| Description | That's the partisan Republican spin on the dreadful McCain campaign. Krauthammer makes the case this morning:
The patient was fatally stricken on Sept. 15 -- caught in the rubble when the roof fell in (at Lehman Brothers, according to the police report) -- although he did linger until his final, rather quiet demise on Nov. 4. In the excitement and decisiveness of Barack Obama's victory, we forget that in the first weeks of September, John McCain was actually ahead. Then Lehman collapsed, and the financial system went off a cliff.
The data do not support this thesis. McCain was behind for almost all of the campaign, apart from a brief post-convention bump. Here's the Pollster graph for the period in question:
You will note that McCain's slide began September 7, a week before Krauthammer claims; and Obama's re-surge began September 9. Pollster's polls are smoothed out, but the turning point was well before Lehman, and correlates with the disastrous Couric Gibson-Palin interview.
All along, the clear line for McCain was always down, and only the convention period - when people were still under the temporary illusion that Sarah Palin was a credible, rather than a farcical, candidate - gave McCain any hope. |
