Gotta Find a Way, A Better Way

From NBC's coverage of its new poll showing a substantial Obama lead:

“The 200-pound ball and chain around McCain’s foot is George W. Bush,” Hart says. “Unless he figures out a way to cut it loose, he’s going to be dragging it throughout this election.”

This tends to get discussed in quasi-mystical terms, like nobody can say what would suffice to cut McCain loose from Bush. But it would really be quite easy. The crux of the matter is that most voters think Bush has been a bad president and would like to see different policies implemented. Obama goes out on the campaign trail, says Bush has been a bad president, and then proposes policies that are different from Bush's.

John McCain could do this, too!

But he doesn't say Bush has been a bad president. He campaigned for Bush in 2000 and even more so campaigned for his re-election in 2004. He seems to have no regrets about that. On the trail, he's made continuing Bush's Iraq policies the centerpiece of his campaign. At the heart of his economic agenda is extending Bush's tax policies and his health care agenda is the same as Bush's. He joined Bush in opposing the Climate Security Act, endorses Bush's approach to Iran, and agrees with Bush that no action should be taken to provide people with viable alternatives to driving. Consequently, he's got this 200-pound ball and chain around his leg. But he could cut it off easily enough. The trouble is that his substantive views seem to be very similar to Bush's and he's dependent on the financial and logistical support of a very similar interest group coalition to the one behind Bush.

Comments

The problem is not EVERYONE in the United States disapproves in George Bush's presidency. About 1/3 of the public (mostly Republicans) still supports the President. So if McCain says Bush was a terrible president and most of his policies are reversed, that's going to have negative consequences among his base, which he needs to win. It's not as if the McCain campaign doesn't realize how much of a drag Bush is, but they know they can't throw Bush under the bus totally. They have to create distance in a more nuanced fashion.

Posted by Tim K | June 12, 2008 1:25 PM

I doubt that it would be quite that easy, Matt. He's already having to fend off the charge that he's a flip-flopper, as evidenced by that McCain vs. McCain video.

If he chooses to try and divorce himself from the Bush legacy, now, it's just going to seem opportunistic and it will also really piss of the 30-percenters who still think that Bush was a great president.

In other words, he'd lose part of his base and probably wouldn't pick up any significant number of votes.

That said, I'm sure that he will try to distinguish himself from Bush... but he'll try to be subtle about it. I'm sure that won't work, but that's really the only option that he has, IMO.

Posted by Andrew Lias | June 12, 2008 1:28 PM

John McCain's plan for America!
1. Bucket List?
2. or Coyote Plank?

You decide!
.

Posted by Grand Moff Texan | June 12, 2008 1:30 PM

You are right of course. But the problem with that analysis is that journalists believe in magic. Hence, Ignatius can claim today that Obama doesn't have new economic ideas unless he packages them differently (i.e. actually the way Obama and other democrats have been packaging them for a few years now)--if he does though then they will be magically "new" even though they are the same. The hope among the journalists is that McCain can somehow "package" his largely Bushian views in a mavericky non-Bushian way--at which point they would be "bold, new" non-Bushian ideas. The journalists would love to help him wave the wand, but McCain is having a hard time even performing this trick.

Posted by David | June 12, 2008 1:32 PM

this is another conundrum that makes McCain's campaigning difficult. does he cut off bush to gain independents while losing the base, or vice versa. quite the dilemma.

Posted by dj spellchecka | June 12, 2008 1:35 PM

The problem for McCain is, even assuming he wanted to break with Bush on policy, what kind of road-to-Damascus moment will allow him to repudiate every major policy stand he's taken in the last last, what, six years? Somehow--God knows how--he still has this image as a straight-talking maverick. So now he's going to say, "I just changed my mind completely on taxes, Iraq, climate change, and everything else the polls tell me we're losing on?" I can't see it.

Posted by Craig | June 12, 2008 1:37 PM

I'd like to think that McCain doesn't really want to be president. That what he wants was to be nominated and run. He's amazingly old for someone approaching the job. (A far different job than David Ben-Gurion or Éamon de Valera held.) When I hear him talk, other than the impression of great age, I also hear stultifying vanity. So, he wants to trot around the ring like the country's most pampered poodle. He knows he's old and diminished, so he's going to run the race on his terms because he's not concerned with actually winning. He's a mildly corrupt, really lazy, Coriolanus.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | June 12, 2008 1:40 PM

Well, this is not 100% true. Even if McCain were totally different from Bush, being from the same party would be a major liability. Of course, it's really irrelevant b/c at least policy-wise we know that McCain is very similar to Bush. And if he's willing to hire Cheney... is there any difference at all?

Posted by mpowell | June 12, 2008 1:40 PM

I highly suspect that if the price of gasoline were $2 a gallon instead of $4, Bush's job approval rating would be at least fifteen points higher, which would still be a problem for McCain, but not nearly the anchor it is now. Political junkies often overthink these things; Jimmy Carter's defeat was in good part due to the same price-at-the-pump dynamic. Furthermore, future Presidents will draw electoral lessons from this, which creates a perverse incentive to avoid taking measure designed to make oil less central to our economy, or which risks greatly offending the House of Saud.

Posted by Will Allen | June 12, 2008 1:41 PM

He joined Bush in opposing the Climate Security Act

Don't forget the GI Bill.

I highly suspect that if the price of gasoline were $2 a gallon instead of $4, Bush's job approval rating would be at least fifteen points higher, which would still be a problem for McCain, but not nearly the anchor it is now.

Alternatively, if Bush had taken the lead on weaning the United States off of its addiction to oil after 9/11, his approval rating now would probably be higher as well.

Posted by Darius | June 12, 2008 1:51 PM

No, Darius, I suspect he would have lost to Kerrey in '04 if he had done so. Weaning the U.S. off oil is going to be a very long, costly, and painful process. Incumbent politicians who state that they will adopt policies which will inflict significant cost and pain on voters over long periods of time tend to get defeated in elections. In case you haven't noticed, this is why politicians lie all the time.

Posted by Will Allen | June 12, 2008 2:00 PM

I guess it's possible John McCain doesn't know this Social Distortion song, but he should:

Take away, take away
Take away this ball and chain
Well I'm sick and I'm tired
And I can't take any more pain
Take away, take away
Never to return again
Take away, take away
Take away
Take away this ball and chain

Posted by Psittakos | June 12, 2008 2:04 PM

Does Attackerman know you are stealing his "song lyrics as his post titles" shtick?

Posted by Dennis Doubleday | June 12, 2008 2:05 PM

Alternatively, if Bush had taken the lead on weaning the United States off of its addiction to oil after 9/11, his approval rating now would probably be higher as well.

Alternatively alternatively, if Bush had bothered to act on the PDB memo saying "Bin Laden determined to strike inside U.S." 9/11 wouldn't have happened, there would have been no Iraq war, and we'd be in the middle of John Kerry's re-election campaign. We'd also, most likely, be in slightly better shape with regards to weaning ourselves off the petroleum based economy.

Posted by drjimcooper | June 12, 2008 2:05 PM

McCain could do it if he wanted to. He'd just have to proclaim his new positions and deny having ever suggested the old ones. The press would play along.

McCain doesn't have it in him, though. He believes that shit.

Posted by phil | June 12, 2008 2:10 PM

Cutting off his leg would hurt.

Posted by eriks | June 12, 2008 2:15 PM

McCain crawled as far up Bush's ass as he could over the past 4 years to make sure he could get the votes of the tapeworms who still think Dumbya is great.

The problem is that he's now up there so tight it will be almost impossible for him to crawl out, and even if he does he'll still have that Bush stink all over him.

He fully deserves the vicious beating he's going to get in November. It will be like 5 years in captivity all rolled up in one night. It didn't have to be this way, but he chose the path he crawled.

Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | June 12, 2008 2:19 PM

This seemed obvious during the Republican Primary debates. It was horrendous, listening to them out-Guantanamo each other. Ron Paul was the only one with daylight between his positions and Bush's.

It's been said many times, but ANY one of the Democratic candidates would be better than ALL of the Republican candidates.

Posted by Beth in VA | June 12, 2008 2:23 PM

The percentage choosing Obama went from 46% in the prior poll all the way up to... 47% in this poll. Quite a bump!

Posted by Al | June 12, 2008 2:27 PM

Problem is, McCain cannot possibly catch on as the change candidate. Obama and a huge following left the station on that train about a year ago. McCain's made a couple of weak gestures in that direction recently (complaining Obama's policies aren't new, and comparing him to Jimmy Carter) and they've been either mocked or ignored. It's not going to work.

So even if he were to disavow Bush, where would he go?

Posted by Kit Stolz | June 12, 2008 2:31 PM

He campaigned for Bush in 2000 and even more so campaigned for his re-election in 2004.

He also campaigned for Bush in 2006, for the 2008 presidential election! He urged his supporters to write-in Bush's name during the straw poll conducted by the Southern Republican Leadership Conference. Bush came in third with 10% of the vote. McCain got 5%. The winner? Bill Frist. It's hard to believe Frist still thought he could be president in 2006.

Posted by Ben | June 12, 2008 2:44 PM

Kit Stolz is almost right: "Problem is, McCain cannot possibly catch on as the change candidate."

It's a longshot, but maybe he can convince people that by "change candidate" he means he changes his Depends undergarments 3 times a day.

That may not work out to additional votes, but at least it could make some sort of sense.

Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | June 12, 2008 2:45 PM

After seven years the overwhelming majority have reached the conclusion that Bush is a bad president.

However, this does not imply that the overwhelming majority believe his policies or bad policies.

You look at his foreign policy and say it is bad.
But many look at Iraq and still believe that invading Iraq was the right thing to do and it is just that Bush did a bad job of implementing the invasion.

You look at his tax cuts and say they are bad policy. But many disagree. They think his tax cuts were the right thing, it just that he did not also cut spending.

Just because many of his original supporters have turned against Bush does not imply that they are looking at the world the same way your are.

Posted by spencer | June 12, 2008 3:47 PM

How many monkeys worked at how many typewriters before spencer's post at 3:47 was produced?

It seems like a real waste of monkeypower.

Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | June 12, 2008 4:11 PM

Monkeys make everything better.

Plus, he does have a point. There's a chunk of people out there who really do believe that all of Bush's big ideas would have worked if they had just been executed better. To think otherwise would require them to admit that they were wrong. It's so much easier to think that they were right and it was the guy running things that messed up.

Posted by daveNYC | June 12, 2008 4:25 PM

Alternatively, Bush could have a stunningly successful next five months in office. Iraq will spontaneously organize into an open democratic society which wants US bases, and the level of violence will plummet to North Korean levels, leaving us free to get cracking at Afghanistan. In October, pro-US Pakistani villagers would capture Osama bin Laden and deliver him to US custody. The surge in consumer spending this month would turn out to be the first wave of an economic turnaround.

Posted by Deborah | June 12, 2008 10:10 PM

You look at his tax cuts and say they are bad policy. But many disagree. They think his tax cuts were the right thing, it just that he did not also cut spending.

'many' is a dangerous word. I'm sure there are lots, in the social sense, of people who believe this sincerely, and lots more people that claim to believe it but would have a seizure when presented with the actual spending cuts needed to offset Bush's tax cuts.

But in the political sense, the former group is somewhere in the vicinity of a null set.

Posted by NBarnes | June 12, 2008 11:29 PM

As others have pointed out, the remaining Republicans won't let McCain do what he would need to do to win (and now it is too late anyway).

I think the interesting question is why the Republicans are so insistent on their candidate losing. And I think the basic answer is that they still believe in Karl Rove's math ... that somehow despite all the evidence to the contrary, they trust their party leaders are going to find a way to win.

Posted by DTM | June 12, 2008 11:30 PM

The better way

They could use a bit of theater to distance McCain from Bush perceptually, but without him having to actually endorse different policies. It involves Bush resigning, so for this to work, Bush would really have to want McCain to win. Presumably a pardon from McCain would be the reason Bush would be interested enough in a McCain victory to cut his presidency short.

The first thing they would do would be to have Cheney resign, citing health reasons. This would be perfectly plausible, and even if Dems didn't like it, or rightly suspected this was part of some plot, they can't keep a VP from resigning.

The next thing is for Bush to nominate McCain to be the replacement VP. The Dems could frustrate this part of the deal, because the president's nominee would need a majority of both houses to become VP. But why would they want to stop McCain from becoming VP? Being associated with BushCo is the kiss of death for his campaign, so sayeth this item, anyway, and it sure seems plausible to me. So why would the Dems want to run the risk of refusing Bush's nominee, thereby leaving the office of VP open, and themselves open to the charge of wanting to sneak Pelosi into the WH in the event of Bush's death? Let McCain have the job, and thereby put the last nail in his campaign's coffin.

At any rate, the Dems will not be able to do a thing to block what happens next, so once they let McCain become VP they have lost their last control over the situation. What happens next is that McCain makes a great show of being shocked, shocked at learning, as he receives the full classified briefings for his new job as VP, at learning just how badly the administration has run the war in partiocular, and things in general. Not that the policies are wrong, mind you, just that they have been executed with shocking ineptitude. A tearfully repentant Bush will redeem himself by at last admitting his inabilities, and resigning to let a truly experienced leader, John McCain, ride to the nation's rescue on his white horse.

They'll time all of this so that President McCain is still in his honeymoon period on 11/4/08. McCain gets his best possible shot at winning. Without having to repudiate any of Bush's policies, he gets to distance himself 180deg from BushCo. He will be the strong leader who, in stark contrast to the Dems, manfully confronted the failiings of the Bush years, and Bush himself, and forced the miscreant from office.

And, of course, the least a grateful nation can give Bush for at last manfully admitting his insufficiencies and resigning, is a full pardon for any crimes that may have been committed, not from criminal malice, but that simply arose out of Bush's leadership failings and inability to control events, even the doings of his own underlings. A strong nation and a strong leader can forgive mere incompetence if the repentant miscreant's heart was in the right place.

Posted by Glen Tomkins | June 13, 2008 12:15 AM

Deborah suggests: "In October, pro-US Pakistani villagers would capture Osama bin Laden and deliver him to US custody."

Yes, or Jesus could return and he and Dumbya could move to Massachusetts and get married. Would you like to try to catch the bouquet?

Posted by MoeLarryAndJesus | June 13, 2008 2:29 AM

Nirvana. Nice.

Posted by bago | June 13, 2008 3:11 AM

“The 200-pound ball and chain around McCain’s foot is George W. Bush.”

Unfortunately, this is why most Dems wouldn’t dream of impeaching Bush and Cheney.

Posted by Me-again | June 13, 2008 9:52 AM

“The 200-pound ball and chain around McCain’s foot is George W. Bush.”

Unfortunately, this is why most Dems wouldn’t dream of impeaching Bush and Cheney.

Posted by Me-again | June 13, 2008 9:55 AM