The post-suspension coverage of John McCain has tended to focus on his supposedly fatal mistake in Virginia Beach, the anti-Christian Right speech that sank his candidacy. Most of this analysis is correct in its assumption that McCain could have won the nomination. It turned out that Bush, an inexperienced campaigner with a complacent staff, was eminently beatable. But what doomed McCain wasn’t Virginia Beach, which was only the symptom of two fundamental deficiencies that were present in his campaign from the very beginning and were evident to any journalist not subject to the famous McCain swoon (see, for instance, my McCain profile in NR’s September 27th issue).
The first was a matter of strategy. McCain, despite his voting record, decided to run to Bush’s left. Early in the race, Bush seemed to have two chief competitors on either side of him, Liddy Dole on the left and Steve Forbes on the right. The McCain camp worried most about Dole, and hoped she would drop out so McCain could supplant her centrist territory. This turned out to be a mistake. Instead, McCain’s strategists should have realized that Forbes was not a viable candidate and focused on occupying his ground as the reformist outsider challenging Bush from the Right. The Forbes anti-special-interest message of radical tax reform would have been easy for McCain to adapt to his own devices. Would this have ruined McCain’s appeal to independents and Democrats which was so important to launching his candidacy in New Hampshire?
Absolutely not. What the McCain camp didn’t realize is that his appeal to those voters was mostly a matter of his sensibility, of his biography and his reputation for truth telling. It was not issues. The beauty of being a straight talker is that people cut you slack in areas where they disagree with you — because they just admire you for standing up for what you believe.
So, McCain didn’t need to pander to independents with the Social Security issue, and debt repayment, and anti-tax-cut rhetoric. His biography, and campaign-finance reform, were enough. He should have used issues to go after Republicans and conservatives. The McCain campaign didn’t get this until after Michigan, when it was already too late. He had been attacking Republicans and conservatives for weeks and there was no way he was going to reposition himself as a Reagan Republican in a matter of days, even without the Virginia Beach speech. It was this fact that made it possible for my colleague Ramesh Ponnuru to write confidently the night of the South Carolina primary that McCain could not win the nomination.
McCain’s other problem was his temperament and style, which were bound to create mistakes and alienate people eventually. Many commentators treat his Virginia Beach speech as a momentary lapse. But the peevishness and self-righteousness that characterize that speech, and McCain’s “evil” comments afterward, weren’t an aberration. They are why so many of the Arizona senator’s colleagues can’t stand him. They are fundamental to who McCain is. They also helped dictate McCain’s run-against-the-GOP strategy, since he’s a temperamental maverick with no interest in philosophical consistency or conservative ideology.
So, McCain wasn’t sunk by a few random mistakes that he can rectify in a future run, say in 2004 — he was sunk by himself. That is a much tougher problem to fix.
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