The Left’s Stupid Anti-McCain Messaging

by Patrick Ruffini :: May 9th, 2008 11:41 pm

Third Bush Term. The Bush-McCain hug. McSame.

Excuse me while I McYawn.

For all the left has done to move bodies and build infrastructure, there’s one area in which they remain woefully lacking: message. Nowhere is this more apparent in their central charge against McCain: that he’s a Bush clone from top to bottom. From the Obama campaign, to the DNC, to 527s and c4s like David Brock’s Progressive Media USA, you’ll see this repeated over and over.

With President Bush’s approval ratings in the toilet, and I think I’m being charitable here, it’s easy to see the Democrats as picking off low hanging fruit. They’ve been Bush haters for this long, so why give up now? And why resist the temptation to hang the Bush albatross around the GOP’s neck, which would seem to be their trump card in another down year for Republicans?   

The problem is that it runs counter to some deeply ingrained perceptions about McCain, the most transparently un-Bush candidate Republicans could have nominated. How does one overlook the fact that amongst Republican primary voters most dissatisfied with Bush, McCain dominated. Or McCain’s bitter rivalry with the President that lingered long beyond the 2000 election, culminating in charges that he threatened to leave the party, and now, that he didn’t even vote for President Bush in 2000? How does Arianna’s story square with the narrative of “McSame?”

The Democrats have chosen to run the same campaign against McCain as they would have run against Romney or Huckabee. This will turn out to be a strategic mistake.

Why? Because they ignore the new media reality that no amount of points on television can overturn a narrative backed up by the free media. The left’s “McSame” campaign is an example of the particularly crude communications tactic of countermessaging. Countermessaging consists solely of challenging a prevailing public narrative. The media is not liberal. There was no housing bubble. Global warming is a myth.  

This tactic can be useful practiced by notoriously off-message B- and C-teamers running interference while, well behind the line of scrimmage, the quarterback prepares to throw long. The problem is that this particularly uninventive form of McCain Maverick Denial is the Democrats’ central strategy for discrediting the Republican nominee. Few people who aren’t partisan Democrats actually believe it. If you were to ask undecideds about McCain’s comparative weaknesses, I’m not sure Bush-coziness would be close to the top of the list in the same way it would be for a more conventional Republican.

If we are in an era of authenticity, where free media narratives reign, then you’re limited to arguing based on a candidate’s actual weaknesses and strengths. In a few cases, you can create weaknesses if you’re operating in an evergreen space where there are no public perceptions yet either way. Unfortunately for David Brock et al. Bush-McCain tensions have been a recurring theme in our collective political psyche for nearly a decade.

If the left were actually smart, what would they do to us?

• Drive wedges between McCain and his base by playing up McCain’s ongoing feuds with Bush and the conservative movement, demoralizing conservatives and keeping base turnout closer to 1996-2000 levels as opposed to red-hot 2004 levels. Focus on insider issues like the 2000 vote that won’t get much play outside the respective party echo chambers, limiting any fallout among true independents, who are a dwindling percentage of the electorate anyway. Remember that it’s easier to get 4 million conservatives not to show up than it is to get 2 million independents to switch.
• Portray McCain as the “fake Democrat” and Obama as the “real Democrat.”
• Limit Bush=McCain criticisms to Iraq only, where there is already an established public narrative of McCain being very hawkish, and in fact, leading Bush into the surge. And isn’t Iraq the core of their indictment? Why muddy it up with domestic stuff where Bush and McCain are often night and day?
• If you are going to focus on Bush-McCain similarities, always juxtapose with McCain’s past Bush opposition to make him appear inconsistent. But publicly recognize that Bush and McCain were once opposed, so you don’t take the credibility hit you would from straight-up McCain Maverick Denial.

Will they pick up on this? Doubtful. To do so would mean to concede some Republican talking points to make even more devastating anti-McCain arguments, something those like Brock who are accountable to the netroots must never do. And countermessaging is too central to what Brock does as the head of Media Matters advancing liberal media bias denial.

In many ways, the Bush 2004 definition of Kerry provides a useful contrast. It was a textbook example of a more nuanced message offensive that the base wouldn’t have chosen. It would have been easy to run a classic Kerry as Massachusetts liberal campaign. Instead, they tagged Kerry as a flip-flopper, with the goal of maximizing contrasts with a decisive wartime President. In that year, juxtaposition and the perception of incoherence mattered more than one’s current or past positioning.

And isn’t Hillary Clinton the ultimate example of one’s relationship to a President not counting for squat in a real-world election?

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