Posted on 06/08/2008 10:20:31 PM PDT by Red Steel
John McCain is great in town hall meetings. He is not so good at giving major speeches. As I like to say, he can hit a curveball, but he can’t hit one off the tee.
Barack Obama, on the other hand, hits a 350-yard drive every time he steps to the microphone, but has shown some vulnerability in debates.
It follows, then, that if McCain is to be successful this fall against Obama, he must play baseball and not golf.
McCain's latest proposal, challenging Obama to a series of town hall forums, is smart strategy. That Obama didn’t immediately agree to McCain’s proposal shows that his team has some nagging doubts about it.
But McCain needs to rethink his entire campaign strategy if he is going to compete with Obama. Here are some ideas:
1. Short is sweet: With all due regard to Mark Salter, who is a wonderful writer, McCain should ditch the long flowery speeches and beautiful rhetoric. He is just not that good at giving speeches. No amount of media training between now and November is going to make him any better. Keep the speeches short.
2. Smaller is better: Let Obama be the rock star. McCain should be the folk singer. He should use smaller venues. You can get just as much energy from a small venue as you can from a large venue. Remember, it is about the cameras, stupid.
3. The venue is the message: Make the places you visit part of your message. Go to the most popular bar in the biggest city in the state. Visit the local VFW hall. Visit the hospitals and health clinics. Tour the community colleges. Go to a high school football game in Texas and a college football game in South Bend, Ind. Make these visits your sound bite for the day.
4. Don’t wear a tie anymore: Only 6 percent of American men wear a tie to the office each day, according to NBC News. Be with the 94 percent of the people who don’t wear ties.
5. Listen before you talk: Make a point of listening to people's stories at each stop. Listen to their concerns and their anxieties, and then react to those stories in your own remarks.
6. Find surrogates who are not politicians: Community leaders, country music stars, racecar drivers, baseball players, anybody who is famous for anything other than politics. Using fellow senators as surrogates when congressional ratings are in the toilet is not a winning strategy. Maybe Chuck Norris will come out of retirement.
7. Reach outside the GOP: Packing the halls with preppy young Republicans is no way to attract Reagan Democrats. If working-class Americans won’t come to your rallies, go to theirs. Whether it is union meetings or even the NAACP, play on the home turf of the Democrats.
8. Find ways to be funny and show that you are having fun: By now, the obligatory visits to Jon Stewart and "Saturday Night Live" have pretty much run their course. But that doesn’t mean that having fun and being funny shouldn’t be part of McCain’s communications strategy. He has a wicked sense of humor, especially when he talks about himself. He shouldn’t be afraid to be funny.
9. Viral market the heck out of everything: God knows the Obama people know how to use the Internet. Think Obama Girl. Creatively telling the positive stories about McCain in short clips on the Internet should be a bigger part of this campaign. The opposing team will do negative clips. McCain has to keep it positive and keep it real.
10. Reinvent the modern campaign: The Obama primary campaign was nearly perfect. It used the most modern techniques (heck, it invented them) to make Obama a true modern phenom. McCain’s people need to study what Obama did and adapt those techniques to the Republican’s personality and his strengths. The long-winded speech is not McCain's strength. But his personality, his courage, his integrity and his life story are strengths that can be highlighted in a truly modern campaign.
John Feehery worked for the House Republican leadership from 1989 to 2005. He is the founder of The Feehery Group, a strategic advocacy firm.
When Obama is not reading somebody else's word off of a Tele-Prompter, he's not exactly Daniel Webster.
For the good of the nation, I wish McCain would step aside and let a Republican represent the party.
Yes, well this is all good I guess. But success has less to do with the window dressing and more to do with being on the right side of issues. McCain needs to find again the truth of conservatism. He is great on keeping spending down and has discovered the need to keep taxes low. He is supposedly good on the life issue.
He also needs to remember how business builds the economy and not point fingers of blame like Hussein and his party constantly do.
Be more like Reagan, in other words.
11.) Don’t wear out the “I was a POW” story (remember John “I served in Vietnam” Kerry.) Bring the conversation around to your experience in the Senate.
12.) Educate the American people as to the radical leftist nature of Boobama. USE HIS OWN WORDS AND ACTIONS AGAINST HIM. Repeat: USE HIS OWN WORDS AND ACTIONS AGAINST HIM. He is a scary presidential prospect, but the Drive Bys will shield the American people from his WORDS AND ACTIONS.
One more time: it is not dirty politics to bring up your opponents WORDS AND ACTIONS. If Republicans would learn this, they would be far more successful.
13.) DO NOT stop your surrogates from educating the American people about Boobama’s radical friends of the last 20 years. It illuminates the radical nature of the man.
14.) Try not to sound like you’re always pleading. W does that, it doesn’t help him, and now you’ve taken to it. Stop it.
On or off a teleprompter Obama says nothing of substance. It’s absurd.
This strategy has great insight. I hope it turns on some lights in the McCain campaign.
Don't get too complacent. That break in his talking was when he had a mentally challenged guy shouting at him from the second row...
Note just after the camera flash at about 8 seconds, you can see a guy in the second row shouting (just to the right of the flashing camera, to the left of Obama). Obama then addresses the guy's shouting, which continues to interrupt him: "Hold on, I can't hear myself ... I'm glad you're fired up, though..." (And you can see the guy waving his arms up and down after the camera comes back to him...and all the people looking over at the disturbance.)
Very good additions to the good advice of the original post.
But haven't you heard? Big-government, open-borders Nanny-statism is the New Republicanism.
:-(
And if Obama won’t show up, invite Bo Snerdley to fill in.
True, but public speaking, even extemporaneous speaking, is something that can be learned fairly quickly if the person is willing to practice.
Note that HRC's public speaking was much better at the end of the campaign than it was at the beginning.
When Obama gave his speech to APAC, he sounded like a fourth grader reading a book report.
This would truly work BETTER for John McCain if McCain didn’t show up: “And if McCain won’t show up, invite either Bo Snerdley, J.C. Watts, Herman Cain, Michael Steele, Walter Williams, Armstrong Williams, Janice Rogers Brown, Clarence Thomas, or Thomas Sowell to fill in.”
Advice for McCain — Don’t listen to Politico. They haven’t exactly been the Republican’s best friend during the primary. Too many times upon investigation their stories turned out have errors which were major.
All you had to do was to read what he had to say about Mr. Teleprompter Obama who is horrible if he cannot read a teleprompter to know where the author is coming from.
Right. Don’t pack the halls with preppies. Great strategy. Heaven forbid he should actually use a “strategy” to put meaningful proposals out that are worth voting for.
That's a winning strategy...
True, but public speaking, even extemporaneous speaking, is something that can be learned fairly quickly if the person is willing to practice.
What you cannot acquire fairly quickly, however, is a fund of knowledge and experience. Especially in foreign affairs, McCain can make Obama look like the inexperienced State Legislator that he is.
You mean for the DEATH of a nation.
A true conservative does not have a snowball's chance in Hell of being elected this year.
MsPain is liberal and Democrat enough to maybe pull enough leftist from 57 state Obooboo.
Frankly, I can't stand McPain and consider voting a waste of time.
Being out of the USA now, the crash of the USA does not hurt me as much as if I were there.
As for my fellow FReepers, I feel your McPain, but I can just sit offshore and watch the disaster unfold.
“One more time: it is not dirty politics to bring up your opponents WORDS AND ACTIONS. If Republicans would learn this, they would be far more successful.”
You would think so, but Romney got slammed for “playing dirty” when he ran comparison ads between his positions and those of others, indeed using their own words and their own actions.
I agree with you in that Republicans need to be more aggressive, but the media has a nasty habit of turning things against its most hated candidate.
Whatever. I say run with it. It’s about time we swung back.
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