McCain Deserved To Lose

Certainly the guilt vote provided an edge to an individual 1) without much of a track record and 2) who has demonstrated little sound judgement, past 20 years. But as black scholar Shelby Steele noted, "Obama will always be a bargainer, a person who relieves the anxieties of white people about race."

The economy provided the clinch. The greatest irony is that the very mess that tipped the scales in Obama’s favor was birthed by the Democratic party leadership’s successful efforts to block meaningful reform of Fannie & Freddie, reform that would have prevented the twin’s excesses and thus the crisis. Obama and others went along because the twins were a cash cow to them. We have detailed this process in several past sketches.

Only one Dem has so far apologized. Arthur Davis, D-Ala. now admits Democrats were in error: "Like a lot of my Democratic colleagues, I was too slow to appreciate the recklessness of Fannie and Freddie. I defended their efforts to encourage affordable home ownership when in retrospect I should have heeded the concerns raised by their regulator in 2004. Frankly, I wish my Democratic colleagues would admit when it comes to Fannie and Freddie: We were wrong."

From the IBD 5/06: After years of Democrats blocking legislation, Sens. Hagel, Sununu, Dole and McCain wrote a letter to Majority Leader Bill Frist demanding that GSE regulatory reform be "enacted this year" to avoid "the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system and the economy as a whole." Nice try guys.

We don’t expect the masses to come up with this stuff on their own (and pure partisans don’t care) but we did expect McCain and others to explain it to them - bullet points endlessly repeated throughout the campaign would have done the job. Who it was exactly that was responsible for the Heart of Darkness, who it was that put their 401K’s in the sewer. The campaign had a silver bullet and refused to use it.

Robert Craven