McCain's Strategy of Hopelessness

The presidential race has narrowed so dreadfully that even the foreign press has been moved to remind us that we Americans are supposed to be a people of optimism -- a national trait whose reputation is suffering precisely because of Gloomy John's unexpected competitiveness.

Asked, for instance, the Economist this weekend in so many words: What in bloody hell are you people thinking? Although the more pertinent question might be, of course, Do American voters think at all?

Sometimes, in answer to this, I'm inclined to reflect on the philosophical complacency of a long past, thoroughly drug-addled acquaintance who would respond to virtually any inquiry on virtually any subject with, "Hey, it's your world, doc, I'm just a squirrel."

I don't know whatever became of that chap and his hopelessly scrambled frontal lobes, but I suspect he could have had a splendid career with the Republican National Committee. Because his anthropomorphic worldview -- that we, the people, are mostly large rodents put here to pick up scraps left by much greater eminences -- possessed a certain affinity with professional GOP thinking.

At a fundamental level this also appears to be the public mentality that John McCain is aiming for in his presidential bid: the mentality, simply, of hopelessness, of an overweening complacency that the status quo is as good as it gets, no matter how bad it has gotten.

And this, to return to our opening observation about the foreign press' observations about us, is something the Economist recognized in its sternly disapproving editorial, "On the attack."

"Some Republicans think that all Mr. McCain has to do is 'disqualify' Mr. Obama," observed the London-based magazine. "According to this view, as a long-serving senator with a military record, he seems safe next to a young and inexperienced senator." And of course "safe," mutatis mutandis, means a continuation of the status quo.

But how to "disqualify" Obama? Here, the Economist was, for a conservative publication, uncommonly critical of the conservative politician: "McCain and his team have run a barrage of negative television ads and made personal attacks that have had political commentators suddenly staring, jaws agape, at the Republican.... In other ads, Mr. McCain’s attacks make substantial charges that are false, or wildly exaggerated."

Well, that's the American political tradition, is it not? Yet the Economist saw a danger in all this for McCain -- a potential danger that becomes, truly, the $64,000 strategic question of this election, which I'll get to momentarily.

"McCain has joined the attack.... But his grim repetitions of these [assaults], which suggest that Mr. Obama does not care for his country, risk turning off those independent voters he needs.... Focusing relentlessly on Mr. Obama’s negatives ... cannot help but damage what was once most endearing about the Republican."

That may be true. In fact, it's indisputably true. Yet McCain's purpose at the moment isn't to increase his popularity; it's to destroy Obama's. And it's here that I question the Economist's final analysis expressed as a danger for McCain: "If Mr. McCain keeps up his full assault, he risks souring not only the press, but those voters drawn to his old independent streak."

The Economist's assumed premise, of course, is that independent voters remain indispensable to a McCain victory. And that, I might add, has been everyone's premise all along. But raised now is that $64,000 question I mentioned, which is this: Within McCain's internal strategizing, are independents still vital in the same way we expected them to be?

Which is to ask, Has the McCain camp decided to depress the independent vote through a dispiriting onslaught of negativity, rather than seek that vote as a positive, pro-McCain force? The question's corollary is, then: Does McCain now believe he can rally enough of the conservative base to be competitive in the forced absence of a large independent turnout?

That, at least, would explain the otherwise inexplicable -- why McCain has persisted in catering to the hard right in an election we all expected to be determined by the soft middle. Such a shift in strategy would also reflect the thinking of McCain's recent hires from the old Rovian crowd, which always was, and probably still is, convinced of the numerical power of its traditional base.

I don't know, I'm just thinking aloud. But the flaw, if a flaw there be, in the Economist's proposition that McCain "risk[s] turning off those independent voters he needs" may be that McCain is simply no longer convinced he needs them. He just doesn't want Obama to have them, which a full-scale, vote-depressing negative campaign can go a long way in accomplishing.