Gasoline, Meet Fire

Isn’t it a bit ironic to warn against pointing fingers and infighting, and then engage in a steaming load of it yourself?

Where to begin.

Vice presidents do not win or lose elections, and experience was not a winning message in a year like this. Hillary Clinton can tell you how well experience worked as a campaign argument.

Ultimately, at the bottom of the “blame Palin” phenomenon is the assumption that things would have been better with a different nominee. Who, I ask, would have been a better nominee?

(Read more after the leap)

Let’s focus on Mitt Romney, since it appears to be his former staffers that are trashing Sarah Palin. John McCain lost his post-convention edge when he suspended his campaign, returned to Washington, and voted for the deeply unpopular bailout. While it’s true that Mitt Romney was a business guru, he would have easily been caricatured by the opposition as the affluent snobbish face of Wall Street greed in the wake of the market crash and the bailout.

If the bailout and the market crash hurt John McCain (and that is true without a doubt), then the solution to avoiding being hurt by that is not to nominate somebody that is then going to double or perhaps triple the number of houses on the ticket.

John McCain, if political expediency was his sole motivating factor, should have voted against the bailout. But that’s not John McCain, a guy who has spent his life putting his country before himself, his political party, and every other possible consideration. Voting against the bailout would have helped John McCain far more than putting a poster boy for country club Republicanism on the ticket with him.

Sarah Palin didn’t hurt John McCain’s electoral chances. What hurt John McCain’s electoral chances were the curse of uncontrollable fate and the simple fact that John McCain is an honorable man in a profession of vicious scoundrels, dogged partisans, and ruthless hacks. I’m not convinced that, in the end, Palin helped McCain all that much either. I think that the ultimate motivator for the 57 or so million people that voted for McCain was not support for Sarah Palin–though that was certainly present among certain demographics of volunteers–but instead opposition to Barack Obama.

In the end, what wins elections is a big tent. Politics is about addition, not subtraction. And this sort of negative retrospection centered upon trashing Sarah Palin is not constructive and is not adding anything. It is just pissing off the very people that are necessary in any future Republican electoral coalition.