It's Now or Never for McCain and His Campaign

What in the world is wrong with John McCain and his campaign? Granted, McCain is facing an uphill battle on many fronts. For one, anti-Bush and anti-Republican sentiment is stratospheric. As the current standard bearer of the GOP, McCain obviously begins at a severe disadvantage simply by association. When one factors in the phenomenon that is Barack Obama and his historic candidacy, McCain’s uphill climb becomes even steeper. Despite the enormous odds against him, though, McCain can still win this election, but only if he can stop being such a horrendous campaigner, and if his overall campaign can get its act together. Now.

As things stand now, there is simply no getting around the fact that McCain is a terrible campaigner. There are very few positives I can point to, and in direct disobedience of my Mom’s age-old admonition that if I don’t have something nice to say, I shouldn’t say anything at all, there are many aspects of John McCain the candidate that are in dire need of improvement. It’s no secret that McCain doesn’t exactly knock ‘em dead on the hustings, and so it’s hard to understand why someone in the campaign’s hierarchy would not have already taken immediate steps to at least attempt to correct some of McCain’s most glaring weaknesses on the stump.

First and foremost, when placed in front of a teleprompter, McCain makes George W. Bush look like a gifted orator. McCain is so amazingly robotic in his labored reading of the machine it’s almost comical (if it weren’t so painful). More often than not, it appears as though McCain is seeing the speech for the very first time as it scrolls down the glass screen in front of him. Why wouldn’t someone at the top of his campaign staff force McCain into some sort of a teleprompter “boot camp”? I know the saying about old dogs and new tricks, and sure, McCain is old, but even still, there has to be room for improvement! On Sunday, McCain spent the greater part of his day attending the Yankees game here in New York with Rudy Giuliani. I would argue that the several hours spent doing that would have been much better spent with McCain practicing and improving his delivery of scripted speeches. (Particularly now, with Obama on his vaunted overseas trip, dominating the airwaves and headlines, the time is perfect for McCain to go underground for a few days of an intense campaigning clinic). Team McCain would argue that prepared speeches aren’t his strength, and that he’s best in settings such as town hall meetings and others at which he can speak more extemporaneously. This is probably true, and that’s all well and good, but the reality is that some of the most important speeches to come in the campaign are prepared speeches such as his GOP Convention acceptance speech. Naturally, these are also the ones that that will garner the most media attention and therefore voter attention, too. As such, it remains imperative that McCain improve his delivery of speeches from a prepared text or a teleprompter.

Next on the syllabus would be figuring out some way to stop McCain from laughing at his own jokes, particularly with the evil-sounding chuckle he is prone to emit – often at the most inopportune and inappropriate of times. On a related note, McCain is also given to displaying a smile that looks as forced as it obviously is. Third on the to-do list would be to remove the phrase “my friends” – something he repeats with an almost compulsive zeal – from his public speaking vocabulary. Seriously, how hard would it be to sit him down and force him to watch a few hours of video of his stilted, stiff delivery with clips of his chuckle, his forced smile and his “my friends” thrown in for good measure? McCain’s no idiot. He’s been in politics for three decades and certainly knows good political theater when he sees it. Surely he’d recognize his own shortcomings – at least to some extent – and be driven to make corrections, right? There are people in Washington who are paid solely to provide this sort of critique and instruction, and since his campaign staff seems unable to correct these tendencies, McCain could benefit mightily from their tutelage.

All the blame cannot be placed solely on McCain, though, since any politician relies heavily on his staff and advisors to put him in the best possible position to avoid mistakes. I’m not even sure anymore who is running the McCain Campaign, so often have been its “reorganizations” and “reshufflings”. I am sure, however, that at least in theory, the person running it now and the people who have previously run it would be individuals with experience in presidential politics and at least a fair amount of political acumen. Given the track record of the campaign, though, sometimes it seems like the campaign is being run by a bunch of political rookies with a shockingly severe tin ear to the politics of today and the overall sentiments of the electorate.

One event thus far in this election absolutely epitomizes the ineptitude of those running McCain’s campaign (and to some extent, of the candidate himself). On the night that Obama clinched the Democratic Nomination last month, he was set to deliver a victory speech of sorts in front of tens of thousands of supporters at the Xcel Energy Center – not coincidentally the site of the Republican National Convention in September – in Minneapolis-Saint Paul, Minnesota. McCain has shown no propensity for attracting crowds a tenth as large (or as enthusiastic) as those of Obama, and on a night when Obama was sure to dominate the coverage after securing the nomination, the smart political move on the part of McCain and his campaign would have been simply to cede the stage and spotlight to him. There should have been a recognition that McCain cannot compete with Obama in a direct comparison of campaign events, and to attempt to do so would not only be futile, it would be damaging.

But there was no such recognition, and what the McCain campaign offered up was shocking in its dreadfulness. Appearing in Kenner, Louisiana, McCain spoke to supporters and, unfortunately for him, all of the cable news networks covered it live. It’s hard to know where to begin with the many things wrong with this event. To start, the venue was dismal, some sort of warehouse or hangar – stark, dark and depressing. Making matters worse, the space was at best half full, showing obvious empty space that could have been filled by supporters. Further, for the first time (and mercifully, for the last time, too), the backdrop chosen by the McCain Campaign operatives running the event was some sort of strange green color – “puke green” truly describes it best – which, when coupled with the insufficient and inferior lighting in the room only added to the malaise already permeating the appearance. To call the crowd’s reactions tepid would be charitable, and I got the sense that they would have benefited greatly from an “APPLAUSE” sign like those used on game shows. And to call the crowd homogenous would be an understatement, as I do not remember seeing anything resembling a broad representation of ethnicities or even genders. Despite knowing that the networks would likely cut away from McCain to “officially” announce Obama’s securing the nomination – and knowing when it would happen – the campaign did not get McCain started on time and so indeed, the networks did simply abandon McCain mid-speech – a blessing in disguise as it turned out, but an accidental and purely serendipitous one. The cherry on top was McCain himself, delivering a long-winded speech via teleprompter that was embarrassingly awful to watch and hear – even by the aforementioned low bar McCain had already set for himself. He even threw in a healthy dose of chuckling or forced smiling – often timing it with each repetition of the speech’s tag line, “That’s not change we can believe in”, as though it were a hilarious joke.Don't just take my word for it, though...

Pretty rough, wasn't it? The broader problem is that so much of what made that entire event so bad is symptomatic of what’s making the overall McCain Campaign itself so bad right now.

Already facing a rather extraordinary candidate and campaign in Obama and his operation, competing with a news media almost laughably shilling for his opponent, and having to fight the anti-Republican, anti-incumbent tides to boot, McCain doesn’t need nor can he afford to do Obama any more favors by continuing to flounder on the campaign trail. Despite all of this, victory remains a possibility for him, but it won’t for long unless McCain and his campaign rise to the occasion. While McCain will never out-campaign or out-speak Obama and since his campaign will certainly not out-strategize or out-maneuver the Obama Campaign, he must become a more disciplined and eloquent campaigner, and his campaign must simultaneously correct his weaknesses while accentuating his strengths. There’s a long time between now and Election Day, but the changes for McCain and his campaign need to start immediately.

(This post can also be seen at Splice Today: http://splicetoday.com/).