Winners and losers of the 2008 election
da: The New York Times
The longest and most exciting U.S. presidential campaign in memory ends Tuesday. The biggest winner will be Barack Obama or John McCain; the other will be the biggest loser. That’s the way elections work.
During the course of the year, there have been many other winners and losers. Barring an unprecedented shift over the next 24 hours, here are some 2008 award designees:
Best political strategist: David Axelrod of the Obama campaign. He is the architect of the most remarkably cohesive and compelling presidential campaign in modern American history. Axelrod and the campaign’s manager, David Plouffe, had a strategic sense of the times and the field. They ran circles around Hillary Rodham Clinton and McCain.
A few mistakes were made. If last March they had focused only on the Texas primary instead of splitting their time in Ohio, they probably could have knocked Clinton out three months earlier. More striking is how few mistakes were made. They were calm and confident when other politicians, and more than a…
