What McCain Needs to Do, According to Experts
According to the Politico’s Roger Simon, Senator John McCain could still “pull it off” this year, meaning he could still win. In order to do so, McCain will have to do the following, experts told Simon:
Ken Duberstein was Ronald Reagan’s chief of staff from 1988 to 1989 and was deputy undersecretary of labor for Gerald Ford. Duberstein is very well-connected within the Republican Party.
“I think it is uphill for McCain, but a victory is doable,” Duberstein said. “He needs, obviously, to raise questions about Obama, but he also needs to reassure the American people — and not simply the base — that he has a plan to get us out of this economic mess and restore America’s stature throughout the world.
“He needs to spell out not why he is a maverick but what he will do to lead: What are the specifics? What is the strategy? He needs three yards and a cloud of dust, and not a Hail Mary strategy. He needs to do what John McCain does best, which is explain to the people where John McCain wants to take the country…Greg Mueller was a senior adviser to Pat Buchanan and Steve Forbes in their presidential campaigns and is an expert on conservative politics.
“McCain can definitely win the race,” Mueller said. “McCain needs to change the discussion back to a referendum on Obama. He needs to define Obama’s agenda as dangerous to America…
Whit Ayres is a pollster and consultant who worked on Lamar Alexander’s 1996 presidential campaign and in numerous Senate and gubernatorial races. He is an expert on Southern politics.
“Anybody who is talking about a race being over a month out has not been participating in very many campaigns,” Ayres said. “Of course McCain can win it. Of course he can.
“He needs to broaden the discussion to dimensions that voters consistently see as relevant to their presidential choice. Voters vote on issues, particularly on the economy, but they also vote on character, leadership, values and ideology. And quite rightly so. A president for the next four years will be dealing with a whole host of issues beyond the economy, and how he deals with those issues is very relevant to the discussion.
I think that the experts are, to a very large degree, right. There’s just one issue on which I disagree with them though, and that is McCain’s ability to win. As I see it, chances of him winning are remote. Not completely gone now that he has opened the attack completely, but remote.
But they are right about how he should act, how he should present himself and how he should attack Obama. There’s certainly room for him to make somewhat of a comeback in the polls. Once he comes back in the polls, much will be possible, history has taught us.
These are EXPERT opinions? Really? In that case, I’m no expert, but I am observant. The #1 thing that McCain needs to do is distance himself as much as possible from President Bush. THE entire Obama rhetoric is based solely on one thing: that McCain is just another Bush waiting to happen. As long as that stigma goes unchecked, McCain has zero chance of winning the election.
Frankly, I think this election is probably over. Insofar as the proposed strategy ^^^^ is character assassination and/or reinventing McCain as the “un-Republican”, that should tell you something. While McCain keeps trying to insist that Obama needs to explain his “associations”, this only drives home a far more persistent and substantial “association” of his own: his membership in the Republican party;, embracement of it’s ideals; his enthusiastic endorsement of Bush in ‘00 & ‘04; and his votes for most of the Bush agenda. Indeed, as to the one conspicuous criticism he DID lodge against the administration (and concerning the Bush tax cut), he now repudiates THAT as a mistake.
After the last 8 years, the Republican nominee SHOULD lose, and lose big. As it’s Congressman, Tom Davis III of Virginia said, “If the Republican brand was dogfood right now, they’d take it off the shelf.”