The New York Times reports today that part of the reason behind the McCain loss was infighting and a breakdown of communication between those running the behind-the-scene details of the McCain and Palin camps. But what made me laugh about the article was two paragraphs appearing about one-third of the way into the article:
Finger-pointing at the end of a losing campaign is traditional and to a large degree predictable, as Mr. McCain himself acknowledged in a prescient interview in July.
“Every book I’ve read about a campaign is that the one that won, it was a perfect and beautifully run campaign with geniuses running it and incredible messaging, etcetera,†Mr. McCain said then. “And always the one that lost, ‘Oh, completely screwed up, too much infighting, bad people, etcetera.’ So if I win, I believe that historians will say, ‘Way to go, he fine-tuned that campaign, and he got the right people in the right place and as the campaign grew, he gave them more responsibility.’ If I lose,†people will say, “ ‘That campaign, always in disarray.’ â€
If the Times had any testes they would have taken McCain’s quote as a cue. Because, in fact, what they and many other papers/news outlets have done is exactly what McCain predicted they would do if he lost. Anything you read about Obama says that he ran an even, measured campaign that never went off message, that always stayed the course, and which never, ever lost its focus. But on the McCain side, at least according to this article, Palin was practically running for president much to the McCain camp’s chagrin.
Not even The Times can escape something so cliché.