What happened to McCain’s luck?

A reader forwarded to me this e-mail:

Obama is going to be our next president. How do you like that?

Looking pretty hopeless for McCain. Maybe he’ll get lucky and a big scandal will appear in the press—like maybe it will turn out that Obama belonged to a racist organization for 20 years, or maybe he will turn out to have been great friends with an ex-terrorist, or maybe a scandal involving a sleazy real-estate deal with a political fixer, or maybe it will be uncovered that his voting record doesn’t stand for “change” at all, but just a yes vote on every business-as-usual massive pork barrel spending bill there ever was. No, McCain would have to get impossibly lucky for a scandal of those proportions to be uncovered.

So, what happened to McCain’s luck—that remarkable luck that rescued him from political death in the summer of ‘07, that eliminated his main contenders for the nomination, that led the Sunnis of Anbar province to turn against Al Qaeda and make the surge a far greater success than its strongest proponents had predicted, that placed in the Alaska governorship a sparkling personality who, picked for the VP slot, created conservative enthusiasm for McCain’s otherwise mediocre and listless candidacy? What happened to McCain’s luck? It ran into a greater force that defeated it: McCain’s liberalism. Handed by fate an opponent whose radical leftist record would doom him if the record were exposed, McCain declined to expose it or even mention it. To paraphrase McCain: he would rather refuse to expose a leftist, and lose an election.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 06, 2008 06:43 PM | Send