A Whole New McCain
By Michael Scherer/Sturgis, S.D.
Despite an outdoor audience of thousands, the nubile girls grinding on the balcony stopped dancing and sat beside their stripper poles. The bearded bikers, arrayed in rows below with their motorcycles, revved their engines in approval. That stilted parade known as the presidential campaign had marched into a High Plains bacchanal of shiny hogs, leather chaps and skanky tattoos--and the people seemed to like it. "As you may know, not long ago, a couple hundred thousand Berliners made a lot of noise for my opponent," Senator John McCain told the crowd on Aug. 4 at the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, an annual rite billed as the largest of its kind in the world. "I'll take the roar of 50,000 Harleys any day."
The sea of unmuffled bikes again sounded its response, filling the air with exhaust and making the ground quake. It was McCain's sort of crowd: heavy with vets and drunk with freedom-loving fervor. In the past, the Arizona Senator might have followed up with some "straight talk" or bad jokes, the informal shtick that won him New Hampshire twice. But the newest version of candidate McCain does not dillydally, soft-pedal or claim to live outside politics-as-usual. He hits hard and on message--one focused squarely on his opponent, the political phenom Barack Obama.
Gone are McCain's daily promises to conduct a "respectful campaign" and the freewheeling bus rides with his old buddies in the political press. Gone are the optimistic speeches about serving "a cause greater than our self-interest." The new McCain is tight and focused. The candidate who once invited all comers onto the back of his bus now hangs a curtain on his campaign plane to prevent reporters from even catching a glimpse. Instead of charm and candor, he serves up fastballs. Instead of risk-taking, he seeks control. It's a whole new McCain. "We're going to drill here, and we're going to drill now," he exhorted the crowd at Sturgis, referring to his latest crusade to expand domestic oil production, an issue that polls well for McCain in key swing states. "My opponent doesn't want to drill ... He wants to inflate your tires."
That last barb has little to do with energy policy, of course, and nearly everything to do with the McCain campaign's desire to paint Obama as elite, aloof and out of touch. It's a story line Republicans have used against Democrats for a generation and one that McCain's team dusted off in late July with an attack ad that mocked the "Obama, Obama" chants of Democratic supporters. Then the McCain campaign released a televised spot that compared Obama to America's favorite vapid celebrities, Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. The spot barely aired as a paid television ad, but it went viral overnight on the Web and in the news media--a first for the frustrated McCain HQ.
To rub in the point about inflated celebrity, the campaign jumped on Obama's seemingly mild suggestion that Americans could save money on gas by inflating their tires properly. In its new hardball mode, McCain's team distributed tire gauges labeled OBAMA ENERGY PLAN, underlining the campaign's contention that Obama offered nothing but more air. For the first time in months, McCain's operation had laid down a clear argument against Obama, which advisers hope to nurture over the coming months. "Most presidential candidates fly at about 15,000 ft. Barack Obama has been living at 30,000 ft.," explains a senior McCain adviser. "The idea was, Let's not try to pull him down from that plane and be mad about it. Let's push him up to 50,000 ft. and create an updraft that sends Icarus a little closer to the sun."
McCain has come a long way since April, when he released a Web ad in which he pledged to run the campaign as "an argument among friends." That ad was watched on YouTube a measly 3,000 times over three months. Hardly anyone noticed when McCain launched a bio tour during the Democratic primaries to proclaim his devotion to service. When McCain visited the black belt of Alabama to burnish his bipartisan credentials, network news barely covered it.
Even when the primaries ended, the imbalance persisted: Obama drew massive coverage while McCain struggled to get attention for anything beyond his occasional flubs. When Obama visited Jerusalem in July, McCain was dealing with an applesauce spill in a Pennsylvania supermarket. When Obama spoke in Berlin's Tiergarten, McCain was ordering chocolate cream puffs to go at a German restaurant in Columbus, Ohio. "Obama's foreign trip was the last proof that we needed--so it is what it is," says a second senior McCain adviser, who, like the first, asked for anonymity. "The media decided that the race is about him."
That's why the McCain team decided to go for broke. Under the direction of top political strategist Steve Schmidt, the campaign's new goal is to tag Obama as nothing more than an untested politician with considerable rhetorical talents while touting McCain as the proven independent reformer voters already know. Schmidt, who took over the day-to-day operation of the campaign on July 2, is a bulldog of a man, broad and bald, with a take-no-prisoners style. A veteran of the 2004 Bush campaign and California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's re-election effort, Schmidt ordered the McCain campaign war room to stop sending e-mails to staff each time a blogger or pundit weighed in on the McCain campaign's various troubles. "We were letting the press [get] in our heads," says Mark Salter, one of McCain's closest aides. Now, he says, "we're going to say what the message is."
Despite his backslapping reputation, McCain will play rough if he thinks it will help him win. During the Florida primary, he charged, dubiously, that his chief rival for the nomination, Mitt Romney, supported a "timetable" for withdrawal from Iraq, a claim based on a misreading of a single quote. More recently, he claimed in a television commercial that Obama canceled a visit to wounded troops because television cameras were not allowed. The charge lacked evidence, but it still managed to knock the Obama campaign off message. "The status quo means McCain loses. He's got to change things," says Peter Brown, an independent pollster at Quinnipiac University who believes, like many others, that McCain must define Obama to undecided voters. "So, what choice does he have?"
Republicans acknowledge that the new tack does carry a risk of tarnishing the brand. McCain's former political mastermind John Weaver, for example, who helped create the straight-talk candidate eight years ago, called the new strategy "childish" and worried that it "diminishes John McCain." McCain's advisers have tried to alleviate that concern by keeping the attacks light and funny while coaching their candidate to have fun on the trail. Several days after the Paris Hilton spot, the campaign released another online video that mockingly compared Obama to Charlton Heston's Hollywood depiction of a Biblical Moses. "They will call him 'The One,'" intones the ad's narrator. "Can you see the light?" (Though perhaps funny to secular voters, the ad was steeped in imagery that catered to conservative Evangelicals, a key voting bloc.)
In some ways, McCain is simply following the blueprint that helped George W. Bush defeat John Kerry in 2004, when Bush painted the Yankee Senator as a windsurfing elitist. It is also a strategy that Hillary Clinton employed in the primaries against Obama by arguing that the Illinois Senator wasn't ready to fight the hard fight for working Americans. Clinton beat Obama in most of the last 13 primary contests, including wins in several industrial swing states that could decide the November election. The McCain campaign hopes Obama, who holds a stable but slim lead in national polls, does not realize the danger he is in. "It's the oldest cautionary tale in literature," says a McCain adviser with a smile. "Hubris."
Democrats are beginning to echo that idea in private. While McCain calls for an "economic surge," Obama still struggles when trying to establish a strong emotional connection with voters facing tough economic times. That's a worry, they say, as voters' attention has shifted away from the war in Iraq to gas prices and job losses. And Obama at times has seemed to play into McCain's new script. Reporters have not forgotten that someone inside his campaign authorized--or wasn't smart enough to stop--Obama's appearance at a podium with an altered version of the presidential seal inscribed with Obama's campaign motto. And for all Obama's talk about his small-donor base, his campaign recently announced a $10,000-a-head fund raiser in September to be hosted by George Clooney in the Swiss Alps. "He needs a much more empathetic economic message," says a veteran Democratic operative. "This is one place where his coolness really isn't working for him. He gives off an aura of distance that really does get in his way."
It's too early to know if McCain's new heat can cut Obama down to size. But if history is any guide, his timing may prove auspicious. It was in August in 1988 and 2004 that the gop and its allies' stealth attacks on Michael Dukakis (regarding his record on crime) and John Kerry (about his patriotism) really gathered steam. Both assaults were witheringly effective in part because neither Democrat took the threat seriously. Both Dukakis and Kerry declined to respond in kind--and neither ever recovered.