HOW JOHN MCCAIN CAN STILL WIN

HOW JOHN MCCAIN CAN STILL WIN THE ELECTION

Kenneth Hacker

October 27, 2008

It is no secret that the only chance McCain now has of winning is to tip some key swing states in his favor to gain the magic number of 270+ of Electoral College votes. Some fairly “red” states look like they might be vulnerable to a McCain surge. However, he needs to carry what are now designated as all of the swing states to get to this goal: These are Virginia, Ohio, Florida, Nevada, Colorado, Missouri, North Carolina, and Indiana. If he carried these states at this point, he would get about 274 electoral votes to Obama’s 264 electoral college votes. How can he possibly do this?

The first thing to do is to muzzle Sarah Palin and Sean Hannity who both do more damage to the possible persuasion of McCain that anyone can yet imagine. McCain needs to demonstrate that he is in charge of his own discourse and quit acting like a senior citizen looking for the next shuffleboard game arranged by Palin and Hannity. If he would tell all of his advisors and followers that racism has no place in American campaigns and that he will be a stop to it right this second, he would gain recognition as the strong, moral leader he claims to be. As Karl Rove has written, criticism of campaign opponents must be fair and reasonable. What Palin and Hannnity put out is pure hate speech that is designed to make Obama the “other” who cannot be counted as “one of us.” It is too late to dismiss the nutty Palin from the ticket but there may still be time to put a leash on her.

Message clarity is essential to a campaign as are vision and statesmanship. All of this is lacking now in the McCain-Palin campaign speeches. Advertising follows suit. Better quality in framing is sorely needed to make a case for John McCain being the most likely one to serve the interests of the American people. But this cannot be seen in ideas like a medical care reform proposal that sounds like a “Run along now” approach to voters and citizens. McCain needs to forget Obama for now and let Americans now how, when, where, and his proposals on the economy, taxes, national security, etc. make more sense than those of Obama.

The failure of the present communication strategies of the McCain campaign are centered in an overreliance on negative campaigning and a focus on cues and imagery with very little substance that voters can mull over and discuss. Right now, it is easy to dismiss the candidate as having little to offer other than four more years of what we have now. This is why change perceptions are dramatically in Obama’s favor.

The cynical consulting within the McCain campaign that encourages relentless attacking on the character of Obama reveals an unbelievable ignorance of psychology and how the mind works. Sure, we can implicitly learn how Obama is some sort of “other” who we cannot trust because he knows a man that bombed building during the Vietnam protests of forty years ago, but we can also implicitly learn to distrust McCain as an old cranky man who throws out invectives instead of policy proposals. This is a double-player game and the points of voter concerns are ignored by the McCain advisors to their candidate’s peril. The Obama advisors correctly concluded that McCain’s ally who shoots abortion doctors and his ally G. Gordon Liddy who teaches people how to effective shoot U.S. government federal agents are silly topics of discussion when the voters want to know what the next President will do about jobs and the economy.

If the McCain advisors had any sense at all, they would put up the signs that the Clinton aides put up in 1992: “It’s the economy stupid!” If McCain continues to listen to Rick Davis and others who say that they lose when focusing on the economy, they might as well just start asking President Obama for jobs in the new administration, perhaps as file clerks in some unheard of office.