The United States is still buzzing after President-elect Barack Obama’s landslide win Tuesday night. In his speech, Sen. John McCain assured supporters the “failure was mine, not yours.” How true that is.
At the beginning, Obama and McCain agreed to a clean campaign. Obama’s campaign aired advertisements aimed at issues most important to voters. On the contrary, McCain’s advertisements distracted voters from the issues by highlighting Obama’s faults. The Los Angeles Times reported that McCain repeatedly referred to Obama as a celebrity akin to Paris Hilton or Britney Spears. Obama was attacked for not supporting the surge in Iraq and criticized for a comment he made about lipstick and pigs, a comment McCain claimed to be an attack on Gov. Sarah Palin. Obama responded by posting an advertisement confronting McCain for stooping that low to win an election. Obama stated in the LA Times that “the election must not be about phony debates and false advertisement, lies and spin, but about the greater challenges of our time.”
Although McCain attempted to distance himself from President George W. Bush, he failed to do so when he hired a team of Bush advisors to his campaign, one of whom was instrumental in vicious, false rumors the Bush campaign sprung on McCain during the 2000 presidential race. The Washington Post reported that McCain had chosen a collection of Bush’s inside staff including Steven Schmidt, Terry Nelson, Brian Jones and Mark McKinnon.
McCain also made a huge mistake in choosing Palin as his running-mate, a pathetic attempt to appeal to evangelicals and women who voted in the primaries for Sen. Hillary Clinton. Unfortunately, his plan backfired. It quickly became apparent that Palin’s role as a hockey mom wasn’t adequate qualification to be vice president of the United States. McCain could no longer criticize Obama for being inexperienced when his running mate had even less experience than his opponent. By the end of the campaign, Palin was considered by many to be a political joke.
These mistakes cost McCain much of the race, while Obama’s intelligent and (for the most part) clean campaigning won him typically Republican states like Florida, Ohio and Virginia, giving him a huge boost in electoral votes.
However, McCain made the right – and respectable – decision in the end. His concession speech was more graceful than anything we’ve witnessed from him all year, with final rhetoric not attacking the president-elect, but supporting him. McCain admirably urged Americans to support the next president in bridging differences in order to “restore our prosperity, defend our security in a dangerous world, and leave our children and grandchildren a stronger, better country than we inherited.” Only that could allow McCain to leave this despicable campaign on a high note.
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