Looking to November, Campaign of Presumed GOP Nominee Shifts Focus and Message
By Michael D. Shear
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Five top aides to Sen. John McCain hunkered down for two days of meetings at the senator's rustic cabin south of Flagstaff, Ariz., over the weekend as they began to plot his transformation from primary-season candidate to Republican nominee.
As they ate barbecue with McCain and his wife, Cindy, the campaign's inner circle debated the dynamics of a race against either Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton or Sen. Barack Obama, the funding necessary for victory, the political climate likely to exist six months from now, and the shape of the organization they will need to quickly assemble.
Plans call for a bigger staff, outreach to more potential donors, offices in battleground states and a revised campaign message that challenges the Democratic vision for change in Washington. Former president George H.W. Bush endorsed McCain yesterday morning, giving his campaign the seal of the first family of the Republican Party and signaling that the transition discussed in Sedona has already begun.
"The McCain campaign recognizes the inevitability of John McCain's nomination," said one of the five, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the meeting was private. "He'll be facing either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama in a race that doesn't appear it's going to be settled anytime soon. Obviously, the conversation focused on the dynamics of the race against either one of them."
The elder Bush praised McCain yesterday, calling him the right person to unite Republicans and adding: "No one is better prepared to lead our nation in these trying times than Senator John McCain." But after decades in which the senator from Arizona has been more agitator than leader within the Republican Party, aides say he must find a way to live up to his reputation for independence while learning to serve as the GOP's face and chief spokesman.
"We are mindful of lessons learned" when the campaign tried last year to build a massive infrastructure fusing McCain loyalists with Bush insiders, said a top adviser who talked about the general election on the condition of anonymity. Those moves led to a midsummer campaign collapse. "I do not think you should expect we will go on a hiring binge and have a huge, wildly overstaffed campaign. You will need to create a structure that has flexibility."
McCain's strategists -- including campaign manager Rick Davis, media guru Mark McKinnon, and advisers Mark Salter, Steve Schmidt and Charlie Black -- will form the nucleus of McCain's general election campaign. But the team will have to grow to include some of the senator's rivals and critics -- of whom there are many on Capitol Hill.
"The balance of power in Washington can change very quickly," said Todd Harris, a GOP strategist who worked on McCain's 2000 presidential campaign. "We are witnessing that change now. A lot of people within the party are starting to say, 'Well, he's our maverick now.' "
For the moment, McCain is still running against former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, who has vowed to stay in the race until McCain has the 1,191 delegates necessary to guarantee the party nomination. He has 903 delegates after adding 50 to his total from Michigan and Louisiana, according to a tally by the Associated Press. If all of former candidate Mitt Romney's delegates back McCain, he will be just a few short of the nomination. The reality that the race will go on is slowing his pivot toward the general election and a matchup with either Obama or Clinton. But his message has already begun to evolve.
At a stop in Wisconsin on Friday, McCain's new focus was evident as he repeatedly took aim at Obama and Clinton. He predicted that the country will hear a meaningful debate between himself and whoever becomes the Democratic nominee in the fall.
"It will be whether we want higher taxes or lower taxes, it will be whether we want bigger government or less government, it will be whether you want government running the health-care system in America or we want families to make the choices," McCain told supporters at a rally in Oshkosh.
That continued a dramatic change in tone and content that began the day he won the Potomac Primary last Tuesday. In his victory speech, McCain mocked Obama's repeated use of the word "hope," calling it a platitude. And he assailed the Democratic promises of "change."
"They will promise a new approach to governing but offer only the policies of a political orthodoxy that insists the solution to government's failures is to simply make it bigger," McCain told his supporters that night.
Black said McCain is "going to shift to talking about issues and contrasts with the Democrats on big issues." Chief among those contrasts, he said, will be an attempt to portray Obama as too inexperienced to take the reins of the country, a line of attack that Clinton has used against her chief Democratic rival with only mixed success.
Black said McCain will have a better chance of making that case about Obama because Clinton "doesn't have experience, either." He added: "People didn't see a big difference, especially on national security."
McCain's changing rhetoric is an attempt to take the offensive while Obama and Clinton continue fighting it out. He is also being forced to alter his message to respond to attacks from Democratic proxies.
Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean took aim at McCain on Thursday: "Just like President Bush, McCain's strategy is a war without end. The choice in this election couldn't be more clear: Elect John McCain and get 100 years in Iraq, or elect a Democrat to bring our troops home."
Since the Super Tuesday voting on Feb. 5, the DNC has issued more than a dozen attacks on McCain, most focused on his support for the Iraq war. This week, it began e-mailing daily "McCain Myth Busters" to reporters.
McCain has dropped all references to Huckabee from his speeches. But Huckabee's refusal to concede is postponing some of the steps McCain would normally take, including a merging of his campaign apparatus with the Republican National Committee. Officials at the RNC said they are required to remain neutral as long as there is an active primary campaign. Research they collect on Democrats, for example, is being delivered to both Huckabee and McCain, they said.
"The kind of synchronizing and meshing of organizations doesn't take place until the candidate meets the threshold," an RNC official said. "We are partners, brothers in an endeavor . . . to make sure the public understands the differences between our candidate and the Democratic candidate."
McCain aides said they expect that the RNC will eventually take over much of the voter-registration, voter-identification and get-out-the-vote operations for the campaign. It will also bolster McCain's opposition research.
But McCain's people will be in charge, aides and others said.
"Make no mistake about it, this will not be a blending of universes," said one Republican strategist not affiliated with McCain's campaign. "It's a wholesale takeover by McCain. That is the prerogative of every nominee."
Black, the McCain adviser, said: "At some point, it will become appropriate for us to begin talking to them. We won't do that as long as we have a serious competitor."
McCain aides are beginning to draft a new general election document that will attempt to balance the need for a bigger national operation with McCain's desire to maintain the small, nimble campaign organization that helped him succeed.
"We have decided to continue to be the ragtag group of volunteers running on fumes," Black said jokingly. For the moment, he and McCain's other aides are playing coy. Davis wasn't "inclined to talk about the general election strategy" until McCain has secured the nomination, a spokeswoman said.
There are no such restrictions on McCain's efforts to expand his fundraising team. Last week, he named former Bush national finance chairman Mercer Reynolds to lead his money-raising team. Scooter Clippard, the former fundraising chairman for Fred D. Thompson, will serve as a co-chairman for McCain.
Aides said the McCain team is successfully reaching out to other top donors and bundlers for his former rivals, but they declined to provide names.
Revamping fundraising operations could be critical for McCain, who struggled financially through most of last year while Obama and Clinton broke records. McCain has said he would accept public financing if he becomes the nominee, a decision that would provide him with $85 million from the Treasury.
At the campaign event in Oshkosh on Friday, McCain assailed Obama for saying he might withdraw what McCain called a pledge to accept public financing if he becomes the nominee. On Thursday, Obama spokesman Bill Burton said that Obama had never made such a pledge and that accepting public financing "was an option that we wanted on the table."
"I expect Senator Obama to keep his word to the American people," McCain said. "If Senator Obama goes back on his commitment to the American people, then obviously we have to rethink our position."
Staff writer Perry Bacon Jr. contributed to this report.
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