CAMPAIGN OUTSIDER Running away from themselves
By Muhammad Cohen
HONG KONG - Presidential campaigns are about changing minds. It seems to be
working for both major parties' apparent nominees. In recent weeks, Republican
Senator John McCain and Democrat Senator Barack Obama have changed their minds
on several issues.
Obama faces questions about migrating to the center, prompting countercharges
that McCain is moving right, changing his positions on key issues more often
than he changes campaign
managers. (Steve Schmidt, a veteran of George W Bush's 2004 re-election effort,
took up McCain's poisoned chalice last week.)
In 2004, Republicans pummeled Democratic nominee John Kerry with charges that
he was a flip-flopper. Kerry made it easy with his "I was for it before I was
against it" defense. The flip-flopper label proved as toxic as the scarlet L
(for liberal) was during the Ronald Reagan era. But the Washington Post's Ruth
Marcus (full disclosure: a friend for more than 30 years) wrote brilliantly
last week about how all flip-flops are not created equal.
What matters isn't simply whether a candidate changes his position, but what
position he changes, what he changes it from, and what he changes it to. For
Marcus' money, Obama's flip-flop on opting out of the public campaign finance
system pales in comparison to McCain's switch to supporting Bush's tax cuts
that mainly reward the wealthy.
If the flip-flop fits ...
Last week, Obama set off flip-flop alarms by saying visiting the Middle East
could help "refine my policy" on Iraq. It echoed the primary season controversy
over Samantha Power, the foreign policy adviser who said that conditions on the
ground in Iraq would dictate the pace of withdrawals by an Obama
administration. That's a common-sense approach, but it underscores how much the
Iraq war and public perceptions of it defy logic. Creating the climate for the
invasion required moving the arguments beyond logic and truth. So whenever
anyone starts making sense - McCain suggesting deploying sufficient troops to
create order, Obama declaring troops will leave as the situation permits it -
they sound wacky.
Obama should have long ago established an Iraq working group with military
retirees and policy experts to formulate a realistic plan to fulfill his goal
of ending the war as soon as possible. Then, all the Illinois senator would
need to say about the issue would be, "I want to end the war in Iraq as soon as
possible, and my expert team is working on the most feasible plan to make it
happen from day one of my presidency."
Pundits have detected other areas where Obama has moved to "refine" his policy,
from gun control to wiretapping to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Meanwhile,
McCain is also shuffling many of his tunes, from backing extension of the Bush
tax cuts he once opposed to seeing the religious right not as "agents of
intolerance" on the "outer reaches of American politics" but as a core
constituency. The Straight Talk Express speaks with forked tongue, it seems.
Liar or Mitt?
If you can ignore the flip-flop din, it's perfectly logical that McCain and
Obama would run different campaigns in the primary and the general elections,
simply because in each contest, the voters are different. In primaries you're
appealing to members of your own party, usually the most activist elements; in
the general election, you're appealing to all voters.
If you start changing core positions to win, then you're a liar, or Mitt
Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts and a former candidate for the
Republican nomination in the 2008 presidential elections.
But if you try to fine-tune your message to reach a broader audience, then
you're a smart candidate. Moreover, the campaign started a year and a half ago,
when oil was half the price it is today and the term subprime mortgage had not
yet entered the American lexicon. As circumstances change, so should positions.
Moreover, for candidates, winning (and for office holders, governing), not
consistency, is the overriding goal.
For McCain and Obama, their position in their respective primary fields also
dictates how they need to move for the general election. In the Republican
field, McCain was in the middle. Now that he's won the nomination, he's shoring
up his right. Obama ran as the Democrat outside the mainstream, so now he's
trying to reassure mainstream Democrats he likes them (and guns and God), too.
Conventional wisdom says that American elections are won in the center. Amid
talk of swing states and triangulation, that seems to be a golden rule of
modern politics. But it's as much a myth as Obama's Muslim faith or Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice's competence.
That creamy American center where electoral wins lie isn't a bull's eye on a
dartboard. It's a moving target that shifts in response to events and,
especially, in response to campaigns.
Middle of the moment
A dozen years ago, the American center wanted term limits for elected officials
and a balanced budget. Now no major candidate is talking about those issues.
So, is there a silent majority of Americans waiting to shower a candidate who
pushes those issues with their votes in 2008? Probably not: more likely, it
means that advocates of those positions made them appealing to a big segment of
American voters in the mid-1990s, and when the advocates stopping pushing those
issues, they faded from voters' radar.
In 2004, exit polls showed that the Republican victory was built on voters who
thought "values" were the most important issue in the campaign. That's not a
tribute to the morality and ethics of the American electorate - just look at
the divorce rate, the crime rate, the countries invaded on false pretenses rate
- but to Karl Rove and other Bush strategists.
Rove and his team made the election about aphoristic "values" rather than real
life issues such as responsibility for the September 11, 2001, attacks -
imagine how the Republicans would have howled and blamed if those attacks had
taken place under a Democratic administration - the war in Iraq, North Korea's
successful nuclear weapons development, or shifting the tax burden from the
wealthy. Rove and company didn't go looking for the center's views and try to
pander to them, but they crafted messages that highlighted differences - real
or invented - between their candidate and the opposition and sold those
messages to what became the center by supporting the winner. It's not about
finding the center riding its views but creating a set of views that a winning
coalition can form around.
So if Obama and McCain are trying to adjust their positions to appeal to a
center expounded by their electoral gurus, they're trying to lasso smoke. The
other difficulty with trying to woo that moving target is that it just won't
keep still. Today it seems that gas prices and home foreclosures are the key
issues for winning the center. But a car bomb somewhere in the Middle East (or
American Midwest), a gene mutation in a Chinese chicken, or corporate
bankruptcy could change everything.
Candidates don't have to be slaves to their previous views, but their campaigns
are irresponsible if they chain them to events or to a voting bloc that doesn't
exist. The one message that has come loud and clear from voters that chose
McCain and Obama is that they don't want politics as usual or conventional
politicians. In trying to appeal to the center or shore up their flanks, the
two nominees have been giving the voters exactly what they don't want.
Former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen told America's story to the
world as a US diplomat and is author of Hong Kong On Air (www.hongkongonair.com),
a novel set during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal,
high finance and cheap lingerie.
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