How To Be Big JohnFive challenges for front-runner McCain.
Posted Tuesday, Nov. 21, 2006, at 6:39 PM ET
In 2000, John McCain's top advisers could fit in the back cabin of the Straight Talk Express. They often did. For his 2008 presidential race, there will be enough of them that they'll need their own bus, or maybe two. McCain's 2000 campaign Web site was colorful and displayed photos from his flyboy days; now it's black and white, sober and presidential.
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StumbleUponThese changes are just some of the small ones that come with being at the top of the list of men hoping to win the Republican Party's presidential nomination. McCain may not top every early poll, but he is the front-runner. No other candidate has his organization, experience, fan base, and staff talent. To cement his standing, he delivered two speeches after Election Day to conservative organizations GOPAC and the Federalist Society. Why is he hustling so hard? Because he will be far more closely scrutinized and tested than he was last time. Here are five reasons he'll maybe wish he could go back to being an insurgent:
1. Managing the Iraq decline.
McCain has better military and national security credentials than any of his likely opponents in either party. As ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, he'll have a chance to demonstrate his experience in every news cycle if he wants to. That's not all good. So far, McCain has been able both to support the war and criticize its execution. He's been spared the public disapproval that has hurt President Bush. But as voters and the press start to look at him as a president-in-waiting, will they start to penalize him for the failed Iraq policies? His political salvation may be his repeated call for more troops. However unpopular that position, McCain has advocated it for so long he can claim consistency, as well as validation in recent remarks by field commanders admitting that more troops were needed. Now that a small troop increase seems a possibility, McCain is likely to argue that it's too little too late, which means that his position won't be undermined if the bump doesn't help in Iraq.
2. YouTube is watching.
In 2000, John McCain had a YouTube moment before the video network existed. On a bus rolling through California in March 2000, he called televangelist Pat Robertson "evil." For the next several days, he both distanced himself from those remarks and embraced them, launching a failed attack on the agents of intolerance in the Republican Party. The mixed message was a disaster that helped end his campaign.
Now McCain will have to run in the real YouTube era, in which he won't be able play a round of craps without being photographed. Fortunately for him, he gets a lot of leeway—anything short of criminal activity will rightly be seen by voters and the press corps as more signs of his storied authenticity.
But he does have one authentic characteristic that won't play well on the continuous feedback loop: anger. The problem for McCain is not the anger itself—the stories of Bill Clinton's rage are far more legendary and numerous—but the perception pushed, over the years, by his opponents, including George Bush in 2000, that McCain doesn't have the cool head needed for the job. Though he's been under considerable strain in his public career, McCain has never had a real moment of purple rage in front of the cameras (a brusque word to a reporter at the end of the 2000 campaign doesn't count). If caught on camera, his straightest talk might not play well given the whispering campaign. That means that when opponents bait him, he'll mostly have to smile, particularly when some crank confronts him in a parking lot at midnight in Decorah, Iowa, with a video camera. What's so tricky about this, of course, is that maintaining such a constant act of sustained civility is enough to drive even the most docile politician into batty fits of rage.
3. More in sorrow than in anger.
When an adviser to Hillary Clinton made a crack about McCain's behavior during his time as a POW, the senator's advisers knew what to do. They took showy umbrage and Sen. Clinton apologized immediately. It was a political boon. Fights with Hillary help when you're trying to court conservatives: They ratify your front-runner position, and plus, conservatives think she's just awful. A fight that reminds everyone you're a tough former POW is as good as it gets. But most of the time, McCain's campaign needs to ignore its opponents. If McCain wants to look presidential, he has to stay above the fray, busying himself with affairs of the country or preparing to meet some foreign dignitary. To respond to every dart makes a candidate look thin-skinned and touchy, and elevates the attacker to parallel status. (Which is not to say that any candidate should make John Kerry's mistake of failing to battle against attacks that undermine his or her entire candidacy.) Mitt Romney has now called McCain "disingenuous" for saying that states should decide the gay-marriage question and not the courts. It's a risky gambit for the Massachusetts governor, whose position on abortion has evolved over the years, but one the McCain camp should probably ignore. There will be time for squabbling later at the Iowa debates.
4. Do your homework.
In 2000, the McCain campaign approached matters of policy in two ways. The first was to find a way to tie any issue to the corrupting influence of money in the political system, the senator's signature crusade. If reporters wanted a more substantive answer about health care or education policy, they were directed to call John Raidt, McCain's one-man policy shop. When the campaign survived longer than McCain staffers had imagined or prepared for, it seemed as if McCain's policy papers had been photocopied from the back of the envelopes on which they'd been scratched that morning.
Now McCain must have a detailed policy position for everything. So, his campaign is building a serious, front-runner's policy shop that will produce lots of laminated booklets with complicated-looking charts. Former Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick will run the shop, and it will house big names like former Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas, who will give economic advice. The McCain team recently also hired Brett O'Donnell, the winning debate-team coach from Jerry Falwell's Liberty University, to help with debates and communication.
5. Culture club.
There is a tight little band of aides at the center of the McCain operation and they will have to get used to ceding control over some of the operation (after they teach the candidate to do the same). Every campaign has this problem when it gets big. The work often requires anticipating the needs of the candidate and the veterans think they're the only ones who can do that. Newcomers have their own hangups. They have to relax and not mope that they're being shut out. They can mistakenly convince themselves that their beloved policy suggestion was ignored for turf reasons rather than because it was unworkable. Such aides complain to reporters, who happily write stories of praetorian guards and disarray.
Big campaigns also have to put up with fund-raisers and party bosses who have an endless supply of bad ideas, but of course can't be dismissed immediately. McCain's entertaining streak is also a liability in that staffers will fight for face time with him. And then there's the yen to re-create the past glory of the 2000 campaign.
In the end, if the McCain campaign can meet all these challenges, it will be because of that trial by fire. The staff is tested and emotionally the wiser for it. In 2000, they would have driven the bus straight to Massachusetts to attack Romney on his front lawn for his recent disingenuity charge. This time, they haven't said a word.
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Remarks from the Fray:
The best thing that John McCain can do in the coming months (and years) is to be true to himself. Despite all of the over-analysis of people like the author, the bottom line is that the American people want honesty and integrity in their public servants.
It is no secret. Not any more.
There are, I imagine, a large number of us who voted against Bush in 2000 rather than for Gore, and wished that McCain had been the Republican choice so that we could have a reasonable alternative to Gore.
The author comes closest to the truth when he speaks of a sort of Clintonesque meeting in the middle.
Most of us are not raging lunatics, fringe rightists, fringe leftists. Most of us seek common ground, a fair and reasonable domestic policy, and a tough but intelligent foreign policy.
Most of us do not think that is too much to ask of our elected leaders, although we understand that because of the media the best of our possible choices are likely never to enter the fray to begin with.
--TidewaterJoe
(To reply, click here.)
McCain's problems involve maintaining his maverick label while sucking up to the movement conservatives. This is not primarily an issue of how he conducts himself--he's already broken any reasonable hypocrisy record--but how his conduct is reported on.
As Begala put it on CNN recently, we're looking at McCain 3.0. 1.0 was the Keating 5 McCain. 2.0 was the straight talk express, campaign finance reform McCain. 3.0 is the come to Jesus conservative McCain. Pulling off the first transformation wasn't so hard. But this latest one will be.
Plus he's in real trouble with this "send in more troops" thing. The gambit he's playing is that the President won't be so stupid as to actually send more troops in. It's an obviously bad idea to send them in in the numbers that McCain is talking about. 100,000 might make a difference, but we don't have 100,000, so the number is 20,000, which we may just barely have. So he's banking on the President, or his handlers, if Bush decides to spend the rest of his term on his bicycle, not increasing troop strength. Then he can do the old Vietnam back stab. "We weren't allowed to win the war because of those dirty hippie Democrats tying our hands."
The trouble is that they may well send in those 20,000. They have to do something, and any something that doesn't increase American presence will be seen as a prelude to withdrawal--something that Bush has made very clear he will not do.
It's just so appalling that Dickerson thinks that what really matters in McCain's campaign is not his policy positions. It's not how he views the future of the USA. It's all about controlling his temper and managing his staff.
--BeowulfSchaeffer
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This is all classic McCain. He always has each foot stuck firmly in both parties mosh pit. The balancing act contains just enough room to escape into the crowd in true chameleon fashion. He is able to both support the war and criticize it as if anything can make this war any less complex. He offers up more troops if there are less troops and would offer up less troops if there were more.
He can call Pat Robertson evil and attack intolerance in the hopes the far right will forgive him. As Dickerson stated "he both distanced himself from those remarks and embraced them".
The single authentic characteristic of anger is a genuine problem. Just as Kerry will stick his foot in his mouth again, McCain will blow an uncontrolled gasket at his opponent. He will spend the rest of his campaign tossing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks so he can change the subject and make the public forget the crass moment. He will wear the mask of a victim.
I was pleased to see the mention of a scribbled tactic of corrupting influence of money on campaigns as that one was my all time McCain favorite. What was left unsaid is why exactly did McCain make that note to self in the middle of running for president. And then why would he preach it to his opposition, Bush, who had never been investigated for that particular problem? The answer is fairly simple, McCain had been investigated. It is hard to run for president with that baggage so he may have fixed it by confronting it. One could speculate that the issue of his 'little problem' would be brought up. McCain likely moved first. It worked. Imagine his surprise when that issue stuck and he was able to become the leader of a bill with his name on it. The Campaign Finance Reform could have been a map for his own history. Not many politicians can claim leadership in a bill that would have stopped their own self had it been in place during the nasty little Keating 5 incident. Can't be too safe. Got a presidential run problem? Create a bill to outlaw your baggage.
The biggest problem McCain has is that now the democrats won't be looking at him with loving eyes. They no longer need him to get to Bush and he no longer needs them to get to Bush.
Got Popcorn?
--marylb
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(9/27)