How McCain Can Win

Barack Obama is already complaining about the Republican election tactics and the campaign hasn't even begun.

...it’s very hard for them to talk about where they want to take the country..."You know, he’s got a funny name. And we don’t know where he’s coming from. And, you know, he may be not sufficiently patriotic." I think that’s going to be the race they run.

He's got a point - McCain hasn't really managed to come up with anything that might excite voters. About all he's got going for him is that he is white and never belonged to a radical black church. But McCain doesn't seem to have the stomach for a hard fight - he'd clearly rather lose the election than risk losing his cachet with the style setters and opinion shapers. And so he is pretty much guaranteed to lose - unless he decides to take some bold positions on the campaign.

• Iraq - this is one big loser issue for McCain. His 'No Surrender' bluster is great for winning Republican caucuses, but in the general election he'll get slaughtered. With some luck, Iraq may continue not supplying much distressing news over the summer, and things may well appear to improve as Iran manages to unite the various Shia factions into a relatively cohesive governing unit. This would give McCain an opportunity to announce, right before the convention, his intention to begin a concerted phase-out of US troops based on the need for Iraq's government to get serious about providing its own security. I'd much prefer that we simply just get the hell out and not linger at all, but this might be enough to deflect Obama's overwhelming advantage on this issue.
  
  
• Health Care - McCain's preposterous plan to effectively phase-out employer provided group health insurance in favor of 'allowing' (i.e., requiring) individuals to shop around for the best coverage sounds like everyone's worst nightmare. A better alternative would be to proclaim the current system 'good enough'. But the quality of health insurance since Hillary's 1993 debacle has declined to the point where she now looks like a regular Cassandra. The public is fed up, and demands a change. I think Obama's plan is pretty crummy also - basically the current system with more taxes to pay for deadbeats. But the current system is lousy because it relies on private insurers whose only path to profitability is to control costs (i.e., screw the insureds and hold back on treatments). McCain should just toss out his (barely understood anyway) free-market principles (because they no longer operate in health care anyway) and join with Ted Kennedy (an old habit of his) to propose a Medicare-for-all health care solution. With just months to go before the election, there won't be enough time to really analyze it in any detail, so he can claim that administrative savings would more than make up for the increased coverage of the uninsured (as Paul Krugman already has). There's lots of reason to fear such a system, but we're going to have some crappy system in place anyway, and Canadians and Europeans do just fine (albeit with a different demographic). This would also neutralize an important Obama policy advantage.
  
  
• Immigration - As bad as McCain is on immigration, Obama is even worse. He needs to continue to emphasize border-security first, moving to a point system for legal immigrants and away from a family-reunification system, and Obama's harsh and reckless language against those who are concerned about uncontrolled immigration.
  
  
• Taxes and Trade - Americans are beginning to get the idea that big tax cuts and free trade aren't exactly windfalls for the working class and don't seem to do much to make America stronger, either. Here McCain would appear to be hopelessly out of touch with his support for more corporate tax cuts and his oblivious devotion to free trade. Fortunately for him, though, Obama isn't exactly William McKinley himself on trade issues. Perhaps McCain can 'see the light' over the next few months, predicated on visits with constituents on one of his free-publicity tours where he meets with disgruntled ex-manufacturing employees in various dive bars. Americans are willing to go along with corporate tax breaks if they believe they will be aligned with job creation, so perhaps some clever wonk can come up with a policy that would use tax breaks to encourage more manufacturing and increased domestic employment in good jobs. He should maybe pare back some tax cuts on the wealthy (drawing that line could be tricky, but few would argue with setting it somewhere around $250k.
  
  
• Broaching the Taboo - McCain may not want to exploit the Reverend Wright opening, but he can still accomplish the same thing by proposing roll-backs in racial preferences, and in particular Obama's disingenuous suggestion that his own daughters perhaps shouldn't benefit from it (he'd have to repeal the Civil Rights act to accomplish that). McCain can easily take it one step further - why should anyone's sons or daughters benefit from preferences based solely on the color of their skin (well, more precisely one's continental ancestry, but no need to make too fine a point of it)? McCain should insist that merit alone should decide. That's a winner issue - especially among the swing voters he'll need to capture. Again, there's little McCain can actually do about it, but it's worth bringing it up for it's collateral benefits.
  
  
• Judges, Judges, Judges - McCain's already on this one, and he needs to continue it. Americans still fear liberal judges, and it's easy to blame them for the terrible crime of the sixties, seventies and eighties while giving conservative judges credit for rolling it back. He should harp on this one endlessly - and let Obama babble on about how the ideal Supreme Court judge is one who can empathize with teenage mothers.

So it's doable, but McCain will have to be willing to redefine his message pretty dramatically, come up with plausible story lines explaining these shifts, and hammer home the key differences. Of course he won't do this, and he won't get rough on Obama's one obvious vulnerability, so he's no doubt in for a pretty harsh thumping come November. And I'm ok with that, since I think we need to repair our foreign policy ASAP, and while Obama strikes me as a bit naive with the whole "I'll meet with..." approach, McCain is downright delusional about American power.