McCain's Campaign Of Opportunities Lost
The president of the country was massively unpopular. His party was hammered by scandals. The economy was bad, unemployment was rising and polls showed worrying levels of public pessimism.
The nation’s left-wing opposition party had united behind a charismatic and appealing challenger: the first major party nominee to be something other than the usual white male.
Really, the whole thing seemed hopeless.
America 2008? No — France 2007.
Nicolas Sarkozy’s triumph over Ségolène Royal provided John McCain with a clear, easy-to-follow template for party renewal.
Like George W. Bush, incumbent French president Jacques Chirac was massively unpopular. Like John McCain, Nicolas Sarkozy belonged to Chirac’s party. Like John McCain again, Sarkozy had repeatedly tangled with Chirac during their years in government.
Unlike John McCain, Sarkozy used his record to present himself as the real force for change in France. Sarkozy achieved this in two ways:
* First, he presented a clear and simple analysis of what was wrong with France — and plausible solutions to the problems he diagnosed. According to Sarkozy, the French economy suffered because it punished work. He proposed a package of relevant reforms, most notably a cut in the payroll tax for all work beyond the 35-hour legislated maximum.
* Second, in direct debates with his opponent, he proved himself more knowledgeable and more thoughtful about the issues worrying the French — including issues deemed taboo by the French establishment, such as crime and immigration.
The French were persuaded: The best way to obtain real change from Jacques Chirac was to vote for the candidate of Jacques Chirac’s party.
As this example shows, McCain’s task in this election was not hopeless. Difficult, yes; hopeless no.
If it looks hopeless now, hours before voting day, it is McCain himself who has made it so.
It was McCain who never offered a coherent economic program. It was McCain who pronounced the fundamentals of the economy “sound” on the very day that Lehman Brothers collapsed. It was McCain who could not defend his own healthcare plan in toe-to-toe debate with Barack Obama. It was McCain who was ultimately responsible for a campaign that emphasized stunts and tactics over policy and strategy.
As a decision-maker, McCain proved himself impulsive and emotional, hasty and over-personal — and the revelation of those faults has frightened many voters at a time of economic anxiety.
Yet if this result is McCain’s doing, it is not entirely McCain’s fault.
It’s been evident for a long time, for example, that the average American worker did not benefit much from the Bush economy. Real wages stagnated between 2000 and 2006, while prices of essentials, such as food and fuel, rose. But the Republican party and the conservative movement asserted against the facts that everything was fine — that the Bush economy was the “greatest story never told” and that those who thought otherwise were “whiners.”
Had McCain attempted a more innovative and responsive economic policy, he would never have won the Republican nomination. By the time he got the nomination, he had so firmly locked himself to the Bush economic legacy that he had no space to pull off a Sarkozy. In the same way, had McCain chosen the running mate he wanted, he would have faced a walk-out from the floor of the St. Paul convention center.
Over-attached to old policies, Republicans could not develop an interesting new platform for McCain. Anyway, McCain is not a policy guy — and Sarah Palin even less so. Lacking substance, the party fell back on the “Country first” slogan that emphasized McCain’s heroic biography.
But what happens when a campaign based on biography falls behind in the polls? At that point, it has no choice but to start attacking the other guy’s less heroic biography: It has to go negative. Which is how John McCain, who promised a “respectful” campaign, who wrote campaign finance laws intended to stifle negative ads, has ended by running the most negative campaign of modern times: Almost 100% of his ad spending in the final month of the election has paid for negative ads, according to the nonpartisan Campaign Media Analysis Group.
These ads badly backfired. McCain’s ads attacked Obama for his radical associations, but the longer the campaign lasted, the less radical Obama looked. Like Nicolas Sarkozy, McCain faced a weak opponent: an untested left-winger of scanty experience. Unlike Sarkozy, it was McCain who consistently seemed less cool, less calm, less steady in every encounter. McCain needed to convince Americans that Obama was the high risk choice. By the end of the campaign, despite Bill Ayers, it was Obama who had seized the centre ground.
As things look, it will take another Republican candidate — and a very different Republican party — to take that ground back.
Originally published in the National Post.