Victory Has a Thousand Fathers

It’s pretty obvious the financial tsunami did in McCain’s election prospects, though Obama may have won a closer race anyway. But the journalists who write “history’s first draft” are busy minimizing the financial meltdown that riveted the country’s attention for most of the campaign’s final six weeks, while maximizing McCain-Palin’s media-exposed errors and Obama’s strategic brilliance.

Of course, McCain did hurt himself with that one bad quote. As Monica Langley described it in the Wall Street Journal:

[On September 15], the Dow Jones Industrial Average tumbled more than 500 points, with Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. in bankruptcy court and other financial firms, such as American International Group Inc., struggling. On the stump, Sen. McCain sought to reassure voters. "The fundamentals of the economy are strong," he said. Sen. Obama attacked: "Sen. McCain, what economy are you talking about?" he said.

But one bad statement is different from Langley and others saying Obama was steady in the face of crisis, McCain wasn’t. Or suggesting Obama adeptly at McCain’s expense played out a strategy set months earlier, as Langley did when she quoted Obama chief strategist David Axelrod [picture]:

"From the start [of the general election campaign], we defined [the] election as about change versus more of the same." At their Chicago headquarters, Axelrod . . . set out "seven pillars" the campaign must do well: the vice-presidential choice, the convention, a European trip to meet with heads of state and the four debates.

If I could rewrite this “first draft” history of Axelrod’s “seven pillars” (above--incidentally, why modestly leave out the “of wisdom”? T.E. Lawrence’s autobiography was Seven Pillars of Wisdom, not “Seven Pillars”), I would say Axelrod/Obama 1) blew the vice presidential choice, 2) overdid the European trip, allowing McCain to separate “celebrity” Obama from ordinary Americans, 3) responded to their Europe error by toning down Obama’s closing speech in front of 80,000 screaming people so Obama wouldn’t come off as Hitler at a Nuremberg rally, and 4) arrived at September 15 tied with McCain in the polls, because people weren’t buying the idea that McCain-Palin were, as Axelrod said, “more of the same.”

Then the economic tsunami hit.