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McCain's failing

Friday, 26th September 2008

David Brooks has an excellent column today on why he wishes McCain was running a different campaign. Here’s the key section:

“what disappoints me about the McCain campaign is it has no central argument. I had hoped that he would create a grand narrative explaining how the United States is fundamentally unprepared for the 21st century and how McCain’s worldview is different.
McCain has not made that sort of all-encompassing argument, so his proposals don’t add up to more than the sum of their parts. Without a groundbreaking argument about why he is different, he’s had to rely on tactical gimmicks to stay afloat. He has no frame to organize his response when financial and other crises pop up.”

Brooks is, as so often, spot-on. I was really hoping that McCain might run as a Reform Republican with a strong set of ideas about what to do. But instead he has fallen back on the old playbook. This strikes me a real mistake given how liberal, in US terms, Obama is.

If McCain had run as part of the radical centre one imagines he would have gained significant support from independents. There are those who say he couldn’t have done this as the Republican base would have stayed at home—or at least not volunteered—if he had. But the Palin pick gave him cover to run to the centre and he simply hasn’t taken it.

The McCain campaign has, at times, been tactically brilliant. But it has lacked a strategic vision, a central message. That gap is what makes the McCain campaign lurch around in such an un-presidential manner.