A Christian Liberal is NOT an oxymoron.

Posted by XT on March 3rd, 2009 in Campaign News

Marty Ryall as a article up for Politics Magazine explaining why the “Godless” campaign ad in North Carolina wasn’t a failure. He likes the football analogy:

Many in the media, especially on the liberal side, were quick to point to the ad and claim it backfired, costing Dole the election. Nothing could be further from the truth. When a football team is trailing by 7 points and throws a “Hail Mary” on the last play of the game, they don’t lose because they failed to complete the play, they lose because they were down 7 points and time was running out.

Um, is he saying “the losing team is the one who scores fewer points?” Wow. Insightful.

The analogy is of limited use, I think. A Hail Mary pass has the potential to win the game – so for this to work, we have to believe that Elizabeth Dole’s desperate attempt to win the race based on Kay Hagan’s attendance at a fundraiser held by atheists would have turned the election. I don’t see that evidence.

Kay Hagan outpolled Barack Obama – by more than a hundred thousand votes. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Dole fell a quarter of a million votes short of her party’s Presidential candidate. Even if everyone who voted for Obama also gave a kneejerk vote for Hagan, she still beat Dole handily. But I agree that it wasn’t the Godless ad that did it – the Godless ad was simply a symptom of a candidate that was completely out of touch with her electorate.

Ryall gives three reasons for Dole’s loss – 1) Dole wasn’t able to raise money; 2) Obama politicized the race heavily towards Democrats; and 3) Dole was hit for not being in the state. Reason 2 can be ejected because of the vote totals. When your opponent outpolls the top of the ticket, you can’t blame the top of the ticket for your loss. When your candidate drops a quarter of a million votes from the top of the ticket, it isn’t because of the top of the ticket. That’s an electoral judgment being passed on your candidate. Reasons 1 and 3 are essentially the same – North Carolinians didn’t really care for Dole’s missing-in-action style. So they talked about it and they didn’t give her money.

The Godless ad was simply one more losing strategy added to the sorry story. The GOP read the electorate as caring more about their faith (and the faith of the candidates) than they did about the economy or about Dole’s absence from the state. They were wrong. They were never in position to throw a Hail Mary pass. They were running a chuck-and-duck against a defense custom made to defeat it. The Godless ad is simply evidence that the GOP believes it can cynically step in, throw religion around, and win a race. North Carolina should have showed them that they can’t.

But what does Ryall say?

The risk was huge and not worth taking until it was evident we could not win without it, and that was not clear until about 10 days out. Had the ad run about 20 days out, it may have made it closer, but the data we had at that time did not warrant taking such a large gamble. However, in the end the ad had very little impact if any, in the defeat of Elizabeth Dole.

Right – it had little to do with her defeat. But it would have been a flop if they had run it twenty days or twenty months out. Where is there any proof of Ryall’s hypothesis? The best he can do is point to straight-ticket voters. But that hypothesis fails to explain Hagan outpolling Obama. So where does that leave his logic?

Stuck in another decade.

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