The right man
John McShow
Things were looking bleak for Bob Dole in the spring of 1996. The Dole campaign had decided it had to do something drastic to change the electoral map. And so, on May 15, Bob Dole issued a dramatic declaration.
Things were looking bleak for Bob Dole in the spring of 1996.
The Dole campaign had decided it had to do something drastic to change the electoral map. And so, on May 15, Bob Dole issued a dramatic declaration: Effective almost immediately, he would resign his seat in the Senate. Dole explained his decision in an uncharacteristically eloquent speech, widely attributed to his newly hired ghostwriter, the novelist Mark Helprin. I announce that I will forgo the privileges not only of the office of the majority leader but of the United States Senate itself, from which I resign effective on or before June 11. And I will then stand before you without office or authority, a private citizen, a Kansan, an American, just a man. The speech "jolted the capital," reported Richard Berke of the New York Times. But outside the capital… Nobody cared. A week afterward, Dole again trailed Clinton by 12 points. "Just a man" was just a stunt. I find myself thinking of Bob Dole a lot as I watch the McCain campaign in 2008. As personalities, of course, McCain and Dole could not be more different: Dole a natural leader, McCain a rebel; Dole judicious and predictable, McCain impulsive and erratic. Yet these two very different men face very similar political problems, and both are handicapped by a similar political weakness: a chronic inability to explain in simple, clear, and consistent language why their election would benefit ordinary voters. Dole never corrected that weakness, and the result is history. McCain is trying to evade it, with a dizzying sequence of campaign twists and turns. McCain chose the glamorous governor of Alaska as his running mate, the first female vice presidential candidate in Republican history. He responded to the crisis in financial markets by calling for the firing of the (Republican) head of the Securities and Exchage Commission – notwithstanding the complicating fact that the SEC had no authority over the markets in crisis. He cancelled a day of his convention in St. Paul because of the hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. This week he suspended his entire campaign, and temporarily canceled out of the first presidential debate, to jet to Washington to try unsuccessfully to broker a grand deal to rescue Wall Street. It's all bold, dramatic, and exciting. Yet for the ordinary voter, all this excitement is also irrelevant. (Or worse than irrelevant: A majority of independent voters say Palin is "unready" to be president – and her support among women drops almost from day to day. And when John McCain did finally join the debate with Barack Obama, a majority of those polled declared Obama the winner) John McCain's election campaign is all tactics, no message; all biography, no ideas. It's a whirligig of devices and strategems, all of which must have sounded brilliant at the expense-account lunch where they were concocted, but few of which make any difference to Americans hard pressed by the decline in housing values or the stagnation of middle-class incomes. The dilemma of the McCain campaign was shrewdly predicted months ago by Obama campaign manager David Plouffe. "Their campaign is all about winning the news cycle." Plouffe meant was that the McCain campaign thinks that if they can somehow do or say something to gain headlines, that they must thereby gain votes. But in a tough economic year like this one, voters are reading their mortgage statements more closely than the headlines, and are watching the net worth of their retirement accounts more closely than CNN. The
American presidential election of 2008 is an election about big
issues. It's not going to be won by small maneuvers.
The Dole campaign had decided it had to do something drastic to change the electoral map. And so, on May 15, Bob Dole issued a dramatic declaration: Effective almost immediately, he would resign his seat in the Senate. Dole explained his decision in an uncharacteristically eloquent speech, widely attributed to his newly hired ghostwriter, the novelist Mark Helprin. I announce that I will forgo the privileges not only of the office of the majority leader but of the United States Senate itself, from which I resign effective on or before June 11. And I will then stand before you without office or authority, a private citizen, a Kansan, an American, just a man. The speech "jolted the capital," reported Richard Berke of the New York Times. But outside the capital… Nobody cared. A week afterward, Dole again trailed Clinton by 12 points. "Just a man" was just a stunt. I find myself thinking of Bob Dole a lot as I watch the McCain campaign in 2008. As personalities, of course, McCain and Dole could not be more different: Dole a natural leader, McCain a rebel; Dole judicious and predictable, McCain impulsive and erratic. Yet these two very different men face very similar political problems, and both are handicapped by a similar political weakness: a chronic inability to explain in simple, clear, and consistent language why their election would benefit ordinary voters. Dole never corrected that weakness, and the result is history. McCain is trying to evade it, with a dizzying sequence of campaign twists and turns. McCain chose the glamorous governor of Alaska as his running mate, the first female vice presidential candidate in Republican history. He responded to the crisis in financial markets by calling for the firing of the (Republican) head of the Securities and Exchage Commission – notwithstanding the complicating fact that the SEC had no authority over the markets in crisis. He cancelled a day of his convention in St. Paul because of the hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico. This week he suspended his entire campaign, and temporarily canceled out of the first presidential debate, to jet to Washington to try unsuccessfully to broker a grand deal to rescue Wall Street. It's all bold, dramatic, and exciting. Yet for the ordinary voter, all this excitement is also irrelevant. (Or worse than irrelevant: A majority of independent voters say Palin is "unready" to be president – and her support among women drops almost from day to day. And when John McCain did finally join the debate with Barack Obama, a majority of those polled declared Obama the winner) John McCain's election campaign is all tactics, no message; all biography, no ideas. It's a whirligig of devices and strategems, all of which must have sounded brilliant at the expense-account lunch where they were concocted, but few of which make any difference to Americans hard pressed by the decline in housing values or the stagnation of middle-class incomes. The dilemma of the McCain campaign was shrewdly predicted months ago by Obama campaign manager David Plouffe. "Their campaign is all about winning the news cycle." Plouffe meant was that the McCain campaign thinks that if they can somehow do or say something to gain headlines, that they must thereby gain votes. But in a tough economic year like this one, voters are reading their mortgage statements more closely than the headlines, and are watching the net worth of their retirement accounts more closely than CNN. The
American presidential election of 2008 is an election about big
issues. It's not going to be won by small maneuvers.