In Battle of Quotes, Obama Wins 6 to 1

"I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it."

--John Kerry, March 16, 2004

Newsweek’s inside coverage of how Bush won re-election in 2004 made much of Kerry’s statement on funding the Iraq war (above). The Bush people saw immediately how it captured Kerry’s flip-flop-flip position on Iraq and the war on terrorism, and used Kerry’s words mercilessly against him. You could not have invented a better quote, and Kerry said it himself! One quote. One election lost.

I remember thinking, “Sure that quote was important, but isn’t it risky to build elections around a single ill-considered statement?” After all, “all who take the sword will perish by the sword” [Matthew 26:52]. And so it was. Democrats did the turnabout in 2008, using McCain's own words to defeat McCain. Here’s how:

1. Democrats used 3 phrases to define Bush and elect Democrats to Congress in 2006.

“my belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.”

--Dick Chaney, March 16, 2003

"Mission Accomplished"

--Banner behind George W. Bush during speech on USS Abraham Lincoln, May 1, 2003

"Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job."

-–George W. Bush, to FEMA director Michael Brown, while touring hurricane-ravaged Mississippi, Sept. 2, 2005

2. With a single old quote, Obama then nailed McCain to Bush.

“I voted with the president over 90 percent of the time, higher than a lot of my even Republican colleagues."

--John McCain, May 22, 2003

I didn’t think Obama would get away with marrying McCain to Bush. They are so different. I overlooked the power of that one televised quote from 2003, which held up because McCain’s “agree with Bush” votes later continued to hover around 90%.

3. Obama used two quotes, one just as the meltdown began, to portray McCain as unqualified to deal with the economy.

"The issue of economics is something that I've really never understood as well as I should.”

--John McCain, December 18, 2007

"Our economy, I think, is still -- the fundamentals of our economy are strong. . . “

--John McCain, September 15, 2008

These two McCain errors, tacked on to the reality of our economic meltdown, probably cost McCain any chance of winning.

Obama made a big mistake himself, and it hurt him for months afterwards, when he said:

You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them . . . And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

--Barack Obama, April 5, 2008

The Obama campaign, however, never repeated that mistake, and Obama did everything he could to remind voters that he came from a low income background, raised by a white single mother and white grandparents from Kansas.

Two weeks ago, McCain thought he had the quote that might sink Obama at the last minute, when the Democrat told “Joe the Plumber:”

“I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”

--Barack Obama, October 12, 2008

McCain was right to jump on Obama's statement. The quote showed Obama more interested in income redistribution than wealth creation. The problem is that in a bad economy, voters don’t see a problem with income redistribution. So in the end, the quote hardly touched Obama.