Palin Signals Shift in Focus for McCain Campaign
In my last post I noted that one of Sarah Palin’s weaknesses as a vice presidential candidate was her lack of experience. Sure enough, Democratic operatives and journalists have made Palin + inexperience = risky choice the dominant storyline. Republicans are also worried that McCain has handicapped his strongest line of attack against Obama.
Up until this weekend “experience” has been the primary narrative of McCain 2008. The Republican party had selected a war hero who had served in Congress for as many years as his opponent, Barack Obama, had been post-pubescent. Although McCain’s campaign brandishes his lengthy resume, he likes to be seen as a maverick, willing to buck his own party for what he believes is right.
The Democratic Party countered attacks on Obama’s inexperience by transforming it from a liability into a strength. They present a young, fresh visionary who has not been tied down to special interests. Obama is a new kind of politician who will reform Washington.
Since politicians are elected largely on image, McCain needs to burnish his own maverick identity while simultaneously poking holes in Obama’s reputation as the rebirth of JFK. The experience debate has served McCain well, but over time it may have lost its bite. Voters who find experience a compelling argument have already been won over. No point in beating a dead horse. Experience could even be a liability if the opposition can paint McCain as a professional politician whose values are divorced from those of ordinary Americans. McCain is old enough to remember the 1960 Nixon v Kennedy campaign. In an environment more congenial to Republicans than today, Nixon ran on his superior experience, but still lost to the youthful and exciting Kennedy.
Palin provides the McCain campaign with the opportunity to switch the dialogue from experience to reform. Obama has dominated this conversation so far with talk of change and a different style of politics. Yet McCain and Palin could subsume Obama’s message. (Subsume is a debate term for taking your opponent’s premise, or primary issue, and arguing that you can do a better job with it than they can.)
McCain has been something of a political outsider for the last decade in Congress. The conservative base has distrusted McCain since his centrist campaign against George W Bush. McCain has not been afraid to buck the party line on immigration and other issues. He even cosponsored legislation with conservative archenemy Ted Kennedy. It seems that Palin has managed to annoy nearly the entire Republican establishment in Alaska. She publicly supported investigations into the infamous pair Don Young and Ted Stevens. She resigned from an energy commission in protest at a Republican commisioner’s corruption. How’s that for bipartisanship and reform?
The McCain campaign should push this reformist image on the news shows and in their campaign analysis. Republican operatives should then highlight Obama’s thin record on bipartisanship and perilous connections with shady politics back in Chicago.
Obama likes to tell the story of how he couldn’t even gain admission to the 2000 Democratic National Convention. What explains his meteoric rise through the state legislature and into Congress? Obama made several connections to the notorious Chicago Democratic political machine. Ever since Obama began making waves in the Democratic primary, there has been an undercurrent of articles, and a book, written about his relationships to shady Chicago political operatives.
One story that has gotten some play in the national media is his relationship with Tony Rezko, a man who was a major fundraiser for Obama’s Senate campaign. Rezko was also found guilty of federal fraud this May and is currently under indictment for several more fraud charges. Obama was understandably embarassed after Rezko’s indictment and said that he had never done Rezko any “favors.” However Obama had written a series of letters to Illinois government officials on Rezko’s behalf in a bid to get taxpayer money ($14 million) to build apartments for the elderly, $855,000 of which went in fees to Rezko and Obama’s former boss, Allison Davis. Whether or not Obama thought he was doing Rezko a favor, it seems that Rezko was grateful enough to sell the Obama’s a strip of land next to the family’s new house for over $500,000 less than what the political fixer had paid for it six months earlier. Keep in mind, this land deal came after the feds investigation into Rezko was already public knowledge.
Furthermore, Obama began his Congressional campaign under the patronage of Emil Jones, then the Democratic leader of the Illinois Senate.
“You have the power to elect a US senator,” Obama told Emil Jones, Democratic leader of the Illinois state senate. Jones looked at the ambitious young man smiling before him and asked, teasingly: “Do you know anybody I could make a US senator?”
According to Jones, Obama replied: “Me.” It was his first, audacious step in a spectacular rise from the murky political backwaters of Springfield, the Illinois capital.
Jones used his leadership in the Senate to block anti-corruption legislation from becoming law even though the bill had already unanimously passed through the lower chamber. Jones also recently announced his retirement and filed to have his inexperienced son take his position, nepotism worthy of Richard J. Daley himself in the 1970s.
Finally, Obama’s campaign manager, David Axelrod, ran Richard M. Daley’s mayoral election in 1989 and is still one of Daley’s advisers. He surprised liberal Chicago reformers by running the campaigns of several other distasteful Cook County politicians. In his defense Axelrod may have just done it for the money and to gain influence. But when comparing clients, Axelrod makes Karl Rove look like a boy scout.
So Obama’s campaign manager, political patron, and a major fundraiser are all connected to a sordid Chicago political machine. Sure, Obama himself has not been directly accused of corruption, but when a man runs a campaign about change and reform, surely he should be held to a higher standard of association than Rezko, Jones, and Axelrod, Inc.
While the Republicans’ experience argument was based upon how much we know about McCain’s impressive resume, it left Obama’s record in the dark (which was the point). But if the McCain campaign switches the dialogue to reform, highlighting McCain’s support for campaign finance reform and his pledge to abide by public financing limits (unlike Obama who welshed on his promise), the burden of proof shifts to Obama and focuses on his past. If Republicans can focus the public’s attention on Obama’s seedy Chicago connections, than Obama’s image will suffer severely, especially among Independent voters.
