McCain's Campaign Chief: He Never Had a Chance

The man who ran John McCain's campaign said his defeat was nearly preordained, reports Politico. It was "the strategic equivalent of throwing a football through a tire at 50 yards,” said Steve Schmidt. Given the ascendancy of Barack Obama—"the unfinished Bobby Kennedy campaign"—the unpopularity of George Bush, the economy, and the splintered GOP, McCain would have needed a miracle.

“We were running a campaign under extra difficult circumstances," he said. "A lot of issues that were not John McCain’s fault but were John McCain’s problem in this race. When Lehman Brothers collapsed in the fall I knew pretty much right away that...from an electoral strategy perspective, the campaign was finished,” said Schmidt, who spoke at the University of Delaware with Obama campaign chief David Plouffe. (More Steve Schmidt stories.)