Why McCain Lost

IN the first grim days after the Democratic blowout, three overlapping schools of thought emerged: No Republican could have won this year; McCain lost because he was the type of moderate who can never make the party’s best case; and McCain lost because he was trying to appeal to the conservative base of the party rather than swing voters. There is no need to choose among these explanations: All are true. Each problem reinforced the others.

“Headwinds” was the Republican strategist’s cliché of the year, and they were indeed fierce. Even if President Bush had been popular and the economy been good, there would have been time-for-a-change sentiment after eight years of a Republican president. But of course Bush has been very unpopular for a very long time. He became unpopular for a lot of reasons, but a few stand out. The discovery that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction hurt his credibility. For the first three years of the occupation, he insisted that we stay the course while the public came to believe, correctly, that we were losing. Similarly, Republicans insisted that the economy was fine even as wages stagnated. And Bush was widely blamed, fairly or not, for the

About the Author

Ramesh Ponnuru

Ramesh Ponnuru is the editor of National Review, a columnist for the Washington Post, and a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

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IN the first grim days after the Democratic blowout, three overlapping schools of thought emerged: No Republican could have won this year; McCain lost because he was the type of moderate who can never make the party’s best case; and McCain lost because he was trying to appeal to the conservative base of the party rather than swing voters. There is no need to choose among these explanations: All are true. Each problem reinforced the others.

“Headwinds” was the Republican strategist’s cliché of the year, and they were indeed fierce. Even if President Bush had been popular and the economy been good, there would have been time-for-a-change sentiment after eight years of a Republican president. But of course Bush has been very unpopular for a very long time. He became unpopular for a lot of reasons, but a few stand out. The discovery that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction hurt his credibility. For the first three years of the occupation, he insisted that we stay the course while the public came to believe, correctly, that we were losing. Similarly, Republicans insisted that the economy was fine even as wages stagnated. And Bush was widely blamed, fairly or not, for the