The obvious winners are Barack Obama, Congressional Democrats, all the volunteers that worked hard to make this dream a reality and the progressives that wanted this change so badly.
Politico has highlighted the winners and losers of this campaign election. I agree that the verdict on the victors will come not from a single night of election returns but from the actions the winners take to remedy the nation’s economic ills and extricate it from two long and costly wars.
President Bush. The worst President in history. The debt, deregulation, the two wars, and his unpopularity helped doom John McCain who voted for Bush policies 90% of the time.
Steve Schmidt. McCain’s main strategist was brought in after a shake-up to hammer Obama hard every day, and he did that with gusto, hatching the highly effective “Celebrity” ad equating Obama with Paris Hilton. Schmidt’s mid-campaign testosterone boost turned off independents, young voters and women. Meanwhile, the base never believed the Arizona senator was one of their own – even when Schmidt succeeded in persuading McCain to choose Sarah Palin as his running mate.
Rudy Giuliani. America’s mayor began the year as the Republican front-runner by making the case for the big-tent GOP approach. He ended it as a caustic Republican attack dog at a time when GOP partisanship has turned off the very independents Giuliani initially attracted.
Bill Kristol. The former Republican White House aide-turned-New York Times columnist was one of the loudest voices in favor of invading Iraq. And he was among the first to suggest Palin could be McCain’s savior. It proved to be a brilliant move. For about two weeks.
