The NY Times reports on John McCain on the campaign trail in
Iowa. Unable to attain the status of the inevitable nominee, McCain
is back on the Straight Talk Express in an attempt to reintroduce
himself to voters. To win over conservatives, McCain will have to
remind them that he has a solid voting record on a lot of issues
that are important to them. His problem is that when he has
deviated from conservatives, he has made a public show of it in the
mainstream media. Thus, conservatives' attitudes toward McCain have
become so poisoned that any case he makes for himself, however
compelling, will be greeted with skepticism.
Even were he to win the nomination, I think he'd face a problem
in the general election similar to the one Al Gore faced in 2000.
Gore tried to distance himself from Bill Clinton during that
election in the wake of Clinton's scandal-plagued second term. As a
result, Gore was less identified with the strong economic growth,
became resented by Clinton lovers in the party, and missed out on
having the most talented Democratic politician of his generation
campaign for him. At the same time, people who hated the
administration still associated Gore with Clinton anyway.
McCain, too, has somehow managed to get himself in a situation
in which he's the Washington insider closely associated with
President Bush's most unpopular policy--the war in Iraq. This isn't
really fair, because though McCain has been a staunch supporter of
the war from the get go, he was always critical of the way it was
being waged, specifically arguing repeatedly over the years for
increasing the number of troops. But fair or not, he has become
associated with the war policy, and yet at the same time, he is
viewed with disdain by many Bush loyalists for the occasions on
which he very publicly broke with the administration.
topics:
John McCain, Bill Clinton, Mainstream Media, Iraq
