McCain doesn’t know how to ‘distance himself’ from Bush

A couple of weeks ago, the Politico’s Jonathan Martin reported that a key aspect of John McCain’s general-election strategy is to “drive a triangulated contrast among himself, the Democratic nominee and President Bush.”

Reuters reports today that we’re starting to get a sense of what this strategy looks like in practice.

Slowly but surely, Republican presidential candidate John McCain is putting some distance between himself and unpopular President George W. Bush. This week it was the ill-timed “Mission Accomplished” banner that the White House hung behind Bush five years ago when Bush declared major combat operations over in Iraq. “I thought it was wrong at the time,” McCain said in Cleveland on Thursday, proceeding to criticize Vice President Dick Cheney’s various comments over the years that the Iraqi insurgency was in its “last throes” with “a few dead-enders” all that was left. Last week, McCain surprised some in the White House by declaring Bush’s leadership “disgraceful” during the crisis over the 2005 Katrina hurricane that walloped New Orleans. “Never again,” McCain declared.

The motivation is pretty obvious; Bush is, after all, “the most unpopular president in modern American history.” And the Republican Party is clearly sensitive about the Bush-McCain connection, as evidenced by Karl Rove and Fox News pushing back against it.

But in the end, it’s going to take more than half-hearted criticism of Katrina and “Mission Accomplished” if this strategy is going to have an effect.



The inescapable point that the McCain campaign either a) doesn’t understand; or b) doesn’t know how to fix is that subtle criticism is ultimately meaningless. One cannot realistically “triangulate” against an incumbent president while running on that president’s identical policy agenda.

For the McCain gang, this is about style, not substance.

McCain aides also want to paint their guy as different from an unpopular administration that prefers secrecy to transparency and friendly crowds to unpredictable ones. “Sen. McCain believes every American should participate in the arena, and that includes people that don’t agree with him,” Schmidt says, taking care to note that such unscripted exchanges have waned “in the last decade.” Additionally, McCain and his advisers want to pursue voters that look different than the bare majority coalition that Bush put together twice. “We’re running a campaign that is not designed to get 50-plus-1 percent of the vote,” says Schmidt.

In other words, the pitch is relatively straightforward: “Vote for John McCain — He’s George W. Bush without The Bubble.”

But I get the sense this is a fundamental misread of public opinion. Bush isn’t the most unpopular president since the dawn of modern polling because Americans are mad over invitation-only rallies and misguided war banners. They’re desperate for change because Bush’s policy agenda has been an abject failure.

And here’s the kicker: McCain is running on Bush’s policy agenda anyway. On Iraq, the economy, homeland security, taxes, the federal judiciary, veterans’ benefits, and as we saw this week, healthcare, McCain is Bush, only older and with slightly better grammar.

McCain was recently asked to name the issues where he’s different from Bush. After hemming and hawing a bit, McCain could point to exactly one issue: “[W]hat‘s an area of disagreement? Climate change. I believe that climate change is real. I think we have to act.” Shortly thereafter, wouldn’t you know it, Bush said he believes climate change is real and we have to act — removing the one subject on which Bush and McCain allegedly disagreed.

Reuters reported that McCain is “putting some distance” between himself and Bush. In every way that counts, that’s just not the case.