The Early Word: McCain-Palin Post-Mortem
By Michael Falcone
As all eyes turn to President-elect Barack Obama, his transition to the White House and the changing political landscape in Washington and across the country, epilogues to the 2008 presidential race abound.
Today The Times’s Elisabeth Bumiller goes inside the McCain campaign to find out what went wrong in the closing days before Nov. 4. Ms. Bumiller writes of sharp differences between the staff who surrounded Senator John McCain and advisers to his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin: “The tensions and their increasingly public airing provide a revealing coda to the ill-fated McCain-Palin ticket, hinting at the mounting turmoil of a campaign that was described even by many Republicans as incoherent, negative and badly run.”
On the day after the election, Senator McCain was surrounded by friends, who indicated the defeated Republican senator was in high spirits and ready to get back to work in Washington:
