McCain Has Little to Show for Head Start
While the war between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton has dragged on, John McCain has stood alone on the Republican side of the field. He has had an unparalleled opportunity to define his candidacy, assemble a fall campaign team, shore up his support among the party's core activists and raise the money he needs to compete until his public funding starts to flow in September.
The senior senator from Arizona has dedicated himself to this agenda over the past 11 weeks. And yet today, by some measures, he is further from his goals than when he began.
Consider the matter of staff. McCain began last year with a team of consultants and loyal aides that included many from his failed bid in 2000 (notably John Weaver) and others lured by his frontrunner status for 2008. The McCain campaign went first class and let everyone know it.
But the bills piled up even as the campaign faltered. The issues of age, Iraq and illegal immigration weighed on McCain just as the national media were discovering and celebrating his GOP rivals. By the summer of 2007, the putative frontrunner was broke and dead in the water. A lesser man might have given up.
But the former POW made bold moves to survive and recover. He reduced his staff and cut his costs, allowing him to persist on a pittance compared to the self-financing Mitt Romney and the high-rolling Rudy Giuliani. McCain traveled Iowa as humbly as a local farmer, toured New Hampshire as frugally as a flint-eyed native.
When he won the New Hampshire, South Carolina and Florida primaries and the preponderance of big states on Super Tuesday, McCain was back on top. And he soon brought aboard the kind of blue chip Washington big boys who imbue a campaign with the aura of success. No less a presence than Charlie Black, a mega-lobbyist in each of the last three decades, stepped in to take the helm.
But with this new hegemony there should have been an outpouring of dollars from those within the party with the deepest pockets. McCain had the right people making the calls, but the contributions did not flow in the torrent he needed. McCain had also fallen short with the rank and file who respond to direct mail pitches. And when it comes to online giving, both McCain and his party as a whole are still catching up to the Democrats.
Not to worry, the Republicans said. Campaigns sometimes get a slow start. McCain could look to heavyweights such as Tom Loeffler, the former Texas congressman who became his national finance co-chairman and promised to open the coffers of the party's biggest givers. The fiscal picture was going to brighten, and fast.
But then in mid-May a kind of internal mini-scandal swept through the top ranks of the McCain operation. It began when Newsweek reported that Doug Goodyear, McCain's choice to run the Republican convention this summer, worked for a firm that lobbied for the brutally repressive military junta in Myanmar - the government blocking aid to cyclone victims in its own country.
Let's assume for the moment that everyone really does deserve representation in Washington by top-dollar pros, even the oppressive junta ruling in Yangon. Do those same pros also deserve to occupy key slots in the presidential campaign of the presumptive nominee? This conflict might be compromising for any candidate, but McCain built his rep as the scourge of K Street. His repertoire is replete with lobbyist bashing absolutes. The irony is too baroque to be borne.
So Goodyear was gone, as were several others. And then Loeffler joined them. As the kettle reached a full boil, anti-McCain groups such as therealmccain.com were posting extensive dossiers on Black and his claim to have refrained from lobbying his campaign clients after 1984. The Web site had a list of citations for Black's campaign work for the Bush-Cheney tickets as well as for his lobbying of the Bush-Cheney administration.
Some dismiss all such travails as inside baseball, but they interfere with the defining of the McCain candidacy and the shoring up of the conservative base. McCain cannot focus on the course he is setting while battling to keep his campaign vessel upright in the sea.
To be sure, the most immediate challenge for a man with a maverick's rep is to show he can play it straight. McCain needed ways to assuage the disappointment of conservatives who had never cared for him and were making noises about sitting on the sidelines in the fall.
So he set about making himself acceptable, and in this he had the aid of Karl Rove, the erstwhile guru of President George W. Bush, and, indeed, the very consultant who had managed the political knee-capping of McCain himself in the 2000 primaries.
Under Rove's tutelage, the McCain Straight Talk Express has been visiting the touchstones of conservative orthodoxy, such as the federal judiciary ("I will appoint judges who know the law and know their own minds and know the difference") and the refusal to negotiate with enemies abroad. The word "appeasement" has become part of the McCain mantra.
In other words, the new McCain has defined his candidacy largely as a defense of the conservative consensus of the last 30 years -- which for younger voters will be synonymous with the Bush presidency. That will make it easy for the Democrats to say McCain promises nothing but Bush's third term. Indeed, they are already saying just that.
In brief, the drive for more money and party unity has yet to produce either one; and the struggle to define McCain as a candidate has produced schizophrenia within his campaign and a closer-than-ever identification with a poisonously unpopular president.
John McCain may yet be the 44th president of the United States, if only because of weakness and division on the Democratic side. But if he is to succeed, his summer and fall will have to be better than his spring, a season of great promise as yet unfulfilled.
7:21 AM ET | 05-20-2008 | permalink
