McCain

Why is Barack Obama running against the record of George W. Bush?

Have you heard the Democrats' newest nickname for John McCain? It's "Bush 44," from a speech Joe Biden gave on Monday in Michigan. It's succinct; it's memorable; and it will convince exactly zero people to vote for Barack Obama. The biggest arrow in the Democrats' quiver is cut from an old, wooden meme that asks Americans to transfer their visceral hatred of President George W. Bush onto John McCain. If there's a way to link the Arizona senator to the lame duck president, you better believe the Democrats have thought of it. Voting record? Bush and McCain agree ninety percent of the time. Economic issues? Just "more of the same." Those adoring hugs between McCain and the president? They're the kicker of every Obama ad.

But so much for that. After four months of stagnating and ultimately drooping support for Barack Obama among the anti-Bush independents, it's time to concede that the strategy isn't working. More than half the country considers McCain a legitimate "agent of change," according to a September Gallup poll. In key blocs such as independents and Americans making more than $75,000, he's tied with Obama within the margin of error.

How can Americans consider McCain an agent of change when Democrats keep reminding them that he's just like President Bush? To amend a line from Obama's convention speech: It's not because Americans don't get it; it's because average American doesn't care.

Even with the Democratic Party locked in a fierce civil war, John McCain still hasn't pulled ahead of either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama in national polls.

The Democratic primary campaign - divisive, bitter, and seemingly endless - has made many Republicans optimistic about their party's prospects for retaining the White House this November. But the numbers still seem to tell a different story -- and not just secondary indicators like the enormous gap between McCain's fundraising and the dollars his Democratic rivals are raking in, or the underlying economic realities that will make this a tough year for the GOP no matter what. The polls themselves aren't running McCain's way, or at least not to the extent that would justify the current wave of conservative optimism about November.

John McCain sketched out his economic agenda in an address at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University.

McCain's speech reads like an attempt to unify a divided party by offering every faction something to make them happy. For the GOP's supply-siders and business interests, there are promises to extend the Bush tax cuts and slash corporate rates. For moderate Republicans clinging to seats in Democratic states, there's a pledge to cut the Alternative Minimum Tax, which hits upper-middle class Blue Staters hardest. For free traders, there's a shout-out to the Colombian Free Trade Agreement; for flat-tax obsessives, there's a call for an alternative tax-filing option, featuring just two brackets instead of four or five. For deficit hawks and porkbusters, there's a promise to veto any bill with earmarks, an attack on corporate welfare, and a call for a one-year freeze in discretionary spending and a top-to-bottom review of every agency's budget. For entitlement reformers, there's a call to means-test the prescription drugs benefit. There's even something for the small band of conservatives (this writer among them) who have been agitating for a distinctively pro-family economic agenda, in the form of a pledge to double the tax exemption for dependents, from $3500 to $7000.

John McCain raised $15 million in March. Hillary Clinton raised $20 million and Barack Obama raised over $40 million in the same month.

As Marc Ambinder reports, the McCain campaign raised only $4 million online and through direct mail. Barack Obama, meanwhile, has over 1.3 million donors, a number that will surely increase if he wins the Democratic nomination. So far, McCain has caught a lucky break. MORE

A New York Times/CBS News poll finds that eighty-one percent of Americans think the country is now on the "wrong track."

That Americans are pessimistic isn't terribly surprising: The last year of the Bush Era feels like a cross between the final days of the Truman and the Carter Administrations, with a widely-disliked president presiding over an unpopular foreign war and a struggling economy -- a rare and understandably dispiriting combination. Still, the depths of the public's discouragement about America's prospects is striking, and one statistic in particular from the Times poll should be pasted on every political journalist's bulletin board: "Seventy-eight percent of respondents said the country was worse off than five years ago; just 4 percent said it was better off."

In his first foreign-policy address since winning the GOP nomination, John McCain argued that the U.S. has a "moral obligation" to fulfill in Iraq.

Place McCain's speech side by side with the address Barack Obama delivered last week, on the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, and you don't just have two divergent takes on the war in Iraq. You have two completely different prisms through which to view the conflict.

The New York Times hints at a McCain affair, and the crowd goes wild.

That wheezing noise you hear is the sound of Rush Limbaugh climbing down from his tree. Having inveighed against John McCain for months -- the wearisome Ann Coulter said she would support Hillary Clinton over him -- assorted right-wing commentators found their bluff called as he locked up the nomination. But, putting a new twist on the proverb that the enemy of your enemy is your friend, The New York Times has tossed the commentariat a line by publishing its report on McCain's coziness with lobbyists. "The lesson is liberals are to be defeated," Limbaugh grumbled, as he maneuvered his bulk earthward. Meanwhile, the chin-stroking has begun: Should the Times have hinted that McCain had a special interest in one lobbyist? Should it have run the story at all? Quibbles aside, the piece was legitimate, and press critics should be grateful that as their advertisers slip away, their stock prices sink, and their armchair critics multiply, the big papers are still ponying up for long-term investigations. What's too bad is that some truly shocking revelations haven't gotten so much attention. Maybe it's just not a scandal without sex. MORE

McCain hasn't won the Republican nomination yet, but the fat lady is just about read to sing. So will the celebrated maverick right Rove's wrongs, win the White House, and build a more inclusive Republican majority? Or is he the second coming of Bob Dole, an irascible, ornery war hero with a temperament unsuited to the times? There have been moments when Americans valued the martial virtues most: duty, honor, courage. But these have been, in truth, brief moments, which followed the most serious, sustained, bloody conflicts -- the Civil War, the Second World War. Americans then inevitably turned to what you might call our national equilibrium, a state that is diverse, disputatious, commercially-minded, perhaps to a fault. It is this bustling, grasping, devout, disorderly country the aristocratic McCain hopes to lead, despite self-professed ignorance of matters economic, despite an apparent indifference to matters of the spirit. Republicans having second thoughts are running out of time ...  

Can John McCain be stopped?

Last night the battle for the Republican presidential nomination drew to a close. Or at least it seemed to draw to a close.  MORE