Let McCain Be McCain

With the nomination in hand, the instinct in Camp McCain has been to “rein in” their candidate and rebrand him as safe and unthreatening. This is the wrong instinct.

Senator John McCain was sitting in the front of his fancy-pants front-runner’s plane, trying to get comfortable. He fidgeted, occasionally lapsing into un-McCainlike blandness: “There is a process in place that will formalize the methodology,” he said in describing how his free-form campaign style will assume the discipline expected of a probable Republican standard-bearer.

The position is unnatural to Mr. McCain, who has typically floundered when not playing the insurgent role. But now he is in the midst of an at-times awkward transition — from being one of the most disruptive figures in his party to someone playing it safer, not to mention trying to make nice with Republicans he clearly despises and who feel similarly about him.

The truth is seldom conditional. By shedding his frontrunner aura in the summer of 2007, McCain’s team happened upon a fundamental truth about their candidate: that his candidacy only “works” as that of a maverick underdog fighter. That truth is still in force today. There is no need to reinvent the wheel by returning to the failed strategy of the spring of 2007 just because he is the nominee.

How so? Doesn’t the nomination require something more august, more restrained than the happy warrior riding the Straight Talk Express?

Not necessarily.

Over the last week, we’ve seen McCain go through the tea-and-crumpets routine with party elders in hopes of “uniting the party.” And while we certainly all love and respect Jeb Bush, George Allen, Tom Coburn, Mitt Romney, and George H.W. Bush, their pro-forma endorsements do nothing to “unite the party.”

In the last few weeks, we have seen the leader-follower model of conservative activation fail spectacularly, with McCain as the beneficiary. (It turns out that the conservative base does not jump when talk radio says “jump.”) This is all part of a broader disintermediation of politics. The two most successful GOP candidates were the ones the most hated by the conservative establishment. The Democrats — almost as deferential to their frontrunners as we are to ours — are on the verge of repudiating their First Family. Democratic voters in Massachusetts went in the other direction — only to repudiate theirs.

So if conservatives won’t take cues from talk radio, whom they at least agree with ideologically, why would they take cues from Washington party insiders who are seen as Republicans first and conservatives second?

As I wrote at CPAC, the way for McCain to mobilize the base is to go at them directly with policy specifics and red meat. Or as Matt Lewis suggests, conservative straight talk.

I fought as hard as anyone to get us a different nominee. But now that it’s McCain, can’t we at least get the benefit of his unique maverick-style approach to campaigning instead of the uninspiring Bob Dole “unite the party” routine we’ve got right now?

My problem with McCain was never with his free-wheeling maverick style. In fact, I’m in awe of how he uses to bring people around to unpopular positions. The problem was that I wished he’d spent more times pushing positions unpopular with Democrats. But those times he has agreed with us, such as the war, he has turned out to be the best advocate we could have.

By flashing his trademark pugnacity and humor, by deploying his straight talk on behalf of red meat conservative issues, he can go a long way towards amping up the enthusiasm level of grassroots conservatives.

The need for a different approach is underlined as it becomes progressively more likely we will not have Hillary as a foil.

Against Obama, we will be up against a movement that can raise $10 million a week online — and one that will have earned at least token goodwill from conservatives by slaying the Clintons.

The last thing we need in a race against youth and excitement is a boring and conventional older Republican. John McCain has already shown the capacity to transcend that image. We could use the happy warrior of old, the one who can shoot the breeze interminably with reporters (yes, it still works in the general) and puncture the Obama hype with authenticity, wisdom, and wit.

The likelihood is that we will be outspent by 2 or 3-to-1 in hard dollars, but John McCain was able to get nominated on fumes. All the Republican establishment support possible will only be able to provide but a shadow of the Democratic nominee’s support. Running a traditional Republican-style top-down campaign this year is not a strategic advantage but an Achilles’ Heel.

So leave pre-implosion make-nice John McCain in deep freeze and keep the guerrilla strategy from the primaries going a few more months. At least we know it works.

Tagged: john mccain strategy

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