McCain Off to Bad Start for the Fall Campaign

Throughout this presidential campaign, two words have been almost universally left unsaid by the Republican candidates for president. Two words have been avoided as though they were poison.

What are those two words?

George Bush.

Even Mitt Romney, who on occasion stoutly defended the President when trying to woo Bush voters, was loathe to defend Mr. Bush when asked about the current president’s record during the Republicans’ most recent debate at the Reagan presidential library.

The reason for the GOP field’s hesitation to invoke Mr. Bush’s name is simple: The approval rating of the current president has been in the mid-30% range throughout much of the past year.

And it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand why. The economy is in trouble. The war in Iraq is in its sixth year. The federal budget deficit is through the roof. Energy and food costs are rising at alarming rates. Too many people are without health care. Bush’s foreign policy is more like that of Woodrow Wilson than Dwight Eisenhower, his willingness to accept spending and bureaucracy more like that of Lyndon Johnson than of his father.

The Democratic field has been anxious to talk about the Bush record. But not Republicans. For them, President Bush has been the 8000-pound pink elephant they want everyone to forget about.

So, who is John McCain, the Republican candidate who clinched his party’s nomination tonight with wins in Ohio, Texas, Rhode Island, and Vermont, going to visit on Wednesday? Hint: It isn’t Mickey Mouse at Disney World.

Instead, McCain, the engineer of the Straight Talk Express who has, for over a decade, portrayed himself as a different kind of Republican, is going to accept the embrace of the least popular Republican in the United States today, the President of the United States.

Of course, party unity is something that, for example, Democrats would love to see, rather than the internecine battle to which they are currently being subjected. Such unity has long been seen as an essential ingredient for general election victories. “I support the regular party candidate in every case,” said the shrewdest politician of the 19th-century, Abraham Lincoln. That tack accounted for much of Lincoln’s success. So, Mr. McCain may feel that he needs the endorsement of a president still heavily approved by core Republican voters.

And, of course, John McCain’s agreement with President Bush on the war in Iraq and the surge is well known. So is McCain’s embrace of the Bush tax cuts without the spending reductions he once insisted were necessary.

But the Arizona senator’s trip to the White House seems an inauspicious and altogether unnecessary start for a general election campaign in which the prime desire of voters–Red, Blue, and otherwise–is for change. Going to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue on Wednesday hardly signals a campaign of change.

John McCain was one of the few candidates in this year’s Republican field who could credibly argue that he has been an agent of change throughout his career. That record, which has been among the most conservative in Congress for the past two decades, has nonetheless been marked by a willingness to work with Democrats, to break with those conservative orthodoxies that don’t necessarily conform to what he–or people like the late William F. Buckley–regard as actual, essential conservatism.

But in recent weeks, as his quest for the GOP nomination has taken on the aura of inevitability, McCain has started doing what can only be described as an overabundance of kissing up to Bush-Delay-Limbaugh-Coulter Republicans. To his credit, the senator did repudiate the low-ball assault on Barack Obama undertaken by Cincinnati radio shock jock Bill Cunningham at a rally in the Queen City last week. (When I lived in Cincinnati, I always channel surfed through Cunningham when I heard his voice coming over the car radio. I have no interest in listening to character assassins, whatever their political or religious persuasions. And Cunningham is a character assassin.) He incurred the wrath not only of Cunningham, but also of Limbaugh.

That’s okay. It’s difficult to imagine the wing of conservatism represented by Cunningham (or Limbaugh) are going to abandon the Republican ticket or sit on their hands after the Democrats nominate either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton.

Yet, the Arizona senator, who has demonstrated undenibale courage in the service of his country, whether in North Vietnam’s hateful Hanoi Hilton prison camp or on the floor of the US Senate, has seemed afraid of those conservative Republicans who, throughout the nominating process, have subjected him to treatment equivalent to a two year old holding his breath to get his way. And so, he who has received the votes of rank and file Republicans across the country and gotten the endorsements of Republicans whose conservative bona fides are undeniable, continues to play up to those constituencies that will, in the end, have no choice but to vote for him in the fall.

On the same day he courageously repudiated Cunningham’s hateful speech, McCain rode around Cincinnati with Rod Parsley, pastor of the World Harvest Church near Columbus. Parsley, who apparently believes that God is a Republican, tried his hand two years ago at kingmaking, seeking to get Ken Blackwell elected as Ohio governor. That didn’t work. His endorsement not only doesn’t help McCain, it–along with the blessings of other members of that form of conservatism represented by Parsely and James Dobson–no doubt will actually hurt him in the long run, ruining his chances to compete in a year when the odds are heavily stacked in favor of the Democrats anyway.

Bush strategist Karl Rove has, for some time now, sold Republicans on a minimalist strategy for winning presidential elections. (The same sort of startegy pursued by Bill and Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Party, by the way.) The strategy is simple: Feed the members of your base on a steady diet of partisan cliches. Keep them filled up on the red meat that will cause them to register and vote your way. Pump up your turnout and don’t worry about appealing to anyone other than those who are already in the Red and Blue camp.

But McCain has always been about expanding the base of the party. This was the strategy even of Ronald Reagan, who was pragmatic enough to select a liberal Republican for a running mate in his losing quest for the GOP nomination in 1976 and to pick the moderate George H.W. Bush to run with him in 1980. (It was also Reagan’s strategy for governing in both Sacramento and Washington, showing a willingness to compromise and work with the Democrats in order to advance his agenda…and that of the country, as he saw it.)

Senator McCain appears to have decided that he will more likely win Rove’s way than Reagan’s. I hadn’t thought that would be the sort of campaign that John McCain would run. Bur riding around with Rod Parsley and making pilgrimages to see George W. Bush has me thinking that having once been beaten by Karl Rove, he’s decided to join him.

In 2000 and in 2004, that may have worked. But unless I miss my guess, in 2008 it won’t.

The best strategy for John McCain this year is to be John McCain. That may not be enough to win the election, especially in a year that gives significant advantages to the Democrats and when the likely Democratic nominee is a charismatic phenomenon named Obama.

But I can guarantee that this faux-John McCain, whose first moves have been to get the endorsements of the very Republicans about whom many, including some Republicans, have such misgivings, won’t stand a chance in the general election.

People want change. McCain is sending the message of more of the same. In 2008, that won’t sell.

[See here and here.]

[By the way, I should add that the pieces I write about politics do not indicate and shouldn't be taken as an indication of who I favor in the presidential race. I don't do that and don't feel that it's right for pastors to endorse candidates. This, in short, is an analysis.]