Republican Presidential nominee Sen. John McCain has now accomplished several major tasks: he was last-man-standing in the GOP primaries, he moved enough to the right to satisfy many Republicans and he hit — to use the now-tiresome cliche — “a home-run” among the party’s conservative base by picking conservative red-meat serving Gov. Sarah Palin as his Vice Presidential choice. So what’s his next task?
Winning a good chunk of the undecideds and moderates because, as the Christian Science Monitor notes, he can’t win this election without them:
But the 8-1/2 weeks until Election Day will bring the real test: convincing enough undecided voters, many only now tuning into the race, that John McCain should be president.
That fight, political analysts say, will turn in large measure on Senator McCain’s ability to wrest the mantle of “change” from Sen. Barack Obama and win independents and conservative Democrats in swing states like Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan.
“The shift we saw at the convention was away from a strict reliance on the experience card, to a revamped message that McCain will bring about the right kind of change,” says Lawrence Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota.
“This is not a Karl Rove play-the-base strategy,” he added, referring to President Bush’s former strategist who won elections with partisan wedges like gay marriage and abortion. “This is a really significant shift away from that.”
McCain has walked a political tightrope since losing the nomination to George Bush in 2000. His campaign in 2000 was about building coalitions aimed at a more bipartisan form of winning and governing. During the past 8 years he has relentlessly-wooed segments of the party that were out to get him in 2000 — from some GOP leaders in Congress to evangelicals. It wasn’t pretty. And in some of these circles “bipartisanship” is considered weakness or disloyalty. A combination of his efforts (skill) plus other 2008 primary candidates flopping or canceling themselves out (luck) helped him win.
This new battle could be a truly tougher one:
“The Palin nomination excited and united the base,” says James Campbell, a political scientist at the University at Buffalo, in New York. “Now he has to win over moderates.”
By Professor Jacobs’s estimate, McCain would have to win some 55 percent of independents and more than 15 percent of Democrats – a tall order – to defeat Senator Obama.
Palin’s pick excited the party’s base and the negative press and blog coverage about her solidified GOP party base support for her pick. She became a hero because of her enemies.
Now it moves into a new phase:
Obama, who accepted the Democratic presidential nomination last week, leads McCain by nearly six points in an average of polls compiled by the website Real Clear Politics. Less than a third of Americans approve of President George Bush, the party’s standard-bearer for the past eight years.
Voter surveys earlier this week found that a Palin vice presidency makes scant difference to most women. Even after her selection last Friday, Democrats were nearly 50 percent more likely than Republicans to feel enthusiastic about voting this year, according to a Gallup poll.
For Republicans, the race is likely to be won, or lost, in Pennsylvania and the populous Midwestern battlegrounds of Ohio and Michigan. Also important are a string of states Bush won in 2004 but where Obama now leads – even if by a whisker – in the polls: Virginia, Iowa, Colorado, and New Mexico.
Up for grabs are economically struggling but socially conservative voters – both blue-collar and middle class – who may have stayed home or backed Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in the primaries and are now on the fence.
“McCain will win the South, Obama will win the East and West coasts,” says GOP strategist John Bell. “The real fight is going to be in the Midwest and in Pennsylvania.”
To win those states, he says, McCain has to paint Obama as a kind of wolf in sheep’s clothing – a traditional tax-raising liberal hiding behind an unearned image as bipartisan uniter. At the same time, he has to toughen his defenses against efforts by Democrats to tar him as an heir to Bush.
This will be the toughest tightrope yet for McCain to walk: saying he’s for bipartisanship when his Vice Presidential pick is decimating the Democrats and saying he’s going to bring change while the Demmies paint him as Bush Lite. He must convince undecideds and moderates that his administration won’t be Rush Limbaugh/Sean Hannity Nirvana but will be a new era where the views of non-conservatives will be respected and seriously considered as well.
That may be hard to do in a campaign laced with increasing mockery and sarcasm — which translated means showing a lack of respect and near-contempt. YouTubes, the mega-speed of the Internet, and the fierce competition among cable news networks for compelling and particularly-controversial product to fill airtime means McCain won’t be able to just take the high road and let his ads and Palin run a 50 + 1 party base mobilization campaign while he seeks to project a loftier image. It will be noticed if he does.
Unlike in the primaries, this time he won’t be walking a tightrope in danger of falling off due to Republican opponents shaking the wire.
This time he’ll walk a tightrope in danger of falling off due to Democrats shaking the wire, and it’ll tougher to pull this off with Democrats than battling his Republican primary opponents.
Or will it?
Cartoon by Frederick Deligne, Nice-Matin, France
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.