The Campaign '08 Lesson? Don't "Piss Off" Letterman.

An Election 2008 "war stories" panel featuring the principal players in this year's presidential contest quickly turned into a discussion of how John McCain lost the race earlier this evening at the Harvard Institute of Politics.

As part of a quadrennial symposium assessing the battle for the White House, "Washington Week" host Gwen Ifill moderated an affable discussion this year between Barack Obama chief strategist David Axelrod, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe, McCain manager Rick Davis and former McCain chief pollster Bill McInturff. McCain chief strategist Steve Schmidt was originally scheduled to appear instead of McInturff but did not attend.

Over the course of the event, the group mused about one Alaska governor, McCain's campaign suspension, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Iraq, and experience v. change, among other matters.

A massive audience of political journalists (CNN's John King and Newsweek's Richard Wolffe, among others), Harvard affiliates (Kennedy School professors Graham Allison and David Gergen), and college students watched as IOP Director and former Nashville Mayor Bill Purcells (D) introduced Ifill as the author of an Obama-themed book that has "received some early attention."

Relatedly, Ifill quipped: "In a year when we elected our first African American president, I get to share the stage with four white guys."

Other lines of the night:

Axelrod, asked when he last spoke to IL Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D): "Thankfully, a long time ago."

Davis, immediately before defending AK Gov. Sarah Palin (R) as McCain's VP pick, had this to say about her high-end wardrobe: "You get what you pay for."

Plouffe and Axelrod on the subject of McCain's brief campaign suspension during the financial crisis: "Can we put air quotes around that?"

Throughout the evening, there was a contrast between the Obama staff's upbeat recollections and the slight melancholy of the McCain men. As McInturff said when asked if the McCain campaign simply ran out of time to close the polling gap: "No, no. We lost."

Davis agreed "to a large degree" with Axelrod's assertion that the "Faustian bargains" McCain made with the Republican base in exchange for the nomination eventually cost the GOPer the general election.

Foremost among these, Davis said, was the war in Iraq. With his early support of the surge, McCain set himself up as "the chief opponent" of the Bush Administration's Iraq policy – but when the White House began to negotiate the terms for make the troop surge a reality, McInturff said, it became impossible for McCain to adequately distance himself from Bush.

"John McCain essentially became the Bush Administration spokesperson on Iraq," McInturff said. "In typical John McCain fashion, we managed to alienate every side of our political party."

Davis said that the campaign "by and large" thought the Palin pick was "a good decision," and McInturff added that Palin will certainly be "a player over the next 4-8 years."

But Davis also justified offering Palin the VP slot on the grounds that McCain faced an uphill climb that looked ever steeper as the summer wore on. "We were losing, and the prospects for winning were not that great in July and August," he said.

Looking to the future of GOP, he added: "We've got to work on our bench."

Holding court with audience members after the panel concluded, Davis further defended the VP selection process, saying that "99% of the list" of short-list candidates that "the press are talking about is totally false."

"That was the only thing that didn't leak in our campaign," he added.

Davis also said Obama's historic candidacy played a role in Palin's selection:

"You feel the tug of history; it was a historic election, and to some degree you have to fit into that narrative."

However, during the panel, Axelrod said that Palin's attempt at a "change" message helped sink McCain's chances. "Their campaign was predicated on the celebrity thing, and in one stroke, they blew up the month before, and now they were fighting on our turf," he said.

The campaign suspension later also made it onto Davis's list of regrets. He said the most damaging act of the campaign was "pissing off [CBS Late Show host David] Letterman," and that "the last thing I thought I was going to do in August was lobbying Congress."

The discussion also revealed a stark contrast between how the two campaigns functioned internally. Early in the event, Davis remarked: "The days when you could sit in a room and make plans and not read them on a blog post an hour later are over." Less than an hour later, he and McInturff glanced knowingly at each other as Plouffe described the "sense of mission" that pervaded the Obama ranks. The campaign, Plouffe said, "did not have a conversation or a phone call" during which they worried about a leak.

Speaking after the event, Davis said the Republican Party has "got to change its attitude versus Hispanics" in order to win in the future. Given the "really crazy things said on talk radio" in the name of the GOP, Davis said, "I don't blame Hispanics for not voting for us."

"California, Colorado, Texas, Florida – we can't win in these states any more," he added.

Davis also lamented the regionalization of the GOP. "We have three senators, three governors, and three congressmen north of Virginia," he said. "That's a problem. We as a party don't exist in the Northeast."

Other event highlights:

McInturff, asked if he believed the poll analysis he issued at the end of the campaign: "You could still see improvement from the second-to-last week to the last week. … I felt we were watching a race close."

Plouffe, on Davis's comment that the election was "not about character." "We had some fun with Rick's comment. It is about character of course," but issues also play a part.

Davis, on McCain's "fundamentals are strong" comment regarding the economy: "I think at the time he was trying to be the cheerleader for the American public and the American businessman."

Axelrod: "I understand being a cheerleader, but when your team's down 70-6, it's tough to do."

Plouffe on the Rev. Wright controversy: "We failed as a campaign to do the proper research there. … We hadn't looked through every page of every sermon. … The ferocity of it took us by surprise, and I think the press could see we were taken by surprise." The initial round of videotape of Wright, he added was as bad as when Wright "went on his little media tour" thereafter. By the general election, however, "the public had digested Rev. Wright. I don't want to minimize it; it gave them some indigestion, but they'd digested it."

Axelrod, after receiving a draft of Obama's race speech at 2 a.m.: "I e-mailed him back and said, 'This is why you should be President."

(NICHOLAS TABOR)