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.