October 13, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Fire the Campaign
By
WILLIAM KRISTOL
Its time for John McCain to fire his campaign.
He has nothing to lose. His campaign is totally overmatched by Obamas. The Obama team is well organized, flush with resources, and the candidate and the campaign are in sync. The McCain campaign, once merely problematic, is now close to being out-and-out dysfunctional. Its combination of strategic incoherence and operational incompetence has become toxic. If the race continues over the next three weeks to be a conventional one, McCain is doomed.
He may be anyway. Bush is unpopular. The media is hostile. The financial meltdown has made things tougher. Maybe the situation is hopeless and if it is, then nothing McCain or his campaign does matters.
But Im not convinced by such claims of inevitability. McCain isnt Bush. The media isnt all-powerful. And the economic crisis still presents an opportunity to show leadership.
The 2008 campaign is now about something very big both our future prosperity and our national security. Yet the McCain campaign has become smaller.
What McCain needs to do is junk the whole thing and start over. Shut down the rapid responses, end the frantic e-mails, bench the spinning surrogates, stop putting up new TV and Internet ads every minute. In fact, pull all the ads theyre doing no good anyway. Use that money for televised town halls and half-hour addresses in prime time.
And let McCain go back to what hes been good at in the past running as a cheerful, open and accessible candidate. Palin should follow suit. The two of them are attractive and competent politicians. Theyre happy warriors and good campaigners. Set them free.
Provide total media accessibility on their campaign planes and buses. Kick most of the aides off and send them out to swing states to work for the state coordinators on getting voters to the polls. Keep just a minimal staff to help organize the press conferences McCain and Palin should have at every stop and the TV interviews they should do at every location. Do town halls, do the Sunday TV shows, do talk radio and invite Obama and Biden to join them in some of these venues, on the ground that more joint appearances might restore civility and substance to the contest.
The hope for McCain and Palin is that they still have pretty good favorable ratings from the voters. The American people have by no means turned decisively against them.
The bad news, of course, is that right now Obamas approval/disapproval rating is better than McCains. Indeed, Obamas is a bit higher than it was a month ago. That suggests the failure of the McCain campaigns attacks on Obama.
So drop them.
Not because theyre illegitimate. I think many of them are reasonable. Obamas relationship to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright is, I believe, a legitimate issue. But McCain ruled it out of bounds, and hes sticking to that. And for whatever reason the public mood, campaign ineptness, McCains alternation between hesitancy and harshness, which reflects the fact that hes uncomfortable in the attack role the other attacks on Obama just arent working. Theres no reason to think theyre suddenly going to.
There are still enough doubts about Obama to allow McCain to win. But McCain needs to make his case, and do so as a serious but cheerful candidate for times that need a serious but upbeat leader.
McCain should stop unveiling gimmicky proposals every couple of days that pretend to deal with the financial crisis. He should tell the truth were in uncharted waters, no one is certain what to do, and no one knows what the situation will be on Jan. 20, 2009. But what we do know is that we could use someone as president whos shown in his career the kind of sound judgment and strong leadership well need to make it through the crisis.
McCain can make the substantive case for his broadly centrist conservatism. He can explain that our enemies wont take a vacation because the markets are down, and that its not unimportant that hes ready to be commander in chief. He can remind voters that even in a recession, the president appoints federal judges and that his judges wont legislate from the bench.
And he can point out that theres going to be a Democratic Congress. He can suggest that surely wed prefer a president who would check that Congress where necessary and work with it where possible, instead of having an inexperienced Democratic president joined at the hip with an all-too-experienced Democratic Congress, leading us, unfettered and unchecked, back to 1970s-style liberalism.
At Wednesday nights debate at Hofstra, McCain might want to volunteer a mild mea culpa about the extent to which the presidential race has degenerated into a shouting match. And then he can pledge to the voters that the last three weeks will feature a contest worthy of this moment in our history.
Hed enjoy it. And he might even win it.
