My friends, John McCain's going to lose this election. He faces a structural disadvantage in the electoral college, an electorate on the precipice of generational realignment, and an opponent who, I believe, will come to be seen as the smartest politician and the greatest campaigner in a generation. But even so, he had a chance to win this election. At the end of May, it was a dead heat according to the polls. With the right decisions, McCain would have had a fighting chance, even in a Democratic year.
Instead, he made a series of monumental strategic mistakes. This is the first in a series of diaries chronicling those mistakes...
Mistake 1: Running to the Right Instead of the Center
McCain's first mistake was to run hard red in a deep blue year. It was unquestionably politically necessary for him to pander to the wingnuts during the primaries, but once he secured the nomination, he should have pivoted to the center. Not doing so was a breathtakingly stupid misreading of the political climate, a craven unwillingness to confront his base with "straight talk" about harsh political realities, and a foolhardy repudiation of his own carefully cultivated appeal to the electorate.
Misunderestimating the Political Climate
Of course, Republicans usually run to the right, rather than to the center. After all, "divide and conquer" worked for Nixon, and it worked for George W. Bush. It is the only path to victory conservatives see when they haven't a Reagan to run. But just as the once relevant policy ideas of the right have devolved into a hollow and bankrupt ideology, McCain's 2008 electoral gambit is a threadbare, hand-me-down strategy originally patterned for a different environment. The reigning GOP president, still the party's standard bearer, is deeply unpopular, party registration and partisan identification numbers heavily favor Democrats, and demographic trends have been reshaping the electorate. There simply aren't enough votes on the right anymore to reach a winning margin.
Given these trends, McCain's turn to the right should be saddening, even maddening, to the lonely few in the GOP still able to honestly assess things as they are. Of course, there are a few stoic-sounding conservatives who make noises about a Goldwateresque cleansing being good for the party in the long run. However, smart Republicans know: only the White House stands in the way of a wave of progressive legislation not seen since the New Deal; only the White House stands in the way of a rebirth of liberalism on the Supreme Court; and only the White House stands in the way of 40 years in a Hooverian wilderness for the whole party.
Cowering Before the Base
Why has McCain run to the right instead of the center? The only explanation seems to be that he is afraid of an enthusiasm gap and afraid of losing his base. Is it possible to lose more votes on the right through depressed turnout of the base than he might have gained by appealing to the center? Sure, it's possible. It's just not likely. McCain seems to have enslaved himself to his base in baldfaced attempt to recreate George W. Bush's electoral successes.
The pivot to the right just shows how much of a political coward McCain really is. Losing the White House means losing all relevance in the governing of the country. This prospect alone should have been enough to unify Republicans of all stripes behind whoever became the nominee. Moreover, Republicans, at the end of the primaries, found themselves more fortunate than they deserved: they had actually managed to nominate the one contender credibly positioned to appeal to independent voters. The smart play for McCain was to argue for his own electability and try to convince the GOP base that winning was more important than slavish genuflection to ideological purity. He should have stuck to the "maverick" approach he took during his 2000 run and simply dared the wingnuts not to support him.
As the eleventh hour apoplexy over the prospect of a "socialist terrorist" in the Oval Office demonstrated, the GOP base would have blinked first.
Poisoning His Own Brand
Over the summer, as a result of his base first strategy, McCain entered full pander mode and attempted to run as an archconservative. And, having run too far into the embrace of the GOP's strong right arm, he fatally undercut his once popularly held, if somewhat mythic, reputation as a bipartisan reformer. He abandoned the very style and the very principles upon which he had built his reputation: he ceased to talk about immigration whereas once he was the champion of comprehensive reform; he proposed steep tax cuts for the rich whereas he once opposed such cuts by his own party; once the avowed enemy of the religious right, he vainly made love to the Palinists in Colorado Springs and Virginia Beach.
And so, in mid-September, when the global financial crisis overwhelmed the campaigns, John McCain found himself trapped by his decision to run right. He is unable to propose truly conservative solutions to address the crisis (vast new regulation and aggressive government intervention in the markets seem to represent consensus policymaking), but yet he is also too politically weak within his own party to force the House Republicans to support the administration's center-left plans (and thus be able to claim some credit for helping solve the crisis).
Moreover, the calls for "reform" that have littered his post-crisis rhetoric seem to be a contradictory fusion of angry redneck populism and anti-interventionism, leading him to the strange position of proposing hundreds of billions in new spending for a mortgage buy-up program, yet to opposing the Bush administration's plans to take equity positions in banks. Trapped between the need to respond to historic events and the need to pander to the ideological demands of his base, he finds himself trying to formulate a conservative response to a problem largely caused by the failures of conservatism.
Scuttling the Future of His Party
The John McCain on the campaign trail in October of 2008 wasn't the John McCain that anybody would have recognized in January of 2000. Having abandoned his former reputation for defying his base and facing the indisputable fact that the financial crisis is redounding to Obama's benefit, McCain has jettisoned any thoughts of running an issue-oriented campaign. He is now conspiring fully with the talk-radio right in an execrable character assassination attempt.
Yet, despite his best efforts to bow to their angriest and most hateful demands, his own base still refuses to trust him and the political center has recoiled in horror at the dishonest and jingoistic campaign he is now running. His attempts to whip the right-wing base of the party into a frenzy may have permanently driven serious and thoughtful moderate Republicans and good government centrists from the ranks of an intellectually putrefying party even as the legions of talk-radio minions rage that he lacks the stomach to truly disembowel Obama's reputation.
These are the wages he has chosen for himself. Unfortunately for McCain, his only electoral chance lay in appealing to the political center.