Don't blame Sarah!

The John McCain campaign didn't wait for Tuesday's decisive loss to start pinning the blame for the shellacking on Sarah Palin. It started weeks earlier with campaign operatives putting out the word that she was a "diva," saying she was difficult to work with and confirming reports of a rift with McCain. Not to mention the leaking of a $150,000 bill for clothing that Palin neither picked out nor paid for, but for which she was saddled with the entirety of the blame.

Talk about the "Straight Talk Express" going off the rails!

The media elites who have demonized and demeaned Palin in every way imaginable will surely run with the McCain campaign's spin and milk it for all it's worth. The storyline will likely lead the election postmortem coverage for quite some time to come. Before long, hardly anyone will remember how energized the Republican National Convention – and the Republican base nationally – was by the Palin selection, or how McCain emerged from that convention (thanks to her stunning performance) with a solid lead over Obama.

Then came the Wall Street financial crisis, and rather than side with the people – who abhorred the Washington bailout and opposed it with unbridled intensity – McCain instead made himself the public face of that bailout by suspending his campaign and rushing back to Washington to try to hammer out the deal. With that, his poll numbers collapsed.

McCain probably couldn't help himself. This is what he'd been doing his entire career – working with Washington liberals to push through horrendous legislation or reach arranged "compromises" favorable to the liberal agenda and then taking credit for being courageous enough to "do the right thing."

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This time, McCain alienated not only conservatives across the country (as he had done repeatedly on a host of issues through the years – immigration, campaign finance reform, drilling, judges, etc.) but the vast majority of the voting public – and he never recovered from it. Hundreds of national opinion polls taken from that point forward showed Obama in the lead, often by double digits, as did most polls in the key swing states.

While this was by far McCain's biggest misstep of the campaign, it was by no means his only one. He also let two of Obama's biggest lies, both on taxes, stand virtually unchallenged.

The first one was Obama's flat-out false assertion that the Bush tax cuts helped only the rich, when in fact they helped people of all income groups and spurred a lagging economy. Of course, it was hard for McCain to make that argument, considering that he opposed the Bush tax cuts on the same baseless grounds of benefiting the rich as all his liberal buddies in the Senate (another example of "McCain being McCain" coming back to haunt him).

The second one was Obama's vow to cut taxes on 95 percent of Americans, notwithstanding the fact that about 40 percent of Americans pay no taxes at all. McCain should have been hammering away at this point relentlessly, and reminding voters that Obama's vow is a typical Democratic ploy (remember Clinton's promise of a middle-class tax cut vanishing as soon as he was elected?), but he remained largely silent.

Consequently, polls showed that McCain had only a slight advantage at best over Obama on the tax issue, an issue that Republicans historically own at election time.

Ronald Reagan liked to say that God put Republicans on earth to cut taxes, and the electorate's understanding of this has propelled innumerable GOP candidates into office. But the voters weren't buying it this time around. Without question, McCain's "courageous" pre-election aversion to tax cuts hurt him badly in his presidential run.

And even though Obama was the most radical presidential candidate in U.S. history to have a legitimate shot at the presidency, McCain negated this by soft-pedaling the incontrovertible proof of it – Obama's lifelong radical associations. To hear McCain tell it, Obama's close relationship with unrepentant domestic terrorist William Ayers was merely a lapse in judgment. Worse yet, McCain decided early on to take the execrable Jeremiah Wright off the table altogether as a topic of discussion.

He also failed to answer the constant questions about Palin's supposed lack of experience. McCain should have been making the point that, however inexperienced she might be, she nevertheless has far more executive experience than Obama. As Newt Gingrich wrote earlier this week: "[I]t is revealing that no national network TV interviewer asked Gov. Sarah Palin about her experiences as governor; her experience writing an $11 billion state budget; her experience leading the 29,000 employees of the Alaskan state government; her experience negotiating a big deal with ExxonMobil, Shell, BP and the rest of Big Oil; her success in giving the money from that negotiation to the people of Alaska as a $1,300 tax cut for every man, woman and child in the state; or her experience in negotiating a natural-gas pipeline that is the biggest civil-construction project in North America, and which three former governors failed to get done."

Perhaps they were just too busy asking her "gotcha" questions in an attempt to reduce her in the eyes of the American people and impress their fellow media elites with their usefulness to the Obama campaign they all so enthusiastically abetted.

Without question, the mainstream media worked assiduously on Obama's behalf and did everything possible to destroy Palin. Their hatred for her can be summed up in one word – "Trig," the name of her Down syndrome child. Her baby boy is not only living proof of her commitment to her Christian, pro-life principles, but he is also a haunting presence to the millions of women who have aborted their own children. Palin is arguably the most serious threat to the liberal agenda on the national stage today, so the media went after her with everything they had to not only keep her from becoming vice president but to undermine any future she might have in politics.

To that end, expect Democrats and the media to make the case in the weeks ahead that the McCain campaign was done in by his decision to nominate such a woefully unqualified running mate. In short, Sarah-bashing will be raised to something of an art form as she is blamed for everything that went wrong.

Still, the fact remains that when all of the votes were tabulated last night, John McCain was left lying in a bed that he himself had made. And if he wants to know who cost him this election, all he has to do is look in the mirror.