By Michael Kelly

There was no election day surprise as to why John McCain could not complete a final campaign comeback. After surging in the polls in the week leading up the election, time ran out for the GOP hopeful. Here are five reasons why…

George W. Bush
The wildly unpopular sitting president was too much for his party’s candidate to overcome. In some respects, it was a great feat for McCain to run as closely as he did in a political climate which saw the American people favor Democrats on a majority of the major issues facing the country.

The Obama/Biden ticket constantly referred to the GOP’s candidate’s policies as coming from a “Bush-McCain” ideology, never failing to remind voters of the party connection between the two. While McCain constantly tried to disassociate himself from the current administration, he could never fully sever the ties. Things like Dick Cheney’s pre-election weekend endorsement surely didn’t help McCain’s case.

V.P. Pick Did More Harm Than Good

At first, Sarah Palin was a breath of fresh air for the McCain campaign, generating lots of excitement (and money) for the Republican ticket. Her campaign visits were well-received and her convention speech went off without a hitch. But nationally, her warm welcome would be short-lived.

Interviews with Katie Couric and Charles Gibson seemed to be filled with rehearsed answers, making her seem like she was unfamiliar with the issues plaguing the country. Even answers to simple questions, such as what newspapers Palin read, became a whirlwind tour through her mind.

In the end, Palin became a distraction to the McCain campaign, with talk about her wardrobe expenses and her own presidential ambitions (possibly as early as 2012) creeping into the news cycle. Days before the election, most Americans shared the view that Palin was a hindrance to the McCain campaign.

The Economy Tanked

Hard. And it brought more and more attention to the party that McCain calls home, and the president who led the party for the past eight years.

Even worse, the economic crisis brought out the worst in the McCain campaign. It reignited the Phil Gramm “whiners” remark and brought attention back to McCain’s remarks that the economy was not his strongest issue. It also led to McCain’s ill-fated decision to temporarily suspend his campaign, which voters seemed to view as more of a campaign stunt than a responsible maneuver.

An election that becomes about the American people’s pocketbook simply does not favor the party in power.

Ask George H.W. Bush

”The Elite Liberal Media (and Entertainment) Bias

And also, as (Tina Fey’s) Sarah Palin might call it, the “liberal regular media.”

All jokes aside, there might be some truth to the common McCain (and Republican) complaint of media bias. A study done by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism confirmed this belief for Republicans. According to the non-partisan Pew, more than three out of every four McCain stories were negative in the last six weeks before the election.

In fairness, some in the media credit results to a study like that as just the media following the narrative of the campaign, a race in which McCain often trailed.

But, the national media also gave Obama a pass on key issues, such as whether or not the idea of “spreading the wealth” was a tenet of socialism, never going into the topic until Joe the Plumber made it an issue. But perhaps most telling was the free pass the media gave Obama on reneging on his promise to take public financing for his presidential campaign.

Before the McCain-Feingold Act of 2002, campaign finance reform had been a common theme on liberal editorial boards across the United States. Yet no media members even batted an eye as Obama historically outspent McCain. They didn’t even take the opportunity when Obama spent millions of dollars on his Oct. 29 network infomercial.

What is definitely true is that there is a “liberal entertainment bias.” And, according to Howard Kurtz, it matters a lot.

Failure To Quickly Secure His Base

This was McCain biggest impediment. His famed “Maverick” brand of politics caused him to have to try to secure his party’s base, after winning his party’s nomination.

How? Many of the early GOP primaries were open to independent voters, which helped spur early McCain wins, as did the abundance of candidates in the Republican field, who each occupied a specific political niche within the party.

McCain was able to win his party’s bid for the presidency without ever fully convincing the party’s base that he was “one of them.”

He spent precious months courting the people that most Republicans would have no trouble wooing; social conservatives. Most of the summer was spent advocating his social conservative credentials, culminating in his choice of Sarah Palin for his number two spot.

The dynamic of most elections is to run to your base in the primaries, and then sprint to the middle after securing the nomination, to where most of the American voters reside. Case in point: Obama advocated his plan for a strict, 16-month withdrawal from Iraq during the Democratic primary, but once he was a general election candidate, his plan became a little softer on deadlines, and more reliant on advice from experts and generals.