IN MY SHOES: What It’s Like To Lose A Presidential Election
The Washington Post describes what it’s like for defeated presidential candidate John McCain to return “to where he did not wish to return … the spotted white marble corridors of the Russell Senate Office Building … to Room 241, which says "Senator John McCain -- Arizona" on the door”:
He quietly enters the office a few minutes after 8 a.m. on this Wednesday, tightly smiles at a receptionist and, without a word to anyone, makes a hard left through a suite of his aides' offices that leads to his own. He is alone. He walks now without so much as a single bodyguard, the Secret Service having disappeared when his dream of winning the presidency did, 15 days ago. It is a jarring reminder of just how much a defeated candidate's station changes in about two weeks. …
There is nothing like a massive electoral loss to strip someone of great relevance in Washington. Historically, the gilded carriage of a presidential nominee returns to being a pumpkin almost the instant he loses. The leased campaign jet is returned to its owners, old allies snipe behind his back about his campaign's failings, his power base erodes, and he is written off as a remnant of his party's past.
A campaign for the Oval Office is an all-or-nothing venture, and friends of McCain, who chased the presidency for the better part of 10 years, wonder how he is faring after the fall. As resilient as the former POW and fighter pilot has always been, there may be no coming all the way back, at age 72, from this spiral.
And yet, while his ultimate quest is over for good, there has been no time to really decompress. He has been busy since election night, his schedule fuller than any defeated candidate's in modern history, including a talk show, a conciliatory appearance with Obama and a rush back to Washington. "I don't think it's all really hit him; I don't see how it could have - I'd like him to get some R&R as soon as this is over," says a former aide who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he thinks McCain, ever the contrarian, would reject his advice anyway.
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