"...in the middle of the summer, the McCain campaign took a series of steps that appeared on their face to be at odds with the candidate's gold-plated brand. In the interest of greater message discipline, his advisers eliminated his running back-of-the-bus (or front-of-the-plane) bullshit sessions with reporters. And they turned sharply negative in their approach to Obama, hammering him with a series of ads--seen by some as trivial and trivializing, by others as racially coded, and eventually by most as unexpectedly effective--focused on his status as a celebrity unqualified to be commander-in-chief.
Much of this departure from the modus operandi of "the old McCain" was chalked up to Schmidt, who had run the Bush war room under Karl Rove in 2004 and who believed that running hard negative against Obama was McCain's only chance to win. But many longtime McCain watchers say that the candidate's own gathering sense of frustration made him ripe for such a change. "It offended him that Obama walked away from his promise to do town-hall debates--and that the press didn't seem to care," says Dan Schnur, McCain's 2000 communications director. "And then he did a series of nontraditional campaign events, like his poverty tour, and was alternately ignored or mocked by the media. And my guess is that gave Steve much greater leverage in saying, 'Let's try a different approach.' "
For one thing, to the public, McCain's brand is still fairly appealing, although he is seen as a much more partisan character than he once was.
To the extent that he lost his base -- the press -- well, there are several theories as to why.
One theory that McCain lost them by running a typically Republican, elite-resenting, cultural-trigger point campaign.
Two: maybe he never really had the press on board. The McCain universe confused the media's personal friendliness with professional leniency, and didn't seem to understand that the young reporters of 2000 were, by 2008, much more skeptical of politics than they were when McCain ran as its change agent; that the young campaign trail reporters and producers simply hadn't experienced the magic of the Straight Talk Express and were not institutionally inclined to give McCain any more of a pass than they'd give another candidate.
Three; journalists tend to be cultural liberals; McCain's pandering to religious conservatives was shocking.
Four: McCain's early courtship of and current relationship with the Bush political machine, which disdains journalism and worked to discredit and decredentialize reporters.
Five: The replacement of the media friendly John Weaver with the not-very media friendly Rick Davis, and ultimately with Steve Schmidt, who exudes ferocity.
Six: The Palin pick. That's when the bottom fell out. How could a guy who takes national security seriously choose her?
Seven: It's not that reporters _like_ Obama more; he's not warm and cuddly. What they like is what they think he represents, and, specifically, what he is counterbalanced against, which is eight years of an administration that they hold responsible for (a) driving the country into oblivion (b) ruining the economy and (c) hating, disrespecting and embarrassing the press. In 2000, McCain was the only real "hero" in the race, and the media sort of lived through him. Now, the media can sort of live through Obama's "change" movement.
Some of these explanations fault McCain's voracious political ambition and others fault journalists' preconceptions and predilections.
Other thoughts?
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I like the new look.
Posted by Vermonter | October 7, 2008 9:38 AM