President McCain, RIP?
Many of the nation’s top political analysts and writers have chosen this week to write the obituary for John McCain’s presidential aspirations. Charlie Cook, one of the country’s best non-partisan political analysts (though I’m more of a Stu Rothenberg guy) has written in regard to McCain’s candidacy that “The physicians have left the hospital room and it’s the executors of the estate that are taking over.” That may be a bit premature, but it would take an amazing comeback for McCain to truly be viable again. Time Magazine makes an attempt to explain what went wrong. They fail, but they do list a lot of facts that point to why McCain is unlikely to make the necessary comeback.
John McCain is certainly not the moderate that the demographics behind his support would indicate. By U.S. political standards, he may be a maverick, but all of that perception is about style, not substance. By any comprehensive examination of McCain’s record, he’s one of the most conservative candidates to ever have a legitimate shot at being president. The conservative activist base of the Republican Party isn’t just leery of him, though; they dislike him. People on the center and even the left end of the electoral spectrum who would hate the world created by a McCain presidency like him anyway. Why? It’s all about personal style. McCain has never been afraid to to thumb his nose at the party line. His classic Goldwater conservatism has often left him at odds with the religious right. He’s affable, self-deprecating, and he’s been willing to poke fun at the insufferably self-righteous elements of his party.
In 2000, McCain used a slightly unconventional twist on a conventional campaign tactic: run as the outsider maverick. It’s been done a million times, but rarely have the tactic and the candidate been so well suited to each other. McCain already had a reputation as a maverick. Naming his campaign bus “the straight talk express”, cavorting with the press, and shooting from the hip all played into that well. McCain was the kind of candidate whose handlers were more likely to try to explain and mitigate his statements than plan them for him. He was the kind of candidate who naturally appealed to New Hampshire voters. His opposition to ethanol gave him a built in excuse if he didn’t perform well in Iowa.
McCain took a very different tack this time around. He was the crown prince in a party that always ends up nominating the crown prince. The conventional wisdom is that he had to run as the establishment candidate. In order to do that, he needed to shore up the party base. It’s logical, it’s what any other crown prince would have done and it’s been a disaster for McCain. The reasons for that are pretty obvious and have been discussed by a lot of other commentators. He had to run a campaign that was completely at odds with his own character. He sucked up to the now rotting corpse of Jerry Falwell. He flip flopped on ethanol. He generally stopped just speaking his mind about the nutjobs in his party. In interviews with friendly media outlets, most notably a couple of chats with John Stewart, you could see McCain chafe at his self-imposed straight jacket. In the first of those two Daily Show appearances, he all but admitted to Stewart that he was sucking up to people he couldn’t stand because he wanted to be president.
He could have been president and here’s what he needed to do to achieve it: He just needed to get the GOP nomination even if it was a squeaker. He didn’t need the enthusiastic support of the base. He would draw enough votes from the center to more than make up for whatever right wing activists that choose to stay home on general elelction day. He needed, from the beginning, to be himself and run a campaign that was focused on the general election. The religious conservative activists were never going to wholeheartedly support him. All he needed to do was keep them from activley opposing him. Rather than uncomfortably sucking up to them, he just needed to restrain himself from antagonizing them. I’m sure he could have picked up the support of a few prominent members of that wing of the party through a combination of emphasizing where they do have common ground and appealing to their self interest. Give them the chance to become important members of his administration.
Two of the defining failures of McCain’s campaign have been his stalwart support of the war and his support for the immigration reform bill. I’m sure that some of his support for the war was genuine at first, but I think it was mostly a tactic. Looking and acting like a tough guy and supporting a war that only the die hards of the Republican base support was supposed to give him some traction with them and remind him of his war hero past. Once having gone down that path, McCain seems to have felt like he could not afford to abandon it. I’m equally sure that there was some genuine belief in his decision to support immigration reform. I think there was a lot of tactical consideration here. I think this was supposed to help remind the moderate voters out there of his past reputation and make him look like a statesman. If I had been advising the McCain campaign from a strictly tactical perspective, I’d have told him to go in the opposite direction. The general public isn’t passionate about this immigration reform bill. The far right are extremely passionate in their opposition to it. If he were going to pander to them on one of these issues, this was the one to choose. The right’s support of the war is persistent, but crumbling and not very passionate. The rest of the country’s opposition and/or exhaustion with this war is strongly and deeply felt. His support for it alienates them. It would have continued to hurt him in the general election.
McCain, of course, didn’t do any of that. The only way for him to have stayed viable given the disastrous tactical moves made by his campaign was to become a fundraising juggernaut and then to effectively use that money. The irresponsible spending by his campaign leadership has doomed him. The public may somehow think that the “Dean Scream” was the end of Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign, but it wasn’t. Dean’s fundraising made him look like the inevitable nominee prior to the Iowa caucuses. A weak finish there certainly would have hurt him no matter what. The real problem, though, was that Joe Trippi didn’t know how to manage the campaign’s finances. Dean spent a ton of money in Iowa and didn’t get anything for it. His vote totals proved that his fundraising advantage didn’t matter because he couldn’t use the money effectively. The fact that he had no real war chest left after Iowa doomed him. He couldn’t afford to mount the campaign he needed to mount to recover from Iowa. Even if he could have afforded it, there’s nothing to indicate that his campaign could have used the money effectively. McCain is now in that boat. His campaign looks mortally wounded. They can’t afford to mount the campaign they need to fix that. Even if they could afford it, there’s no indication they know how to spend the money effectively enough to succeed.
