With despair rising even among many of John McCain’s own advisers, influential Republicans inside and outside his campaign are engaged in an intense round of blame-casting and rear-covering — much of it virtually conceding that an Election Day rout is likely.The civil war developing within the McCain campaign has been clear for a while now. a previous post entitled The fracture points of the upcoming Republican civil war describes additional details.
A McCain interview published Thursday in The Washington Times sparked the latest and most nasty round of finger-pointing, with senior GOP hands close to President Bush and top congressional aides denouncing the candidate for what they said was an unfocused message and poorly executed campaign.
McCain told the Times that the administration “let things get completely out of hand” through eight years of bad decisions about Iraq, global warming, and big spending.
The candidate’s strategists in recent days have become increasingly vocal in interviews and conference calls about what they call unfair news media coverage and Barack Obama’s wide financial advantage — both complaints laying down a post-election storyline for why their own efforts proved ineffectual.
These public comments offer a whiff of an increasingly acrid behind-the-scenes GOP meltdown — a blame game played out through not-for-attribution comments to reporters that operatives know will find their way into circulation.
Top Republican officials have let it be known they are distressed about McCain’s organization. Coordination between the McCain campaign and Republican National Committee, always uneven, is now nearly dysfunctional, with little high-level contact and intelligence-sharing between the two.
“There is no communication,” lamented one top Republican. “It drives you crazy.”
At his Northern Virginia headquarters, some McCain aides are already speaking of the campaign in the past tense. Morale, even among some of the heartiest and most loyal staffers, has plummeted. And many past and current McCain advisers are warring with each other over who led the candidate astray.
One well-connected Republican in the private sector was shocked to get calls and resumes in the past few days from what he said were senior McCain aides — a breach of custom for even the worst-off campaigns.
...One well-connected Republican in the private sector was shocked to get calls and resumes in the past few days from what he said were senior McCain aides — a breach of custom for even the worst-off campaigns.
“It’s not an extraordinarily happy place to be right now,” said one senior McCain aide. “I’m not gonna lie. It’s just unfortunate.”
“If you really want to see what ‘going negative’ is in politics, just watch the back-stabbing and blame game that we’re starting to see,” said Mark McKinnon, the ad man who left the campaign after McCain wrapped up the GOP primary. “And there’s one common theme: Everyone who wasn’t part of the campaign could have done better.”
“The cake is baked,” agreed a former McCain strategist. “We’re entering the finger-pointing and positioning-for-history part of the campaign. It’s every man for himself now.”
A circular firing squad is among the most familiar political rituals of a campaign when things aren’t going well. But it is rare for campaign aides to be so openly participating in it well before Election Day.
It's not just the McCain election that is being recognized as close to lost. Other recent events demonstrate how badly the Congressional races are going: This is not a good year to be a Republican.
2 comments:
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Should The top management of the Public listed company be responsible for the company performance, eg company nearly get wind up?
http://bailoutmovie.blogspot.com/
Are you a Partisan?
Should they give their view......?
I'm not sure that this related to my post, so it is probably spam.
However, I am both ex-military and trained as an accountant. Sarbanes-Oxley made it a requirement that the top management take direct personal responsibility for the reported results of a listed company, something I strongly agree with. The alternative is for the guys at the top who set pay scaled to get all the rewards when things go well, and then when things go bad to blame someone else.
It's a relatively weak law, but it is a step in the right direction.
The objection is that it costs a lot to do proper accounting to place that responsibility. But well-run companies already spend that money. It is shady companies which do not spend the money for the necessary accounting and thus drag down the good companies to their level so that they can compete.
Much of unregulated free enterprise is exactly that kind of race to the bottom, usually based on ignoring required costs of operation. That's a major reason why mortgage banks failed to properly document the mortgages they issued and thus issued mortgages to individuals who could not pay them back of the home prices dropped.
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