How Sean Hannity Lost The Election for the GOP

You can see it all in retrospect. Sean Hannity and his cohorts at FOX saturated the world with Wright and drove the Wright Issue into the ground. And now the desperate Rev. Wright swiftboating that saturated the media yesterday sinks like a stone. We tune it out like ads we know backwards and forwards. They have no traction. It is old stuff.

Better yet, if Hannity had not played Wright so pervasively, Barack might not have been forced to deliver the most important message on race since I Have A Dream.

Yes, in the world of what might have been, it is likely that Sean Hannity set the precise stage that brought down the entire GOP this time around, including some pretty good Republican candidates. You can blame it all on Sean.

Analysis:

The first thing Sean did was an atrocious job of reporting. A good reporter does not edit tape with the malicious obviousness that Sean displayed. It became clear that Wright had been viciously reduced to a stupid soundbite or two, entirely out of context. Decent Republicans joined everyone else in holding their noses.

The second thing Hannity did, which he repeated in his equally ineffective Ayers vendetta, was to try to convert the electorate by dismal and incessant repetition. He literally took over FOX, followed by a culpable MSM which simply went along. Hannity sullied any residual claim to integrity that Rupert Murdoch might wish to salvage.

His repetition became absurd, guaranteeing that the current resurrection of the Wright soundbites would fall on deaf and jaded ears.

Criminally deficient reporting and intolerable repetition led to the third and most serious result -- tearing an already vulnerable GOP in two,

I am writing this before the votes come in, save for heavy Obama wins in two small New Hampshire towns.

I am right, the landslide I have seen coming for months (see the map at the base of the page here ) will carry Barack beyond 400 EVs.

Why? In substantial part, all the Republicans who were totally turned off by the antics of Hannity regarding Wright and then Ayers, will not have voted for McCain-Palin.

The very idea that people who once were happy to respect Ike and Goldwater and even the McCain of 2000 wanted to be in lockstep behind the warped thinking of Hannity, should have raised a red flag.

Miniscule thought would have revealed that Hannity was and is a GOP buster of the first order, a person no self-respecting Republican would want to claim or follow.

Consider this:

McCain first tried the Bush 2004 approach in the primaries, went broke and proved himself a horrendous administrator.

He fired his most faithful friends and fought on solo.

The only way he won at all was to do what he was best at -- win the votes of moderate Republicans and Independents and non-Obama Democrats -- the very people revolted and embarrassed by Sean Hannity.

But McCain was muddle-headed in his primary victory. He assumed he had to have the support of what has been called the Republican BASE. This was the stupidest assumption of all. The only way McCain could have won was by appreciating the similarity between himself and Barack. By kicking the Hannity BASE in the teeth.

By redefining the base just as Barack redefined the Democratic base as a 50 state constituency. The election could have come down to a civil and humorous McCain versus the Barack we know.

McCain killed himself the second time by going right back to the Hannity-Bush Tree of Knowledge and eating a big apple all on his own.

The result was his schizoid campaign, successive proofs of his own failed leadership capacities.

The end came when Schmidt prevailed on him to suspend the campaign and play Mighty Mouse in Washington. The execution of this was so inept that the American public decided that it was time to get cozy with Barack and that has been the story of the campaign ever since.

It all goes back to Hannity. He created the environment that McCain simply accepted when he could have OPPPOSED it and cut the ground out from under the Obama critique. He could have basically told the Hannity core to buzz off.

Now there are the almost comical Wright ads put out by a Republican PAC with the word Trust in its name. How delicious. How pathetic. How apposite.

Sean Hannity destroyed the proper use of Rev. Wright. He made it so redundant that it became totally ineffective.

I have always been a person who could have been more valuable to the Republicans than the Democrats because I understand how to beat Democrats. Barack has been the consummate politician for whom I cast my vote this very morning. I am deeply and emotionally tied to his candidacy.

But I cannot help observing how Sean Hannity single-handedly became the primary operative in losing of the election for the GOP in 2008.

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Read more Election Day Liveblogs, Reaction and Analysis from HuffPost Bloggers

Comments

[fromero]

(Letter to Heritage Foundation)

How much did the patrons of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity pay Heritage to have their photos included in its 2009 calendar, together with an image of Abraham Lincoln no less? How could a prestigious organization like Heritage sell out to the rabble like that? Government is broken, Wall Street is broken, public education is broken, TV entertainment is broken, and now it appears that our conservative think tanks are broken as well.

[Dadeo]

Unfortunately I believe there is a major plus Fox News gets to reap from the likes of Hanitty, Orielly etc..
Ratings, ratings and more ratings. So many people tune in to these shows just to hear how they will spin their hate, twist the facts and contort the truth.

[Reality30303]

THIS STORY SHOULD BE MOVED TO THE FRONT PAGE

[Stephen C. Rose - Huffpost Blogger]

Wish it would. I guess you need to have been here longer than I have. This has certainly gotten more response than anything I have posted so far. Best, S

[sdeniset]

I'm not sure if it was noted elsewhere, but while Hillary Clinton was the front-runner, when he was running the "Stop Hillary Express", Hannity had nothing but great things to say about Obama, including that he was the better candidate. All of this took place several months after he'd already interviewed "the radical" Jeremiah Wright and presumably knew of the segments of the speeches that he would replay time and time again in the months to come. He did note that, should Obama pull off the unlikely and defeat Hillary, he had "something in his back pocket" that he would save for the general election. It turns out that the only thing that was in his back pocket was his ass. No one of any amount of intelligence (generally not including his listeners, the hatemongering minority of the Republican base) cared about Wright, Ayers, Farrakhan, media bias, race, lapel pins, or any of the other propaganda that Sean Hannity tried to level against Obama rather than repeatedly siting the merits of his own candidate. They all got what they deserved - a president that they're forced by "patriotism" to respect.

[sammy cole]

Sean Hannity helped destroy John McCain during the primaries....he absolutely did not like McCain AT ALL. As soon as McCain became the Republican nominee....Hannity shifted, rarely talking about McCain, his candidate choice but instead........dissing Obama constantly. This is a SURE way to move people to the opposition. Then...in came Palin....by then it was too late. Sure ratings went up momentarily with all that winking and blinking and high healed shoes.....Hannity and his bizzare obcessions with Wright and then Ayers and socialism at the end and love affair with Palin...turned off the base who headed straight for Obama. Good Goin' Hannity.....Heck of a Good Job !!!

[Skepticat]

"Sean Hannity destroyed the proper use of Rev Wright?" Is there a "proper" way to base a campaign on 27 seconds of tape of a non candidate taken out of context - I'm missing something.

[Stephen C. Rose - Huffpost Blogger]

Hi Skepticat. Glad you asked. I was putting myself in the position of someone on the right who had the Wright info. There was a potentially correct way to use it that would have raised a completely legitimate question which relates to liberation theology and values. Hannity's defining of the issue in terms of unfair soundbites and vitrioloc gotcha partisanship made that impossible. We will never know how a more civil discussion of the issue might have impacted things. Clearly Barack's speech, necessitated by Hannity and FOX's undairness, was a huge positive event in legitimizing his candidacy.

[jetgirl]

They over played it because they wanted Hillary. Nothing brings out the base like Clinton hate.

[RealityBaseCamp]

Al Franken had a great reference to Hannity (maybe BillO, but I think it was Hannity) . . . He was going on a USO tour, and his wife mentioned Hannity never went out to entertain the troops. Al replied, "Well, that's not really fair; Sean has no talent." We have to be fair here, too. He's also not a reporter. The closest he comes is doing interviews, having his staff dig up dirt, and sending producers to ambush people. He doesn't bother to get the whole picture, so he can't use the facts he does have effectively. We can only hope he doesn't learn from this, and his viewers do.

[Fritzi]

Sean Hannity did Obama a great favor. So many people that I and my friends know voted for Obama because of Hannity. I guess we can thank Hannity for getting Obama some new votes. Unfortunately, he, Limbaugh, Levin, Savage, Coulter and their ilk will continue the hate and try to destroy Obama's presidency.

[jpaese]

Sean Hannity might be the most unAmerican television pundit allowed on the air. He is bigoted and unintelligent. He is a disgrace to the term journalism, and hasn't demonstrated a working knowledge of the term once in his career. He is an ignorant coward, and I look forward to seeing him fade and become even more obscure than ever. It's funny how big of an ego he has, considering that the only people who take him seriously are the other ignorant racists in this country. They are fast becoming the sound of one hand clapping, thanks to this hateful, ignorant jerk. To the rest of the country, he is an unfunny joke.

[BigRube]

Hannity really did hurt the GOP this year. He just doesn't have enough brains to figure that out. The bad news is he is still spreading hatred after the election. I wonder what is going to happen once Obama becomes president. Just have to wait and see.

[Degringolade]

Isn't ANYONE going to talk about Hannity's radical associations?

[Stephen C. Rose - Huffpost Blogger]

My blog is pretty obscure through no fault of my own :) but last March I did publish the following and this will help clarify to a few who have emailed me and suggested I am slamming Hannity after the fact. I have been slamming him for some time.

FOX, Sean Hannity, Hal Turner: Jaws of Hell on the Right March 19, 2007

http://stephencrosehome.blogspot.com/2008/03/fox-is-not-news-channel.html.

[digguron]

I saw an exit poll that showed that 90% of the people that voted for McCain were white,does that bother anyone as much as it bothers me? I think it should be an eye opener.

[dcree77]

What was the exit poll that you looked at? I would like to check it out. That number sounds high but I am no expert.

[Vyvjala]

After voicing his hatred for President Obama during a shallow conversation with rove hannity once again bloviates, "g.w. bush is a great American and he was mistreated by the media and doesn't deserve to be chastised by leftwing fanatics after all the good things he has accomplished.............

[MsMadame]

Thanks, Sean!



Bravo,Obama/Biden!