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The good news for Republicans is that Obama can be beaten. The bad news is that the McCain campaign has embarked on a course that — although it has some of the right elements — seems likely to fail. McCain would be most comfortable running in accord with his particular notions of political virtue while emphasizing character, national security, and a few pet causes such as earmarks. If he wants to win, he has to leave his comfort zone. He should take a page from Hillary Clinton. She did not, of course, defeat Obama, but she road-tested a strategy that cost him support among crucial constituencies — and that strategy is even better suited to McCain’s general-election run than it was to her primary campaign.McCain ought to be encouraged by how close she came. She was a plodding speaker lacking pizzazz, drew smaller crowds than Obama by an order of magnitude, and was outspent and out-organized. McCain has all the same deficits. Yet she fought Obama nearly to a draw, and after February — when she had finally figured out how to run against him — beat him soundly. That was too late for her. But it is not too late for McCain.Even her failure offers an instructive lesson for McCain. She went too long without frontally attacking Obama. When she did get more aggressive, he was already galloping toward the nomination on the strength of his narrow but insurmountable pledged-delegate lead. McCain has repeated this mistake, whether because of his sense of honor, his campaign’s disorganization, or, less likely, some master plan that escapes most observers. McCain and the Republican National Committee should have hit Obama right after he won the Democratic nomination. An Associated Press poll shows that the two words people tie most to Obama are “outsider†and “change,†associations McCain should have been contesting from Day One.Once Clinton went after Obama in earnest, she came back. She surged on the strength of her “3 a.m. phone call†ad, which ran prior to the Ohio and Texas primaries and argued that she was better suited than the neophyte Obama to handle a crisis. And she rolled up her post-February wins on the basis of lunch-bucket appeals to working-class white and Hispanic voters. For a contemporary Democrat, Hillary ran a center-Right campaign; she talked of blowing Iran to smithereens, downed shots of Crown Royal, and appealed frankly to blue-collar whites. Many of these tactics had little substance, but they conveyed a sense of toughness that endeared Hillary to her voters and highlighted a vulnerability of the polished but aloof and fragile-seeming Obama.
makes a good point. And McC has, to an extent, been doing this.
Quote from: Jim on July 21, 2008, 10:45:20 AMmakes a good point. And McC has, to an extent, been doing this.I must have missed it.......doc
