Posted on 05/02/2008 1:59:31 PM PDT by The_Republican
The day before John McCain's third domestic policy speech in as many weeks, his senior policy adviser sat down with reporters in Tampa, Fla., to preview McCain's health care proposals and try once again to dispel the persistent storyline that McCain's success in November hinges on Iraq.
Health care isn't exactly a bread-and-butter topic for the presumptive Republican nominee. While campaigning in Iowa last December on his support for the surge, McCain told a reporter from the Boston Globe, "The issue of economics is not something I've understood as well as I should."
Whether or not that now-infamous quote was taken out of context -- as the McCain campaign has since claimed -- it speaks to the underlying idea that despite nearly three decades in Congress, McCain is much more comfortable talking about foreign policy than domestic issues.
After securing his party's nomination on March 4, McCain's campaign took steps to address this perception by planning an all-out domestic policy offensive. That push is now nearly a month old, and it shows no signs of slowing down.
"This is a chance for John McCain to lay out what he intends to do as president in the format he likes," said Mark Salter, a senior adviser to McCain's campaign and the candidate's speechwriter in the Senate for nearly 20 years.
As the Heritage Foundation's Mike Franc put it, McCain now has the opportunity to "hone his message."
"[These months] give McCain a chance to unveil his vision for the future in a deliberate, thoughtful way, on his own terms," Franc said. "He can define himself for the voter at his own pace, in his own way."
So far, McCain's way has involved a series of tours across America. First there was the biographical "Service to America Tour" of influential places in McCain's life. Then came an introduction to his economic agenda, given in a speech at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh two weeks ago.
Next came the "It's Time for Action Tour" of disadvantaged and forgotten parts of the country, which included a trip to Selma, Ala., and a walking tour of New Orleans' 9th Ward, where he called President Bush's response to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita "disgraceful."
This week's "Call to Action Tour" focuses on health care and centers around Tuesday's major policy speech at the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center on the University of Southern Florida campus. Next week, McCain plans to dive into environmental issues with a tour of the Northwest.
So, while his opponents remain consumed in a prolonged primary battle, McCain will have addressed four domestic policy issues often seen as strengths for Democrats. By the end of next week, he will have laid out broad policy initiatives in at least three areas and visited rural areas and swing states that could be crucial to a Republican victory in November.
"This [time frame] is allowing him to fit in all sorts of issues and themes in the way that he is at his best as a political communicator, without anything more than crazy Howard Dean making some hyperbolic charge a couple of times a day. That's an advantage," Salter said.
Although the campaign pushes back against what it calls the "misperception" that McCain had previously been unconcerned with domestic issues, Salter admitted that campaigning without an opponent has afforded McCain the opportunity to expand what the campaign calls the "McCain brand."
"It's a pretty well-defined brand," Salter said. "It's not going to be easy to chip away at that brand by the Democrats. It's many years in the making. You can't really send Howard Dean out there, who really doesn't have a very similar brand, and say 'No, no, no -- [McCain is] George Bush's third term. It's nonsensical to most voters, who have pretty definite views about John McCain."
A General Look At Health Care
Analysts suggest that gaining distance from the president and other Republicans at a time when polls show public sentiment trending toward the Democrats is crucial for the Arizona senator and that he needs to portray himself as an individual rather than an average Republican.
McCain "is nimble enough and he's probably smart enough to figure out a way to do some sort of Republican third-way version here to separate himself [from Bush] and emerge victorious," said John Halpin, a senior fellow specializing in electoral history at the left-leaning Center for American Progress. "They're probably more likely to pull that off on personal narrative than they are on policy, because his policies don't look all that different from Bush right now."
Yet a distracted media -- and a public that already seems frustrated with the unprecedented length of this campaign -- means McCain may have a chance to gain some footing in the area of domestic policy while his mistakes go relatively unnoticed.
But a relatively open playing field doesn't guarantee McCain an easy time talking about these issues. After a health care roundtable in Miami earlier this week, when a reporter asked how his approach to health care compared to the Democrats' desire for universal coverage, McCain fell back on talking points.
"Philosophically, I have set a goal that health care is available and affordable to every single American, affordable and available," McCain said, quickly moving on to more general turf. "I want education to be affordable and available to every American. I want housing to be affordable and available to every American, but I do not mandate that every American have education. I mandate and will make sure that every American has access."
The week before, while McCain made his way through Alabama, Thomasville Mayor Sheldon Day briefed reporters on the biggest health care problem in rural areas: access to doctors and hospitals -- not insurance coverage. Day said he had taken his concerns to the senator and felt they were well-received. But later in the week, when a local television reporter in Inez, Ky., asked McCain how he would handle the unique health care concerns of Kentucky and rural America, he avoided any talk of policy.
"I've talked about this a couple of times, it may not sound too serious, but I am serious," McCain said of his rural health care plan. "Who do young people here [in Kentucky] and in America admire the most?… That's great athletes. I'd like to enlist great athletes to come around the country and take maybe just a few days of their time and talk to students about the need, and absolute necessity and benefits, of wellness and fitness."
Breaking With Bush
McCain left a call for action among great athletes out of his most recent health care speech, but what he did include diverged only slightly from a health care speech he gave in October at Grinnell College in Iowa. This week's speech seemed to serve as a reintroduction to the issue of health care for McCain, but as his top policy adviser told reporters at Monday's preview, "Remember: It is April and the election's November, so not everything will happen tomorrow or this week."
"It's still too early," Halpin added. "He's got some time to make some mistakes, figure things out -- but the harder problem for him… He's going to have to find some way to make a dramatic break with the Bush years on domestic policy."
McCain has already tried to distance himself in some areas, with promises to get serious about curbing greenhouse gas emissions and cutting wasteful spending. But earmarks and emissions reductions might not be enough to win over a dispirited independent voting bloc.
"There's a lot of creative thinking on the right about how you take the core conservative issues… and make them more appealing to voters in a populist way," Franc said. "McCain's got the temperament and the track record to have an audience with these people."
So far, McCain's health care week has provided very few breaks from the Republican status quo; in fact, many similarities exist between the solutions McCain is proposing now and the solutions Bush proposed on the trail eight years ago. Next week's discussion of environmental issues is likely to provide a clearer difference -- but, as McCain himself might suggest, the environment is unlikely to be the No. 1 issue on voters' minds as they go to the polls in November.
Nah, McCain is not an idiot, everyone else is.
Meaning, of course, let’s pander to the democrats. Again.
The media is McCain’s preferred party.
Si Se Puede!
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