Matt Tully wrote in the Star this morning of a McCain campaign with too much campaign, too little McCain. Tully pegs the problem as such:One new GOP flier places Obama's photo next to one of DiCaprio and says Obama would rather party with "Hollywood's elite" than deal with the economy. Fear-mongering follows; the flier eerily warns Obama is "not who you think he is." Another piece says Obama is a better friend "to criminals than to cops" and, again, is "not who you think he is." According to yet another mailing, Obama is nothing more than an "unknown charming pied piper."
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The GOP mailings could be dismissed if McCain's Indiana campaign had stood for anything else, if he'd followed Obama -- and Daniels -- and spent time meeting with Indiana voters and talking about real issues. If he'd done that, we'd have more with which to judge McCain's campaign. But he didn't. I agree with Tully's basic premise -- something that has been happening far too often lately than I'm comfortable with -- but I do think he may be missing a larger systemic flaw in the McCain campaign's approach to the Hoosier State. Namely, the fact that their "base" is what it used to be.
As I wrote yesterday, there seems to be a movement afoot among GOP activists to place blame on McCain and praise on Palin, citing her dedication to the ideological foundations that have guided social conservatives over the last eight years or so. This is all based on the premise that the electoral wave rode by conservatives in 2004 could be reclaimed if the right notes were struck in the right order.
This, my friends, is simply not the case.
I know this because, in essence, the McCain campaign has followed the GOP playbook of yesteryear. Fear! Wedge issues! Taxes!
The result of which, here in Indiana and elsewhere, has been the pulling away of the silent majority facade to reveal an electorate that has been by and large immunized to the tactics of old. Put another way, voters had their chicken pox four years ago -- and during the domestic crisis that followed -- the result of which has been a people that just aren't as susceptible to the same mechanism of message delivery.
The McCain campaign and national Republican infrastructure failed to recognize this, and this ignorance has left them behind in the polls in places they never could have imagined. The statements a few months ago by Republicans as to the political impenetrability of the Hoosier State were on the whole sincere -- they simply couldn't (or wouldn't) recognize the potential ineffectiveness of a rhetorical toolbox that had served them so well in the past when it came to swelling the ranks of the party faithful.
But the base wasn't there, or at least wasn't there in the numbers they envisioned. And while Mitch Daniels successfully took a pseudo-post-partisan high road, branding himself as above the din of the convoluted national narrative, John McCain abandoned his seemingly similar track record and donned the Rovian talking points.
The rhetoric hasn't changed, but the American people have, a fatal error in judgment that will haunt John McCain for years to come and has left the Grand Old Party in shambles from sea to shining sea. |
