Inside McCain's Town-Hall Campaign

By Michael Scherer/Pemberton Township, N.J.

Sometimes in politics, the medium really is the message.

Put Barack Obama in an arena with 20,000 supporters or at an outdoor city rally with nearly four times that many, and it hardly matters what he says. The sheer spectacle speaks for itself--something unusual is happening, and a lot of people want to be a part of it.

The same can be said of John McCain, though his trademark medium is comparatively modest. Instead of the massive event, McCain is most at home in the town-hall meeting, a modern twist on the old New England civic institution, in which neighbors gather to participate in pure democracy. For McCain, the town hall is more than just a chance for him to spread his message of staying the course in Iraq and cutting taxes and spending. The gathering is itself the message he wants to deliver.

"These town-hall meetings are the most important part, in my view, of the process, because it not only gives you a chance to hear from me--and I'll try not to make you hear from me very long--but it gives me an opportunity to hear from you," McCain said recently at a town hall in central New Jersey. "It gives us a glimpse and an idea of your hopes and your dreams and your aspirations and your frustrations today and the challenges that you face and better sets our priorities, and it helps me enormously."

McCain overstates the transactional value of these events. In the hundreds of town halls he has held, few interactions have had any real effect on his policy positions. One exception is global warming, an issue McCain says he was alerted to at town halls during his 2000 campaign. But even if the town halls are less interactive than he claims, it's hard to overstate their importance to his candidacy or how much better they showcase him than his normal campaign speeches. On the night Obama wrapped up the nomination before a crowd of thousands in St. Paul, Minn., McCain delivered a stiff, formal speech from Louisiana before a wall the color of Kermit the Frog. He came across as nervous and stilted, his eyes fixed on the teleprompter as he emphasized the wrong words. In such settings, McCain can appear impatient, if not phony. He tries to cover up his discomfort with joyless flashes of a sideways grin.

But when his handlers take away the teleprompter and allow him to interact with the crowd, McCain becomes a candidate transformed. He begins to have fun, spinning stories like an old sailor on a bar stool and speaking with clarity about the issues that move him most, which now include three thematic touchstones of the campaign: reform, prosperity and peace. Though many of his words are memorized, repeated verbatim at each stop, they still manage to come across as conversational. McCain usually speaks for about 30 minutes and then opens the room up to questions. In a typical session, McCain takes a dozen questions from an audience that normally is not screened in advance. Despite a bad knee, he nearly trots across a hall to allow a voter to ask a question. "I'd like you to hang on to the microphone," he tells his citizen interrogators, often inviting them to ask follow-ups.

His obvious comfort in this setting helps explain why McCain has challenged Obama to a series of weekly town halls this summer, a challenge that is fast becoming a key debating point of his candidacy. "If we are really going to change the dynamic in Washington, change the way we do business, let's change the campaign," McCain said on June 16.

After expressing interest in the idea initially, Obama has since backed away, saying he will meet McCain for only one joint town hall, on July 4, when few Americans will be huddled around a television set to watch politics. McCain rejected the counteroffer as insufficient. The negotiations have since broken down, and the two sides are trading blame. "We made a serious counterproposal," Obama spokesman Bill Burton says. "They are content to snipe from the sidelines."

The McCain campaign sees Obama's resistance to the idea of weekly town halls as a weak spot in his "change we can believe in" armor. Obama's July 4 counterproposal "is a joke," says Steve Schmidt, a senior McCain adviser. "What they are doing is saying one thing and acting in a different way."

Because he believes the issue is a winner with independent voters, McCain has decided to go ahead with the weekly town halls whether Obama joins him onstage or not. At every stop these days, McCain takes time to note Obama's rejection of regular joint appearances. The Republican National Committee has debuted a clock on its website counting every second that passes without Obama agreeing to the meetings. Earlier this month, Fox News broadcast an invitation-only McCain town hall from New York City that highlighted Obama's absence, although the event was not open to the public.

Obama's campaign regards this late-spring dustup as little more than a distraction, an emphasis on process that will fail to sway voters, just as Hillary Clinton failed to make much headway when she demanded additional debates in the primaries. "Apparently they would rather contrive a political issue than foster a genuine discussion about the future of our country," said Obama campaign manager David Plouffe in a statement about the issue.

Behind this position is a political calculation that says less about Obama's own affection for the town-hall format than his campaign's determination to maintain its core advantages through the summer. If this election is decided by crowd size, teleprompters and televised speeches, Obama will almost certainly win in November. But if McCain brings Obama to his level, where the Republican can shine, then the outcome is anyone's guess.