Terence Hunt, white house correspondent for the Associated Press, hits the nail right on the head when he writes that Senator John McCain – the Republican nominee for president – is running against the Democrats (Barack Obama) and George W. Bush and other GOP politicians in a position of power in the last couple of years.

Whenever he makes an appearance, he criticizes Obama’s plans, and his record. This is, most would agree, logical. After all, Obama will be his opponent in November. 

McCain has another opponent to deal with, however; the unpopularity of George W. Bush. If he would run as a partisan Republican – in the same vein as Bush – he would certainly lose. The only way for McCain to win in November is to present himself as a different kind of Republican; one who is not overly partisan, one who is able and willing to reach across the aisle, and one who is willing to take on Washington and clean it up.

“We began to value power over principle,” McCain said in Colorado Springs, Colo. Some lawmakers turned corrupt and wound up in jail, he told a rally in Albuquerque, N.M.

“Change is coming, change is coming,” McCain promised later.

Obama’s campaign, knowing that depicting McCain as the second coming of G.W. Bush, tries to counter McCain’s ‘maverick’ image by pointing out time and again that the Senator from Arizona agreed with Bush 90% of the time.

“On the core issues, the economy and the war, he has been joined to Bush at the hip,” said Democratic pollster Mark Mellman. “On the other hand, Bush is a lead weight dragging him down. He has to rely on rhetoric to separate (himself) but he can’t separate himself on policies important to the American people.” 

Of course, the criticism is not entirely fair. McCain, for instance, was one of the most vocal critics of Bush’s strategy in Iraq until the latter ordered the surge (which was exactly what McCain asked for). He criticized Bush and then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for bungling the job in Iraq, and for failing to send enough troops to restore stability and peace.

Still, though, the fact of the matter is that McCain is a moderately conservative Republican. He is independent-minded; he tends to do what he considers best, not what the political establishment tells him he should do, but because of his ideological views, he agrees more often with Bush than he does not. Which is probably why the two belong to the same party; after all, if he did not McCain would probably feel at home in the Democratic Party.

But; since the differences are certainly there, and because it would be political suicide for McCain not to distance himself from Bush, his strategy is logical. What’s more, it’s working. Increasingly more voters seem to believe that McCain would be a much different president than Bush proved to be.

However, there is reason for some concern, or there should be; McCain has adopted Obama’s strategy in recent weeks. He rails against the establishment, criticizing it for creating a ‘mess,’ but he does not offer any specific alternatives to deal with the problems he describes. He promises to reach out to Democrats and to work with them – and his record shows, unlike Obama’s, that he is capable of doing so successfully – but he does not clearly state what his exact goals will be. He outlines a very broad vision, but voters, one could argue, deserve specifics.

It seems likely that these specifics will be offered to the American people later on in the campaign. After all, if both candidates run on a basic platform of change, reforms and non-partisanship, they will have to distinct themselves on specific plans.