14th PRU in 2008 – Don’t make the same mistake as McCain did: Yes, he could’ve

By Muhammad Cohen

Asia Times Online

HONG KONG – History will judge that John McCain never had a chance. Buffeted by an unpopular president, a detested war and an economic crisis, the history books will say the old navy man’s candidacy was swamped by a tsunami of events and circumstances. Even the weather broke against him, perfect for Barack Obama’s big outdoor speech at the Democratic Party convention in Denver, and last night in Chicago, the Windy City, a balmy 71 degrees Fahrenheit (22 Celsius). It seemed Mother Nature had joined the conspiracy against McCain.

But with a steadier hand at the campaign helm, Captain McCain would be the 44th president of the United States. He drew an opponent who couldn’t match his experience nor his personality. Moreover, because Obama is an African American and the most liberal member of the Senate, the right would bury its reservations about McCain and cast its ballots for him. But McCain made several bad choices along the campaign trail that doomed his candidacy.

Perhaps no candidate has a more compelling biography than McCain. You can argue that getting captured by the enemy while dropping bombs doesn’t make a man a hero, but there’s no disputing that McCain spent decades serving his nation and he did it with courage and spirit.

On Capitol Hill, as McCain reminded voters many times, he successfully reached across party lines. Along with that appealing independent streak, the self-described maverick also had a mean streak and could be engaging and witty while indulging it. In an era when party lines have hardened due to media provocateurs, the travesty of the 2000 election, and blatantly partisan governing by a president who promised to be a uniter, not a divider, McCain stood out as a Republican that Democrats could respect, like, and even support.

Flip side of maverick
That likable McCain was rarely seen on the campaign trail. Instead, he too often showed the flip side of his maverick personality: the guy who’s convinced he’s the smartest guy in the room, with no patience for anyone who’s slow to catch on. That’s the McCain who, like Vice President Dick Cheney has shattered the Senate’s collegial, sophisticated patina with the f-word. On the campaign trail, McCain looked like the hopping-mad Yosemite Sam against Obama’s ultra-cool Bugs Bunny.

The McCain whose mouth ran ahead of his mind doomed him on the key issue of the economy – twice. First, McCain admitted that he really didn’t understand the economy. He surrounded himself with a motley crew of economic advisers, including Phil Gramm, the former senator from Enron whose wife served on the board of that poster company for corporate malfeasance, and Carly Fiona, the deposed chief executive officer of Hewlett-Packard, who turned the company on its founding families as she demolished that iconic bedrock of Silicon Valley. The program the economic team produced for McCain was an extension of the Bush prescription of tax cuts for the rich and deregulation that in the best of times had produced jobless growth and a vast redistribution of wealth to the top 10% of the economic pyramid.

Then, in September, as the subprime mortgage mess turned into a full-fledged financial crisis, McCain famously declared, “The fundamentals of our economy remain strong.” The remark underscored McCain’s weakness on pocketbook issues – hey, the guy is married to a millionaire heiress, so he doesn’t even need to know how many houses he has – and that the 72-year-old veteran was out of touch with what’s happening now.

Would you buy a used brain from Bush?
While McCain’s bad side was dominating him, the bad seed in the White House was dominating his campaign. On one hand, the Obama campaign was successfully tarring McCain with the claim that he was running for Bush’s third term. On the other hand, Bush operatives dominated McCain’s campaign brain trust, and they were fully prepared to win the last election. But they were not ready to win in 2008, when people wanted change and an end to the war in Iraq. These veteran operatives could pander to the fringes and stoke fears, but they couldn’t find the center. They tried to ignore issues such as the economy until it was far too late.

After wrapping up the nomination in early March, McCain failed to take advantage of his head start to take the center from the squabbling Democrats. Instead, McCain and company failed to establish an overriding image and lay out the rationale for his campaign. As outlined in the New York Times Magazine last month, in June, a group of McCain advisers gathered and declared they still couldn’t answer the question, “Why elect John McCain?” The dilemma was never resolved.

In those months, McCain’s team squandered a major opportunity: winning Hillary Clinton’s voters. Clinton swept up white working class voters late in the primary season who were to the right of Obama, respected experience, and may have been inclined to support McCain in the wake of an acrimonious primary fight. But McCain’s campaign, perhaps because of who was in charge – or simply because they just couldn’t think that far ahead – never made a serious play for those voters. Instead, the campaign copied several tactics of the Clinton campaign, ignoring that Hillary Clinton could only manage a close second place finish with those tactics.

The vision thing
A frequent criticism of the McCain campaign was that it had tactics but no overriding strategy. That can be traced to the lack of vision of his handlers but it also is the fault of the candidate for failing to articulate a vision for them to follow. So the campaign’s messages bounded from Obama supporting defeat in Iraq to his celebrity – when in fact McCain has been a celebrity ever since his capture in Hanoi nearly 40 years earlier – from experience to running against Washington to spread the wealth.

Many of the errors of the McCain campaign stem from trying to win the day’s battle but having no victory plan for the war. That shortcoming played out on the electoral map when in the final days, McCain’s best hope for victory required overcoming Obama’s double-digit lead in Pennsylvania.

The selection of Governor Sarah Palin as a running mate underscored the campaign’s tactical obsession and the impulsiveness of McCain. The choice of Palin was meant to impress voters who had nowhere else to go and to steal some of the thunder from the Democrats’ triumphant convention. But the choice ignored the big picture, the issue that was crucial for the oldest candidate ever seeking to be elected a first term president: was Palin qualified to lead the free world? She showed herself extraordinarily unworthy of the office, and she became a polarizing figure who ruined McCain’s chances of winning the center.

From Paris Hilton to Joe the Plumber, the McCain campaign enlisted a lengthy cast of characters to talk about reasons to vote against Obama. Many of their arguments failed to connect. In the end, the campaign would have done better featuring John McCain making the case to vote for John McCain.

Former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen told America’s story to the world as a US diplomat and is author of Hong Kong On Air (www.hongkongonair.com), a novel set during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal, high finance and cheap lingerie.