The Desperate Right's Five Biggest Flops of the 2008 Election

After every election cycle, our national press corps likes to point out the so-called game-changing moments during the campaign that supposedly shifted momentum decisively toward one candidate. Classic examples include Gerald Ford freeing Poland, Ronald Reagan telling Jimmy Carter that he went again, Michael Dukakis appearing in a tank, Bush I looking at his watch, Al Gore sighing and John Kerry windsurfing. At their heart, these moments are superficial explanations for very complex processes and phenomena, which is the biggest reason why the media love to discuss them. After all, it beats talking about policy.

Over the past two decades, the Right has excelled at manipulating the media's love of shallow, scripted storylines to transform our national discourse into one long psychodrama in which Democratic candidates inevitably make some tragic gaffe that shows voters how truly out of touch they are with the Real Americans living in the heartland. These moments are usually dramatized by illustrations of blaring sirens on the Drudge Report accompanied by bold, red-lettered headlines that say things like, "SHOCK VIDEO: Kerry orders Swiss cheese on his cheesesteak." Our press corps then dutifully reports on how Kerry's disdain for traditional Cheez Wiz shows why Democrats are having trouble connecting with blue-collar voters who suspect that Democrats are all secretly Jesus-hating communists.

This election, however, none of the GOP's scripted game-changing moments were able to derail the Obama campaign. Indeed, it could be argued that many of the non-game-changers (See: Palin, Sarah) actually worked in Obama's favor. Here, then, are the five most uneventful events that did not decisively help McCain win the election:

Non-Game Changer #5: A crazed Obama supporter did not carve a backward "B" into a McCain staffer's face.

At first, the Ashley Todd saga seemed like the perfect way to shift the election momentum back to McCain. Here, after all, was a young white woman who had been robbed and assaulted by a crazed black Obama supporter who went so far as to mutilate her face when he learned she was working for McCain. Matt Drudge blared Todd's "shock" story at the top of his home page and showed a picture of the poor young conservative with a black eye and a backward "B" carved into her face. Some of the dimmer right-wing bloggers such as Red State's Erick Erickson jumped all over the story and proclaimed that the media were to blame for Todd's alleged assault because they had "cooked up tales about Republican verbal violence" at McCain rallies. Obama also took his share of the blame because he had urged his supporters to get in opponents' faces and aggressively defend their positions and beliefs.

Todd's story, of course, was such obvious bullshit that even Michelle Malkin expressed skepticism about it. While this didn't stop the McCain campaign from actively pushing it to the media, it did ensure that the non-story had a nonexistent shelf life.

Non-Game Changer #4: Obama's non-friendship with Bill Ayers did not leave him vulnerable to charges of supporting terrorism.

In the 1970s, Bill Ayers was a member of the Weather Underground, a fringe lefty outfit that become notorious for unsuccessfully using terrorism to achieve its political ends. By the 1990s, Ayers had become a professor at the University of Chicago and a powerful player in the Chicago political scene. Obama first met Ayers back when then-Illinois State Sen. Alice Palmer invited him to a gathering at Ayers' house. In the years that followed, Obama and Ayers would sporadically serve together on nonprofit charity and education products and ... that's pretty much it.

But while Obama's relationship with Ayers was not exactly what you'd call "close," it was used by the Right as a potential game changer. Sarah Palin made the most high-profile statement about Obama and Ayers by accusing the senator of "palling around with terrorists." Traveling even further into Cloud Cuckoo Land was the National Review's Andy McCarthy, who actually pondered whether Ayers had secretly ghostwritten Obama's first book. And of course, the gold medal for lunacy on this front went to blogger Tom Maguire, who speculated that Obama's connection to Ayers and his interest in ending apartheid in South Africa made it conceivable that Obama could have been involved in an anti-apartheid bombing in 1981.