Posted on 10/05/2008 10:33:06 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Memo
TO: John McCain
SUBJECT: Be yourself
In case you haven’t noticed, Senator, you are losing the argument to be the next president of the United States. And you are doing it all on your own.
Recent trends and polls show that Americans are shedding their discomfort with Barack Obama, and women and independents are breaking in his direction.
For your part, you are doing nothing to persuade people to do otherwise.
Time to shed the over-handling and carefulness and go at it.
A movement is brewing in this country: Americans are looking for a leader. Bush is devoid of leadership. Nancy Pelosi demonstrated she is incapable of displaying it. And Harry Reid proves his ineptness daily.
America is in crisis. We have a war that has dragged on for six years. Our financial markets teeter on near collapse. Our national morale is low. And our international image is damaged.
We have a federal government paralyzed by partisan politics. Last week's defeat of a financial rescue (or bailout) plan in the U.S. House was a perfect example; all the House “leaders” could not pull off a successful vote.
You and Obama both have had problems demonstrating leadership during this crisis. You could not sway House Republicans to accept the rescue/bailout. Obama spoke to the Congressional Black Caucus the weekend before the crucial House vote -- and look how its members subsequently voted against the bill.
Where was the leadership?
We have four weeks left for one of you to reveal the character of his leadership. The one who does will win.
You had things under control after the back-to-back national party conventions. Not everything was exactly breaking your way, but you were steadily building goodwill and confidence among women, independents and detached Democrats. And the base was thrilled with your choice of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as your running mate.
Since then, you’ve made a series of managerial decisions that have frustrated those who support you or who are considering your candidacy.
Seemingly out of nowhere, you started coming across as frantic -- not reassuring, and a stark contrast to the way you dealt with the Russia-Georgia crisis.
In contrast, when the economic crisis hit Capitol Hill, Obama had the wisdom to remain quiet; he quickly shed his rolled-up-sleeves-on-the-campaign-trail persona and his casual-speak and instead suited up and came across as presidential.
Given your decision to suspend your campaign to go back to Washington, you should have met immediately with Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and then headed to Capitol Hill.
You should have gotten into the arena effectively and, for all that is politically sacred, you should have never said you might not go to the first presidential debate in Mississippi. Instead, you should have declared: “I am going to do all of these things and then I cannot wait to debate my opponent, because I want Americans to see what my plan is.”
Starting now, stop allowing political sideshows to get in your way. No one cared if Gwen Ifill, the moderator for the vice-presidential debate, is writing a book about Obama. Really -- no one cares.
And what were you doing in Iowa? You need to be in Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania, with side trips to New Hampshire and Colorado -- and never anywhere else.
Tactically, you should be talking about your plans for America to escape its psychological mess and its very real economic and foreign policy morasses. And be upbeat. No more whining. Whining only gets in the way of your message about how you will move the country forward and demonstrate leadership.
In contrast to your mistakes, Obama is doing everything right; the recent polling trends toward him back that up. He is coming across as steady, calm, reasoned.
Perhaps you need to embrace your inner Harry Truman.
While many pundits are crying “Free Sarah Palin!” in response to the lack of press access to her, it might be wiser to free yourself -- and let you be you.
People aren’t going to like this, but here goes.
John McCain is loathe to trash Democrats. Over time he has defended them far more than members of his own party. Gore, Kerry, the Democrat party as a whole, John has plenty to say, and it’s all positive.
Good luck getting him to go negative now. He may do it, but I doubt his heart is going to be in it all the way.
John McCain is loathe to trash Democrats.
let sarah do it. that’s her strength
The Palin love has blinded us to this reality--Palin is a sideshow. McCain is the one we have to get people excited about.
And people are not excited about him. And if HE isn't even excited. how is he going to convince others?
As we've said over and over, McCain doesn't like to attack Democrats for some reason, prefering to bash Republicans. He doesn't seem to realize what a trap that is--"Yeah, you're right, John, those evil Republicans--we shouldn't let THEM get into the White House again!"
McCain's energy was never higher than when he was fighting other Republicans in the primary. Now, he's pulling his punches because he's obsessed with The Middle.
If he can't get his base excited, how can he excite anyone else?
The failure came when they voted in the travesty bill five days later, if the House had shown actual leadership they would have voted it down and continued to vote no as many times as Nan decided to push it.
Thanks for writing this. I gather someone else beat you to posting it here on FR.
If she does it alone, the media will do even more to destroy her. I can’t yet figure out what that would be, but I’m sure they’ll do something. LOL
If the McCain campaign chooses to target Obama for his past associations with dubious characters it should not be for merely appearing to undermine the Obama campaign but to make it an issue of public safety- “Would you want the next POTUS to have friends like these living in your neighborhood where your children play and walk to school?”
The problem with McCain is he thinks the opposition is made up o decent people. He is loathe to attack them. They on the other hand would cut his throat if they felt they had to.
My concern is McCain got spooked by what he saw entailing the bailout...and may not want the job.
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, to go after your opponent on the real damaging material, you wait until it’s close to election day so it will still fresh in the voters mind and your opponent has less time to counter attack.
I feel that this is part and parcel of the McCain strategy and I expect we will start seeing McCain start hitting obama hard on his association with known terrorists and criminals.
It doesn’t matter much to McCain who gets credit for exposing obama’s past, if people feel they are the reason for McCain going hard after obama, it matters not, I think it’s because it was a strategy developed by him and his campaign.
It is late Monday morning and the market is down the sunny side of 700 points. That makes it either trash city or a great buying opportunity. John McCain has had a million ways to defeat these bastar— but so far he has refused to go after them The President and his men have refused to stand up for themselves and call an ace an ace!! What to do?? The decision to do the trillion...is a bust!!
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