Why McCain’s Approach Was Wrong for 2008
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Related subjects: J.E. Robertson, Opinion, U.S. Politics, Vote 2008 Comments (1)
John McCain used to be a “maverick”, an independent thinker, a rebel against his party’s leadership, and that entailed adopting, promoting and furiously defending ideas that diverged from his party’s stated agenda and its leaders’ most prized political philosophies. He shed the trappings of the true moderate or independent in an apparent effort to win favor among his party’s decision-makers and financial backers, which dampened his appeal as an independent thinker. And most importantly, he seemed blind to the real spirit of the times, which rejected the politics of fear and called for an activist approach to crisis.
Maybe this was because his crushing experience in the 2000 primaries and Bush’s win in 2004 convinced him that only through Bush-Rove politics could anyone win. Maybe it was because his “post-partisan” platform in 2000 was ahead of its time, and he regressed to vicious partisanism now, when post-partisanism had become not only credible, but the defining urge of the moment. McCain’s approach to presidential politics in 2008 was right for winning within his party, but wrong for winning nationally, for the following reasons: 1) Barack Obama; 2) distance from real nature of current problems; 3) misplaced faith in pre-existing party apparatus; 4) lack of understanding of Internet-TV overlap and its power to create a broad pluralist coalition.
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New Media Lag
The fourth point is vitally important, because it helps to explain why Sen. McCain seemed to think he could get away with making statements that were totally inconsistent in their basic logic with other statements he was making throughout the campaign or had made throughout his career. He did not take seriously, or was totally unaware of, the archival effect of the Internet, its ability to house information gathered from far moments in time and from the other side of the world. So he kept getting caught making false claims about his own past or his own present policies.
Party Apparatus: the Small Tent
The third point, about Sen. McCain’s misplaced faith in his party’s existing structure and philosophy, hinges on the apparent confusion about what drove the Arizona senator’s revival as a potential party leader. It was, it seems, his centrism and his reputation as a cooperative but lone-wolf political actor that won him favor in a party that has been shedding millions of registered members, along with its credibility generally, at a time when —despite conservative bluster to the contrary— the Democrats were crafting a big-tent centrist campaign with a platform of civic involvement and idealism.
McCain abandoned that part of his own political character that had won him the nomination, perhaps because he was pressured to cater to the conservative base, in order not to have embarrassingly close contests in the later primaries, with no viable candidate running against him. But the fact is, he began to talk a lot more like George W. Bush than ever before, seeking the fundamentalist Christian vote, and adopting neo-McCarthyist rhetoric to paint the entire Democratic party as inherently risky.
Both the urge to “capture” the ultra-conservative “base” and to do so with time-tested Evangelical and anti-Communist arguments made McCain vulnerable to the criticism that he was living in the past. Conservative Christians had been emboldened to think differently, and he ultimately would win fewer of them than did George W. Bush in 2000 or 2004. And his choice of Sarah Palin undermined the credibility of his “experience” argument, because it indicated hasty judgment —for better or for worse— and political calculation, both of which worked against his original white-haired maverick argument.
Politics of Fear vs. Zeitgeist
This is where the second point from above comes in: he was out of touch with the fundamental thrust of the political tides. Barack Obama has often said “there’s something happening in America”, and he has now shown there was. He first showed the pundits, then Hillary Clinton, and now John McCain and the world. John McCain could not see exactly what that energy was that was building, and Obama was already far ahead, not only able to perceive it, but to talk about it, inspire it, spread it, and capitalize on that contact with the deeper yearnings of the electorate.
By using the “politics of fear” —by trying to say, as George W. Bush had done in 2004, that this was wartime, that there were intruders at the gate, that we needed a Republican lest the Republic burn to the ground—, he isolated himself in a kind of time-warp that made it more difficult for his message to resonate within the context of the political moment. And, worse for his cause, he played into the very nimble political trap laid out by Sen. Obama’s rhetoric: not only is change a vital element in a healthy democracy, but we must be wary of “failed policies”, a term easily applied to every instance in which McCain sought to play to the “Bush base” he thought he needed to win.
Candidate Obama
Sen. McCain’s strategy was not designed to fight a credible campaign against Sen. Obama. It was designed to win an old argument that Sen. Obama, the electorate and the media, all seem to have left behind: that only through a certain type of conservative strength can the nation remain secure against its enemies. Sen. Obama built his candidacy around the grandeur of the US Constitution, its ideals, and its complex evolution toward “a more perfect union”. Sen. McCain sought to imply that such an attitude was inherently anti-American.
This damaged McCain, because he himself repeatedly claimed that such a strategy was reprehensible. He tried to make two conflicting arguments at once. He seemed to calculate that he could paint Obama as risky without being seen as taking the low road, and he wanted to revert to now ancient Republican strategies (tax-raising socialist rabble-rouser Democrats) against an opponent who so eloquently explained away all of those prejudices. McCain was not prepared for that complex a tactical problem, and his tactics fell short.
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[...] Why McCain’s Approach Was Wrong for 2008 John McCain used to be a “maverick”, an independent thinker, a rebel against his party’s leadership, and that entailed adopting, promoting and furiously defending ideas that diverged from his party’s stated agenda and its leaders’ most prized political philosophies. He shed the trappings of the true moderate or independent in an apparent effort to win favor among his party’s decision-makers and financial backers, which dampened his appeal as an independent thinker. And most importantly, he seeme [...]