McCain's Bizarre Strategy

After eight years of painful misgovernance under the hard-right Bush-Cheney administration the American people say by record margins that things are on the wrong track. They say they want change. That's why the Republicans were wise to nominate John McCain for president. He was the one Republican who had demonstrated some independence from party orthodoxy and could credibly make the case that he might actually be for change. That is what makes McCain's general election strategy of running an extreme hard-right campaign so bizarre. Of what could he possibly have been thinking?

To get the Republican nomination all the candidates had to fall into lockstep over the unshakable articles of faith dear to the Republican base: continue the fight in Iraq, make the Bush tax cuts permanent, wall out illegal immigrants and refuse any semblance of accepting those already here into American society, speak glowingly of evangelical religion and speak disapprovingly of abortion and gay rights. McCain had questioned all these tenets except Iraq at times in his past, but to get the nomination he pledged allegiance to the lot.

One might have expected him to gravitate back toward the middle of the road once he had the nomination in hand. After all, that's where most of the voters were: they wanted out of Iraq, had an abysmal opinion of Bush and his policies, realized the futility of hostility to immigrants (not to mention the anger in the Latino community over the issue), were tired of the merging of religion and politics, support abortion rights and were, particularly among the young, growing increasingly tolerant of gay rights.

So what did McCain do? He dug the hardest of hard lines on Iraq. He fully supported the Bush tax cuts and failed to differentiate an inch of daylight between his economic prescriptions and the president's. He dropped his comprehensive immigration proposal and vowed he would no longer vote for it himself. He cozied up to conservative evangelical preachers whenever he could, opposed abortion rights and chose for his running mate a brassy but shallow neophyte as sure to delight the know-nothing hard-right cultural base as she was to dismay everyone else. What was up with all that?

I feel McCain settled on a strategy to try to reconstruct the Bush victory of 2004. He began running at first on his experience and found that was getting nowhere. He determined that in a change election he could not compete with Barack Obama, "Mr. Change" himself. Obama was everything about change, at least on the surface, that McCain was not. He was much younger, a minority, and hip. McCain at first tried to say he was for change, and initially he and Sarah Palin seemed to use the word "maverick" in every other sentence to imply their own openness to change.

What they absolutely failed to do, however, was to devise any actual plans or policy points of change. Change was a slogan, not a program, and the American people caught on. And rather than retool the campaign to go for the center they gravitated to the default campaign mode of the Rovians McCain had put in charge. The idea was and is to recreate the 2004 win over Kerry. First, raise questions about the opponent personally with guilt by association. Next, identify with the symbols the base loves: God, guns and "family values." Finally, divide the nation into us and them by attacking the opponent with the old reliable labels: liberal, socialist, class warfare, unpatriotic, not one of us, un-American parts of the country and so on. The idea is to "energize the base" to a monstrous turnout, rather than to appeal to moderates. It worked for Bush. Why isn't it working now?

The reason is to be found in the news of the day. Americans are deeply worried about the problems now afoot. Job losses, the stock market, the financial and home implosions, energy, health care and the wars are but some of the myriad dangers confronting the nation. People have finally come to the point where they want pragmatic solutions and can no longer brook distracting sloganeering. They have heard it all before.

We will never know what might have happened had the McCain team come up with some innovative ideas for such solutions grounded in the moderate center. What is clear is that they cast their lot with the politics of personal destruction and national division instead. As of now it appears this plan is not working. If there is any justice that will continue to be the case on election day. The American people deserved better. John McCain was capable of delivering better but he chose not to. More's the pity.