What made you think McCain's agenda had to do with him losing? I think the evidence is rather thin on that. He went conservative by choosing Sarah Palin and, to nobody's surprise on the right, was in the lead in just about every poll as a result. It was his going right that put him in the game in the first place. By staying left, he had a completely unmotivated Republican base that would have stayed home. Remember that his poll ratings went UP after signaling a right turn. His poll numbers were in the mud before his choice of Sarah Palin as the left already had Obama and the right had no one.
His poll ratings going south was purely due to the financial meltdown, which conveniently for Obama happened before the election, precipitated by the takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac by the government. The takeover directly caused the fall of Lehman, AIG, and others, bringing the financial problems to the foreground. Wall Street lost 30% of its value costing people trillions of dollars in savings. Up until that moment, it was McCain in the lead. Once the meltdown happened, it was all McCain could do to avert a total disaster. His only hope would have been to promote the truth that Democratic policy had been behind the meltdown, but for some reason he failed to do that, instead attacking Wall Street. That was his biggest failure, not standing up for capitalism, but implicitly saying that capitalism was at fault, when that was nowhere near the truth. It was government intervention and distortion of the marketplace that caused the financial disaster and the obstruction by Democrats from preventing the disasters at Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac.
The irony is that the people who caused the problems were the ones who benefitted from the disaster since the president gets all the blame for everything that goes wrong even when it's not his fault, nor even in his power to prevent. It's no coincidence that Bush's poll ratings sank by about 7%, the equivalent drop that McCain suffered once the crisis manifested. Bush's poll ratings had started to rise with the successes in Iraq. He had gone up to about 33% from 29% because of our big wins in Iraq. Then, the financial crisis hit and he was down to 26%.
If the media had done its job, Obama would have gone down to defeat. But since the media was in the tank for Obama, it was left to the Wall Street Journal and Investors Business Daily, plus the right wing blogs to try and disseminate the truth. Unfortunately for America, it wasn't enough.
You even said yourself that Obama was sounding conservative. That's because every Democrat knows that to win a national election in the United States, you have to sound conservative in this center-right country. Sounding liberal has been the death knell of many Democratic presidential candidates. Those who paid attention know Obama isn't conservative in the least, but not everyone pays close enough attention to the candidates, nor has the time to sort through the filter of the mainstream media.
I know you're left wing, but for some reason you think it's bad to be a conservative in a conservative country. No candidate that sounds liberal can win in this country.
It's pretty clear that being conservative was the only chance McCain had of winning. Obama won because he didn't sound liberal and didn't have an R next to his name on the ballot, and that was acceptable to enough people to put him over the top. Sound liberal and he'd end up just like John Kerry, a loser.
I should remind you that Ronald Reagan, George HW Bush, and George W Bush all won elections by sounding and being conservative. George HW Bush failed to act conservative after the Gulf War and it cost him re-election. George W Bush began acting like a liberal in his second term, costing him much support among Republicans, especially with regards to illegal immigration and spending. Bob Dole sounded like a conservative without any conviction (nobody actually believed he really was conservative) and he lost big. Bill Clinton won twice campaigning as a conservative, promising middle class tax cuts.
