McCain DrainHere's how his struggling campaign could recover.
Posted Monday, July 2, 2007, at 6:54 PM ETJohn McCain's second presidential campaign has never looked more like his first: tight on money and shooting the moon. The campaign raised $11.5 million for the second quarter, which was short of the $13 million the senator raised in the in the first three months of the year, and almost certainly far less than Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani each collected. McCain's bigger problem is that he has only $2 million in the bank, and given the way his campaign has been spending money, that sum could be gone by the end of this sentence.
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StumbleUponThe campaign is doing what most major organizations do when they're bleeding: laying people off and praying. The campaign will be shedding 50 of its paid staff. The campaign manager will be working without a salary for the next several months, and senior staffers are taking pay cuts. Campaigns are allowed one restructuring but rarely two. This is McCain's second, and the proof that the first one was working was supposed to be a strong fund-raising quarter. McCain's chief rivals decided to delay announcing their fund-raising numbers to let him bleed for a couple of news cycles. The deathwatches are starting.
Perhaps the pandering stories will stop now, a weary McCain aide suggested to me today. It's hard to know which myth died faster in the GOP presidential race of 2008: 1) that John McCain was the GOP front-runner or 2) that he was pandering to the party's base to win the nomination. McCain infuriated conservatives by fighting for his immigration bill, and he still had to watch it die. Twice. The campaign-finance bill bearing his name was largely overturned by the Supreme Court last week. As if to prove that bad news loves company, he is about to take his sixth trip to Iraq, another place where they're having trouble meeting their benchmarks. The troop surge that he continues to passionately support is opposed by as much as 70 percent of the country. If McCain is a panderer, he may be the most ineffective one in the history of American politics.
The senator's poll numbers have not plummeted the way his fund raising has, though the entrance of Fred Thompson has pushed him back in the pack, and the anemic fund-raising numbers will not help his standings. The political betting sites were down sharply on the news.
What was once a sprawling campaign that aides boasted would compete in every primary state is now shrinking its focus to Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. The campaign began with an ambitious $100 million fund-raising target. Now the Straight Talk Express will be rolling through the primaries on fumes. Aides say McCain's campaign will accept public matching funds, which they estimate will get them close to $6 million. They say that will be enough to get their message out.
So, how will the campaign try to recover? In the targeted states, McCain will hold even more town-hall-style political events, returning to the magical formula that worked for him in 2000. (Though this too was part of the first restructuring.) "We know that he's the best retail politician in the field, and the commitment rate among people who've seen him or read about his town halls is very good," says a top aide. "He draws the largest crowds, and he is always, always his best when he's directly before voters."
Is it going to work? His biggest fans hope the tough spot will release him a little and that he'll return to being a happy warrior instead of seeming pissed off and burdened. There's nothing in this bad fund-raising news that affects his ability to look presidential.
But he may have too much bad history with conservatives to overcome. Since McCain can't suck up very well, he's going to have to hope that people see their disagreements with him as evidence of his principle and grit. That hasn't happened enough for him yet. It also means he's going to have to wait for voters to fall in and out of love with Fred Thompson and give up their sustained flirtation with Giuliani. That's going to take patience and inhuman endurance, since everyone is going to spend the next few months asking when McCain is going to fold up shop.
The best that can be said for McCain and his team is that they derive a perverse joy from long odds and uphill battles. "He knows how to do this," said a top aide, "and he's gonna fight like hell."
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Remarks from the Fray:
I derive great joy watching him spin on the end of the rope. He will not even carry Arizona. His career is dead. He is a traitor to this country many times over. The last one, unreal.
The sad thing for the country is he had taken out the Republican party. I personally quit the party and registered independent. I truly mean it. I will try at every turn to find a third party person to vote for.
I will not donate a penny to a conservative cause until I see the fence built the entire length of the border. Not one penny. EVER!!!
I have received appeal after appeal from the McCain Campaign. I treated them like he treated my calls for my job. I have white hot anger... this will only be sated by several election cycles. We reward our friends and punish our enemies. I want electoral blood.
--wbower
(To reply, click here.)
It is true that McCain is a bad panderer, but that does not make him a non-panderer.
His problem all along is that he is caught between the stools of "straight talk" (which panders to independents who, unfortunately for him, don't much vote in Republican primaries) and deep conservatism (which panders to those who do vote in Republican primaries).
In this campaign, of course, he has shifted sharply to the second audience. Hence his support for the Iraq war, which is still supported by a (bare) majority of Republicans and was more popular with them when he started his campaign than it is now.
Like Bush, he has misread immigration reform: it was meant to broaden the Republican base by allowing socially conservative Hispanics to support the party and to appeal to big business (an important though oft-forgotten Republican power base). The resulting mess has turned off both, but it does not mean McCain was not trying to pander.
--lloyd667
(To reply, click here.)
McCain can sell the principle and grit thing to lots of folks in the heartland, but it won't play with the real bible thumpers. They want somebody who agrees with them, that we don't need a foreign policy because we ought to be stopping abortion and teaching creationism in the public schools, not messing around with other governments. The family farmers in Iowa would vote for the old McCain, but there are barely enough family farmers left in Iowa to have an impact in Iowa, and they'd have little impact nationally.
McCain is screwed because he deviated from what people saw as his "true self." The voters who liked him in the past liked him even though they disagreed with him. In fact, they liked him because he disagreed with them and told them so in an honest way, and because they thought it was principled disagreement. Now they see him making big efforts to avoid disagreements with the president on Iraq and immigration. People liked McCain because he criticized his president and his party when they went the wrong direction. Now that the president is going the wrong way on two very big issues, McCain agrees with him. McCain is trying to sell this on the premise that he's sticking to his principles, but people aren't buying it because he can't find a reason to squabble with the president anymore. Voters could buy the principle and grit stuff if McCain would get up in the president's face on a weekly basis, but he appears to be Bush's Best Buddy all of a sudden and that makes people suspect he's abandoned his scruples.
Maybe that would save the McCain campaign -- fight with the president. Go after him on stem cell funding, or education, or corruption in government, or something. It's probably too late, but it would be fun to watch.
--Arlington
(To reply, click here.)
The Bush tax cuts were written to disappear after 2010, and the only thing that will keep them alive is a Republican President and a Republican Congress. The only hope for a Republican Congress is for many Republicans to repudiate Bush on the Iraq War -- 2006 proved that. McCain gives them cover to do so, because he continues to defend the war. Yet he might well win even so because, unlike Romney, his honesty and consistency cannot be impugned. Against a waffler like Hillary, he has a really good chance.
That so many conservatives refuse to accept this tells me that they remain idealists -- so certain that the world is as they want it to be that they refuse to recognize when it has moved on. They've forgotten that Bush won office not as a conservative but as a moderate, and held it only because the nation was at war.
For myself, this is good. I want a Democrat deciding who the next Supreme Court judge is; I want tax cuts focused for the upper classes repealed; I want a justice department whose main priority isn't defending the historical privileges of white males; I want a labor department that isn't actively anti-union; and I want a Interior Department run by someone other than the extractive industries. McCain won't do anything major about any of these things; Hillary or whoever will. I don't much like any of the choices the Democrats provide the nation, and neither, as far as I can tell, does most of the electorate. But the electorate has decided that the people who the Republicans NOW have in office have got to go.
So it will come down to "turn the rascals out," and we'll get a Democrat in 2009. Only one candidate has any chance of preventing that outcome, but thanks to you idealistic conservatives, I guess I'm going to get what I want.
--the_slasher14
(To reply, click here.)
(7/7)