VP Picks Reveal Contrasting Election Strategies of McCain and Obama

After the American Century

McCain and Obama have chosen quite different campaign strategies, as their choice of vice-presidential running mates reveals. McCain has adopted the polarizing tactic of going to the Right. Sarah Palin has extreme right-wing positions on most issues. Should Creationist ideas be given credibility? Yes, teach them in schools. Should gays be allowed to marry? Never. Should guns be controlled in any way? No way. Should abortion be permitted in any situations, for example when pregnancy is due to rape or incest? Absolutely not. Is global warming caused by human beings? Certainly not. Should alternative energies be developed? No. Should women's bodies by commodified? She was runner-up in Miss Alaska.

Huckabee supporters are delighted with her selection. So what if she has no law degree, no knowledge of history, no experience in government, and no ideas? She is a religious woman, an athlete, a gunslinger mother, and she wants to drill for every drop of oil that God in his infinite wisdom, as part of his intelligent design of the universe, deposited in American wilderness areas and wildlife reserves. Sarah Palin thus qualifies as the worst imaginable vice-president for the liberals and the best possible one for cultural conservatives. Selecting her is an example of mobilizing the base, or getting a high percentage of your side out to vote. At the same time, McCain's strategy now must be to run negative advertisements about Obama, in order to demotivate his base. Rather than win over opponents, it is just as effective to convince them to stay home. McCain has, in other words, adopted the Karl Rove theory of divisive and negative politics.

Obama has chosen the opposite strategy. He has softened many of this positions, so they are more mainstream. He has chosen Joe Biden, the experienced, moderate insider, who has a history of working with Republicans to get legislation through Congress. Obama is appealing to all Americans, including even the evangelicals, and he has tried to reassure them that he is religious himself. A careful reading of his acceptance speech reveals several passages sprinkled with religious references. He has positioned himself as the champion of the middle class. Almost everyone in the US thinks of themselves as being middle class, so he is promising the middle class a tax cut.About the only people Obama has written off are the big oil companies.

Until the selection of Sarah Palin, the election looked close. But now it is possible it will not be. Conceivably the American voters will become excited by Palin and will lose enthusiasm for Obama after a barrage of negative ads from the Republicans. But the more likely result is that Independents and moderate Republicans will be disenchanged with the McCain-Palin ticket. The Republicans are the smaller party, numerically, and they need the moderates to win.

This choice makes McCain more popular on the Right, but has apparently not been inspiring to his fellow Senators. Of the 49 Republicans from that chamber, it now appears that 10 find their schedules so busy they will not be able to attend the convention in St. Paul. Are ten of the most powerful Republicans treating McCain as a pariah? Are they afraid they might be photographed together, or worse yet, be seen shaking hands with President Bush?

The Summer Campaign

After the American Century

The political campaign is in low gear as far as the public is concerned, but the candidates are hardly relaxing. Not only do McCain and Obama need to select their vice presidents, but they have a huge agenda to deal with. I can see at least these five major items:

(1) Organize a National Convention. This is far more that just providing hotels and meeting spaces for thousands of delegates and thousands more reporters, though that would be task enough. The whole multi-day event ideally should present a coherent message. An exciting line-up of speakers and inspirational short films need to be orchestrated, and the whole event should build up to a climactic speech by the candidate. That speech also has to be written, of course, and it needs to be new, not the primary stump speech on steroids.

(2) Prepare political commercials that are in harmony with that major speech - requires a decision about what should be the major themes of the campaign. Obama surely will choose to focus on the faltering economy and Iraq, a one-two punch that will be hard for McCain to beat. But McCain presumably will seek to make Iraq and national security his first issue. To a considerable degree, however, candidates need to feel the public pulse, to catch the mood of the electorate, and move from there toward the policy positions. Candidates usually cannot dictate to the electorate what the central issues ought to be, and while it may be easy to see what the central issues are, particular groups have other main concerns. Each side is surely polling frantically and trying out various ideas on focus groups. How much, and to whom, should each talk about Guantanamo? Abortion? Faith-based initiatives? Off-shore oil drilling? Gun control? Terrorism and National Security? NAFTA? Affirmative Action? The Supreme Court? Crime? Drugs?

(3) Each candidate must decide on an overall strategy, notably by choosing which states to focus on and which ones will be given up in advance. McCain is running more than 15 points behind in California polls, for example, so he will probably spend little time or money there. Obama is not as far behind in Texas, but he might decide to cede it McCain and focus on Florida, where the two are only a few points apart. Arguably, the choice of where to put the campaign time and money is the most important decision each has to make. Obviously, both will focus on Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Missouri, and Nevada. But in additional to such clear battleground states, should Obama make a major effort in North Carolina? Should McCain try to win New Jersey or Washington?

(4) Each campaign must also "brand" itself in a variety of ways, which include how the candidate dresses, what its buttons look like, how the home page is designed, what slogan is adopted, and even what the campaign song ought to be. FDR used "Happy Days Are Here Again" in the depths of the Depression. Bill Clinton selected the rock n roll song, "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow." By themselves, each of these matters might seem trivial, but in a well-organized campaign all the parts cohere to provide a penumbra of images and associations with a candidate. As an advertising or public relations executive knows, defining and implementing such a campaign takes talent and more time than either candidate really has to spend on it. Based on how they have done so far, one suspects rather strongly that Obama's team will do better at this than McCain's newly reorganized group.

(5) In the midst of all these things, both candidates need to keep appearing in the public eye, and continue to raise money for the fall campaign. Either of these, alone, could be a full-time job.

With all these things to do in only a few months, McCain and Obama must be grateful that they will fall completely out of the public limelight during the Olympic Games. No doubt each will pretend to go on vacation, but real time off is unlikely with all these tasks to complete. How well they prepare this work now will become clear immediately after the conventions. With little more than two months for the fall campaign, there will be little time to correct any miscalculations.

Both McCain and Obama Move to the Right

After the American Century

Both Obama and McCain have been shifting their public stands on many issues, staking out the positions they will take during the fall campaign. They are doing so with quite different goals. McCain is moving to the right, Obama toward the center.

McCain's move toward the conservative Republican base is being orchestrated and supervised by a cadre of Karl Rove's apprentices. Their well-known philosophy is that elections are won by energizing core supporters, not by trying to appeal to the center. This strategy has not really been proven a success, in my view, as George Bush did not win a majority of the votes cast in 2000 and only barely was reelected in 2004. In each case, one could argue that he won as much due to the poor campaigns of his opponent as he did because galvanizing the base is a sure winner. Note, too, that the "Rove philosophy" is to attack one's opponent where they appear strongest. The "swift-boating" of John Kerry is the prime example.

Obama's move toward more mainstream positions means that he has embraced more traditional political philosophy, seeking to be the unifying candidate who can appeal to moderates and independents, and reach across party lines. The danger of this approach is that the core supporters become somewhat disillusioned, taking some of the energy out of the campaign, as they realize that Obama is (surprise?) a shrewd politician more than he is ideologically driven. As noted several blogs ago, his stands on Israel, gun control, and other issues have shifted, to appeal to moderates.

The result of these two contrasting campaign models is that both candidates are moving to the right - with Obama seeking the center, while the supposedly "straight-talking" McCain is making himself over to suit the evangelicals. The man who once opposed Guantanamo torture now seems to accept it. The man who once publically worried about global warming is saying little about it. The man who once wanted to give illegal immigrants a "path to citizenship" is now a hard-liner on securing the borders. The man who once called Jerry Falwell an "agent of intolerance" now meets privately with his ilk, seeking support.

Will the selection of vice-presidential candidates reinforce these campaign strategies, or will they be drive by other imperatives, such as geographical appeal? One suspects that Obama will find a VP who is moderate, who holds his new positions, almost certainly a white person (but possibly Hispanic), and one with solid military experience to shore up his candidacy at its weakest point.

The Republican ticket is harder to anticipate. Will McCain choose a "born again" evangelical from the right-wing of the Republican Party, like Mike Huckabee? Might we expect a moderate non-military person under 60 who comes from the Middle West and who can appeal to the swing states? A church-going woman? A clone of Dick Cheney? Or most horrifying of all, the actual Dick Cheney? McCain's choice will signal how thoroughly he is willing to revamp his campaign to resemble Bush's 2004 campaign. Whatever the new Rove-inspired McCain team decides could be a surprise, because he continues to run behind Obama in the polls, and he needs to find a way to regain the initiative.