There’s an interesting, and long, profile of John McCain’s campaign in this week’s New York Times Magazine. One part of it describes how Steve Schmidt convinced John McCain to talk about his time as a POW. I think it probably helped McCain a great deal in the Republican primaries. But the cost was that, by the summer, people had heard him talk about his time as a prisoner of war so much that they just began to roll their eyes whenever he brought it up. I’m not sure when the McCain camp realized this, but after their convention they pretty much dropped the POW talk from his campaign rhetoric. Whenever he does still mention it, as in one of the debates, the audience is unimpressed.
I don’t find McCain’s use of his time as a POW to be as cheap, tawdry, and exploitative as Rudy Guiliani’s use of 9/11, but the effect over time is the same. People stop listening and the candidate becomes a parody of himself.
If I can think of one thing that I would have done differently as a McCain strategist, it’s that I would have tacked all the way to the center-left after wrapping up the nomination, and run extremely hard against the Bush administration and the fire-breathers in the Republican Party. It would have really caused a blood-bath among the GOP delegates but, if McCain was right about one thing in this campaign, it was the need to throw a successful Hail Mary pass.
McCain and Lieberman were the preferred running-mates of the last two Democratic nominees. They had bipartisan, moderate, bona fides, and they should have exploited them and run as a centrist alternative to the nutso DeLay-Rove-Santorum wing of the party. Running to the right allowed Obama to easily capture the center. And, by not running aggressively away from a party and a president that is in total disrepute, McCain tied himself to a sinking ship.
I always thought his best choice for running mate would have been Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison would have been a decent choice, as well. Or, even Joe Lieberman. If Arlen Specter didn’t have health issues, he would have been a fine choice. Or Tom Ridge, Christie Whitman, or George Pataki. McCain needed someone that could sell him as a different kind of Republican. But he chose to go for a base election in a Democratic year. It was a terrible choice. Choosing Palin wasn’t the half of it. Any conservative would have helped drive him under.
