Episode 17: Dissent Amongst The Ranks

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“It looks like the ‘Straight Talk Express’ has lost a wheel” said Barack Obama in the second debate. Now it seems the bus also has a blown transmission, dead battery, a cracked windshield, and a stalled engine.

Perhaps it stared with the defection of Colin Powell or the endorsement of over 100 newspapers, including The Chicago Tribune – a paper that has never endorsed a democrat in its long history. It seems the nods for Obama from these venerable sources has put the wind in the sails for a McCain exodus – or from another point of view, triggered the abandoning the Straight Talk Ship.

Other converts include Susan Eisenhower, Governor Linwood Holton of Virginia, who is campaigning for Obama in the state, Bill Ruckelshaus, who served in the Nixon and Reagan administrations, Christopher Buckley, son of conservative icon and founder of the republican publication The National Review (and subsequently tendered his resignation because of this endorsement), and the list continues.

Furthermore, McCain is now attacking Bush’s policies these last 8 years, which is causing quite a stir amongst the republican base. In a joint interview with McCain and Palin on NBC Nightly News, the two were definitely not in sync. It is speculated that Palin’s unfavorable standing in the polls are causing somewhat of a rift.

But the biggest blow, which must cut McCain pretty deep, has to come from CC Goldwater, granddaughter of McCain’s hero Presidential Candidate Barry Goldwater. She writes:

“Myself, along with my siblings and a few cousins, will not be supporting the Republican presidential candidates this year. We believe strongly in what our grandfather stood for: honesty, integrity, and personal freedom, free from political maneuvering and fear tactics. I learned a lot about my grandfather while producing the documentary, Mr. Conservative Goldwater on Goldwater. Our generation of Goldwaters expects government to provide for constitutional protections. We reject the constant intrusion into our personal lives, along with other crucial policy issues of the McCain/Palin ticket.”

The rest of her commentary can be found here.

This campaign will go down in the history books as one of the worst. I guarantee, a few years down the road when all of this information has been fully digested, it will serve as a cautionary tale for future political strategists.