Looking to salvage any possible last vestiges of hope in the face of McCain's dismal poll numbers, Republican partisans have turned to evoking yet again the Spirit of Reagan, circa 1980. To do so, the story of Reagan's "come from behind" victory over Carter is duly polished, exaggerated, and trotted out to proclaim at least the possibility of snatching Republican victory from the jaws of defeat.
They almost got it right. The Reagan analogy is perfectly apt, but somehow the roles were reversed somewhere between the central casting department of reality and the Republican talking point emails.
John McCain, despite the 78 RPM repetitions of "Maverick," is the old way, the distrusted, wrong track establishment. His recycling of Republican talking points early on took on a surreal quality. Here's a hint - if you don't want to be tied to a failed Administration, don't repeat their 4 year old campaign talking points word for word. Any way you look at it, McCain is running as the incumbent, the designated successor to an Administration with a 23% approval rating.
Barack Obama is the challenger. Just as Reagan won votes by stepping up and saying "You're doing it wrong," thus leading what was come to be called the Reagan Revolution, so Obama today is positioned to lead the progressive reply to at least a decade of trickle-down, corporatist legislation and de-regulation. Just as Americans looked to Reagan for the answer to what was seen as a crisis of confidence abroad that was crystallized in the Iranian hostage crisis, so Obama today is seen as the best answer to the crisis at home, as crystallized by the economic meltdown of 2008.
So you do have a candidate who rides to the front on a popular wave of dissatisfaction with the establishment, and who had a widespread crisis play to his strengths. The confusion on the Right is simply because the victor who will change the course of American history and affect the narrative of economic and international dynamics for the next thirty years isn't a wealthy, elderly white man with hawkish tendencies and delusions of grandeur.
I would like to be the first to wish the GOP better luck in 2032.
As an aside, here's the best sour grapes image I could come up with for the McCain campaign:
Would you like some whine with that?