all downhill from there up to the Couric disaster and then the house of cards pretty much came apart. By the end of the election the only thing the press wanted to talk about was the infighting going on between McCain and Palin.

[stillcool]

7. he lost because his campaign was insane

[hyphenate]

9. He lost because the radical right

made him put psycho-guv as his running mate--definitely a marriage made in hell.

[Yupster]

10. So many reasons

1. It was going to be very hard for any Republican.
2. He had no money.
3. He was old and yesterday.
4. He didn't run a strong campaign.
5. Obama had more money, was young and exciting, ran a disciplined campaign and was a Democrat.

The Republican who I thought had the best shot was Huckabee but I think he would have lost in 2008 too. With the economy and stock market in the tank, it was just a Democratic year.

Maybe if Bush had saved Lehman Brothers in September, a Republican might have had a fighting chance.

[saltpoint]

11. Over coffee early on I think McCain and his staff knew they would lose to

the Democrats in this election.

Everything done to weaken Obama over the summer of 2008 and into the fall fell short. Nothing worked. The old scare tactics weren't effective.

People were not only sick of Bush Republicansim, they were sick of it in overwhelming numbers.

Initially, over a dozen GOP hopefuls coagulated around the drain in the primaries. They struck many swing voters as bigots, thieves, ideologues, jerks, and nobodies, IMO a charitable assessment.

In St. Paul, their base -- the slobbering fools stomping their approval on the convention floor -- gave the country a picutre of, well, a pack of slobbering fools stomping their approval on a convention floor. Notably, a lot of Republicans must have looked at their television screens and said to themselves, "My god we are going to get our asses kicked in this election."

A very accurate prediction, it turned out.

[Sebastian Doyle]

12. He lost because the thought of Sarah Palin in the Oval Office

even scared the shit out of most Republicans. :scared:

[havocmom]

13. He lost because he ran against a real leader

and America figured out pretend leaders were not cutting the..... mustard.

[TheKentuckian]

14. Certainly not. Only somewhat with at least the perception of being a moderate

had a snowballs chance in Hell.

I'm also not sure that anyone significantly to the right of McCain has ever won. Why anyone thinks of the guy as remotely moderate is beyond me. Not hating brown people with the heat of a billion white hot stars and a passing belief in science fails to meet my description of a "lib".

The mere fact that these nutcases think McCain was too far to the left should finally prove they belong in rubber rooms, underlings of the House of Saud, or at least find a nice junta to join. Who else was going to vote for McCain but felt he just wasn't hardline enough so they'd just vote for Obama or stay home? Another dozen souls?

[Yukari Yakumo]

15. No.

Reasons why he lost:

1. He's conservative. (America is tired of conservatives after eight miserable years of Chimpy.)
2. No message. (His campaign was totally unfocused. Well, except for the attack ads.)
3. Too negative. (His negative campaigning backfired.)
4. The economy laid an egg. (And he demonstrated the complete and total inability to handle it.)
5 to infinity. Palin. (A stupid bimbo who reminded everyone precisely of the type of politician we wanted to be rid of.)

[Old Hob]

16. He lost because of George Bush a smuch as anything IMO.

[saltpoint]

17. It would be predictable for the Right to crank up the looniness and

instability by asserting that McCain was not sufficiently conservative as reason for his loss.

This past week Dick Cheney suggested that it would be "a mistake" for the Republican Party to moderate.

As strongly as he could, McCain presented himself as a "maverick," and the lemming media followed unquestioningly. But evidently independent voters didn't see any "maverick" on the GOP ticket. They saw a still half-baked pre-Eisenhower brontosaurus offering war slogans and desperate pledges of "chasing bin Laden to the gates of hell," and also they saw a half-wit reactionary Shirley Temple of the Tundra as McCain's veep, who seemed to represent little more than a weekend secessionist impulse and not least, herself. An old fool and a young fool equals two fools, which was two too many for getting the country turned around.

Half-baked and half-witted apparently didn't impress enough people, including many Republicans, and that plus the previous 8 years of deceit and torture and incompetence just pretty much wiped the GOP out.