Insight of presidential election insiders proves riveting

Harvard forum a postmortem

CAMBRIDGE - So, with just a few more weeks, could John McCain have pulled out a victory over Barack Obama?

"No - we lost," McCain's chief pollster, Bill McInturff, said without hesitation before a packed auditorium last night at Harvard University's Institute of Politics. "We were happy it was over."

It was the kind of blunt statement that, while unimaginable just weeks ago, has come to mark the ritual of presidential election postmortems: chummy get-togethers where top aides to the candidates sit together cordially, let bygones be bygones, and talk about what was and what could have been.

The event last night, the latest in a series of postelection roundtables that Harvard has hosted for years, featured McInturff and former McCain campaign manager Rick Davis and former Obama campaign manager David Plouffe and David Axelrod, Obama's chief strategist who will follow the president-elect into the White House as a senior adviser. PBS's Gwen Ifill moderated.

Despite their heated, and often personal, general election battle, the four men left all that behind last night in exchanging civil, frank banter over the nitty-gritty of this year's historic march to the White House. There were few juicy revelations, but the insider insights into such a closely watched campaign kept the audience riveted.

Davis acknowledged McCain's image as a maverick, which he had cultivated successfully during the 2000 presidential campaign, had been damaged by this year's brutal Republican primary, which forced McCain to play to his party's base.

"We tried to do as much as we could to preserve that," Davis said.

McCain's top aides also conceded McCain was hurt by his embrace of President Bush's unpopular economic policies, and said they wished McCain had never said, as he did when Wall Street was collapsing in September, that the US economy remained fundamentally strong.

"That would be one he'd want to do a redo on," Davis said.

Davis and McInturff also said that their candidate's strong, outspoken support for the Iraq war had been a major hindrance politically.

"What really happened is that John McCain essentially became the Bush spokesperson, the administration spokesperson, on Iraq," McInturff said.

They both defended the choice of Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska as McCain's running mate, but Davis suggested the campaign believed it had few options in the Republican Party.

"One of the lessons I learned from this campaign is we have to work on our bench," he said.

Axelrod and Plouffe often struck the tone of gracious winners, but they also took opportunities to boast about their accomplishment, lauding the consistency, discipline, and successful state-by-state strategy of their campaign. They did, though, admit to some panic during the primary fight with Senator Hillary Clinton when the controversy first broke over Obama's fiery pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. "It was a moment of great peril," Plouffe said.

Axelrod shared a few intimate details from those frenzied days in the spring, which culminated in Obama giving his high-profile, well-received speech on race in Philadelphia in March. Obama was still writing the speech until late the night before.

"I woke up at 2 a.m., and there was the speech on my BlackBerry," Axelrod said. "I e-mailed him back and said, 'This is why you should be president.' "

Obama later had to directly repudiate Wright and leave his former pastor's church.

Axelrod also answered questions about the federal corruption case against Governor Rod Blagojevich of Illinois, who is accused of trying to sell the appointment to fill Obama's former Senate seat. Axelrod called the allegations "appalling" and insisted that Obama and his team had no involvement in the deals the governor allegedly sought to make for the appointment.

Scott Helman can be reached at shelman@globe.com.