Get The Message

by Steve Soto

We’ve got two pieces in the NYT today that point to internal conflicts within the McCain campaign. Michael Cooper’s piece points out that McCain’s economic agenda reflects a division and lack of cohesion between two camps inside the same campaign: one comprised of deficit hawks and one comprised of supply-siders. More accurately, this division reflects the original McCain, who was a critic of wasteful spending and advocate of balanced budgets, and the new McCain, who has abandoned that to pander to the Bush base that treats the treasury as an ATM for private gain and disaster capitalism. Adam Nagourney tells us that such a division should not be surprising, given that McCain has never operated unified and disciplined campaigns because he can’t deal effectively with personnel issues, signaling what kind of White House he may run. But Obama needs to capitalize on these policy flip-flops.

McCain has no monopoly on a lack of message discipline or strategic thinking, as both of these also bedeviled the Clinton campaign. Alternately, the Obama campaign did a good job at both during the primary campaign, but not lately. They've spent too much time responding to McCain's attacks and positioning themselves overtly to the center, and not enough time focusing their message on 3-4 winning themes and thinking through those issues. For example, their Social Security message is a muddled mess that is unnecessarily ambiguous at a time when simple fixes are advisable in response to McCain's Bushian privatization message. (The idea of a "donut hole" is simply a pander to the upper middle-class, and no excuse for a thoughtful policy.) And talking up investments here at home is a good idea, but not if you can't explain cleanly our need to reprioritize tax, spending, and foreign policies first so that those investments are affordable.