McCain now has a message--but can he drive it home?
It has been obscured by the row over Bush supposedly slamming Obama in his speech to the Israeli parliament and a flap about the lobbying ties of various McCain aides, but yesterday the McCain campaign found its message. McCain’s speech outlining what the country would look like at the end of his first, and maybe only, term was the first time that his campaign had managed to successfully blend together a national security and domestic agenda.
McCain’s reformist domestic policy proposals should help him close the change gap. Indeed, the whole speech with its list of concrete things that McCain wants to achieve is an implicit contrast with Obama’s vaguer—albeit, better delivered and more inspirational—talk of change.
It is also noticeable how McCain once more challenged Obama to match him on the new politics of openness and accountability with his proposals for weekly press conferences and Prime Minister questions-style sessions with Congress. This is an area where the McCain camp believe Obama is vulnerable, thinking that if they can show voters that Obama talks the talk rather than walks the walk on this stuff then they have an opportunity to really chip away at his image.
If McCain is to win in November, then he is going to have to both persuade voters that he is not a third Bush term and that Obama is somehow too much of a risk. McCain, at least, now has a domestic message that shows he is not just another Republican. It is a reform message that the rest of the party would do well to adopt.
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George Mitrovich
May 18th, 2008 3:58pmThere will be no first term for John McCain. He will lose to Barack Obama, and the Democratic Party will win more than 60 seats in the Senate, and may get to 300 in the House of Representatives.
The Republican Party, as presently constituted, are done – and deservedly so. Neither the party nor Senator McCain can recover from eight years of the worst administration in American history – a view not confined to Democrats alone.
America needs a big Democratic Party sweep in November, for it will take a big majority in Congress to begin the process of righting the wrongs of eight years of George Bush and his clients in Congress – and having voted with President Bush ninety-three percent of the time Senator McCain is a major Bush client.
How odd that The Spectator continues to have a “thing” for Republicans and American conservatives, when neither are anything like the Conservative Party in Great Britain. American conservatism is, for the foreseeable future, dead, while British conservatism appears on the rebound. Why? Because it is nothing like the dreadful version on this side of the pond. You cannot prosper as a political party if everything you do benefits the entitled and ignores the great middle classes.
Mr. Cameron and his colleagues appear to understand that; the Bush acolytes never have.
George Mitrovich
San Diego
Ian C
May 19th, 2008 10:44amFrom this side of the pond it appears that winning the centre ground is the key to the 2008 Election, and the main players in that are going to be prospective tax levels under the new administration and the unspoken word of Race - one that McCain does not have to mention.
This side of the Conventions there is less need to speculate as to the outcoem than there has been for a the duration of the primaries. Egalitarianism - is that really an agenda that winds the centre ground up? I would have thought not as the USA is the most egalitarian society in the developed world.
Ian C
May 19th, 2008 5:01pmIf this is the sort of "dreadful version" of conservatism" that George Mitrovich and Co want to get rid of? From today's WSJ Online:
"low-income parents in Florida have gotten a taste of the same school choice privileges that middle- and upper-income families have always enjoyed. And they've found they like this new educational freedom. Under the scholarship program, which is means-tested, companies get a 100% tax credit for donations to state-approved nonprofits that provide private-school vouchers for low-income families."
If it is, it is the sort of basic sensible policies that would have been introduced anywhere but for the 'liberal' consensus of the 1960's generation that is represented by the Labour and Democratic parties. More of this will win elections across the globe, in the 21st century.