If any presidential candidate’s campaign should be a finely-tuned machine, it should be John McCain’s. Not only has he been a political insider for decades, but this is his second presidential race, and he’s effectively been running for two years. There was a very rough patch around April 2007, but McCain has had plenty of time to get his house in order. Now that he’s the presumptive GOP nominee, and has the party establishment and message machine at his disposal, McCain doesn’t have any excuses.
And yet, McCain and his team seem to be making the kind of rookie mistakes you’d expect from an inexperienced candidate, new to the national political scene.
This week, for example, on the exact same afternoon, the campaign unveiled a new TV ad talking about how McCain had “stood up” to Bush on the environment, and then a few hours later, McCain announced his support for Bush’s coastal drilling plan. Better yet, the same day, McCain’s chief policy adviser acknowledged on a campaign conference call that the Bush/McCain drilling policy would not, in fact, have any effect on the supply or price of fuel.
Some Republicans are beginning to wonder if anybody here can play this game.
[E]ven as McCain’s strategists claim tactical victories, Republicans outside the campaign worry that underlying weaknesses in its organization and message are costing him valuable time to make the case for his own candidacy.
Allies complain that the campaign has offered myriad confusing themes that lurch between pitching McCain as a committed conservative one day and an independent-minded reformer the next, while displaying little of the discipline and focus that characterized President Bush’s successful campaigns.
Several Republican supporters of the presumptive nominee said they were puzzled by a series of easily avoidable mistakes, including sloppy political stagecraft and poorly timed comments that undercut McCain’s reputation as a maverick.
I have to admit, as the fight for the Democratic nomination dragged on through April and May, I was concerned not just that the eventual Dem winner would emerge weakened, but also that McCain would take advantage of the delay, revving his engines, just waiting to floor it once the general-election phase began in earnest.
Instead, the McCain engine seems to be stuttering and stalling. It’s quite a relief.
Indeed, after all of this time, you’d think the McCain campaign could at least pick a slogan without screwing up. No such luck — two weeks ago, McCain unveiled, “A Leader We Can Believe In,” an obvious knock off of Obama’s “Change We Can Believe In.” McCain’s slogan was widely mocked, prompting the campaign to drop it almost immediately, replacing it with “Reform. Prosperity. Peace.”
The new motto isn’t especially impressive — the candidate who wants to invade Iran and keep the war going in Iraq indefinitely is touting “peace”? — but in the context of campaign strategy, did it not occur to the McCain gang that “A Leader We Can Believe In” was ridiculous?
It was hardly the only misstep. This week, McCain blasted Obama for his support of windfall profits tax on the oil industry, despite McCain having already announced that he’s open to the exact same idea. A day later, McCain hosted a discussion with Hispanics in Chicago, and proceeded to re-embrace an immigration policy he’d recently denounced. A day after that, McCain traveled to flood-ravaged Iowa, which not only went against the wishes of the state’s governor, but was immediately overshadowed by a simultaneous visit by Still-President Bush. And a day after that, McCain traveled to Canada for some campaigning that sparked some additional controversy. (More on that later today.)
And while the trees look bad, the forest isn’t much better. Fundamentally, after two years of campaigning, the fundamental problem seems to be that McCain hasn’t quite figured which of his personas is the one he wants to present to voters.
“I’m baffled that the McCain guys have somehow managed to take a guy who practically had ‘reform’ tattooed to his forehead and turned him into the bastion of the status quo,” said one Republican strategist, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The veteran strategist, who has not been asked to join the campaign, said the “devastating me-too chorus from Bush and [Vice President ] Cheney” on oil drilling is a “great example of the schizophrenia that surrounds their campaign.” […]
Another Republican strategist, who worked for a rival GOP campaign during the primary and has ties to Bush’s political team, said the McCain team has “not really figured out” how to present McCain to voters: as an experienced conservative leader or a reformer who wants change.
“To them, McCain is inevitable,” the GOP strategist said. “They are good on the opposition research side of forcing the agenda. But who John McCain is and what he stands for — it’s a little hard to connect all the dots.”
It’s still relatively early, but it’s striking how unprepared the McCain campaign seems.