How the election was won -- and lost
John McCain never recovered from his uneven response to the economic collapse. Barack Obama pounced, and he never looked back.
Reporting from Phoenix and Washington — On Sept. 21, six days after the stunning collapse of Lehman Bros. Holdings Inc., one of Wall Street's largest and oldest investment banks, John McCain devoted a total of three sentences to voters' economic worries in his only campaign event of the day, a speech at a National Guard convention in Baltimore.
Three days later, the Republican presidential nominee pronounced the financial crisis so dire that he needed to suspend his campaign, cancel the first presidential debate and rush back to Washington to help forge a solution to a national emergency.
McCain's dramatic move not only failed, his baffling shifts in tactics and message backfired so badly he lost his lead in national polls and never recovered. Both sides now say Barack Obama essentially clinched his victory in late September.
"Images of the two candidates changed dramatically," said David Axelrod, Obama's chief strategist. "Obama came across as commanding and knowledgeable, cool, calm. McCain seemed a little bit unsettled, moving from pillar to post."
As dispirited Republicans sift through the wreckage of Tuesday's results, many argue that McCain was crippled by public anger at President Bush's failures at home and abroad. McCain echoed the claim in his concession speech when he said he didn't know what else he could have done to win.
But if McCain was dealt a bad hand, experts say, he often played it poorly. In decision after decision, he and his aides created problems for themselves and failed to press the advantages they had.
High among them was McCain's inability to connect with Latino voters.
McCain had hoped Latinos would reward his efforts in Congress to help the nation's estimated 12 million illegal immigrants get on the path to citizenship. But under pressure from his party's right wing, McCain had abandoned his own proposals during the primaries and instead stressed increasing border security.
The result: He won support from less than a third of Latinos who voted, far fewer than President Bush did four years ago. The difference helped doom McCain in Florida, New Mexico, Colorado and Nevada, all states that Bush had won.
Steve Schmidt, one of McCain's top aides, blamed the Republican Party, not the candidate. The GOP "has done all that it can possibly do to antagonize Latino voters in this country," he complained.
