WASHINGTON: Sen. John McCain yesterday delivered a new speech that his senior aides said “will begin a turnaround for the campaign” as election day approaches.
This may be a good idea as his current direction has, according to yesterday’s conservative Washington Times, many Republicans growing increasingly concerned about the Arizona senator’s ability to mount a comeback, and who question his tactics and even his campaign’s main thrust in a White House race that is increasingly focused on economic turmoil.
“He has to make the case that he’s different than Bush and better than Obama on the economy,” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich told the Times. “It he doesn’t win that case, it’s all over and it’s going to be a very bad year for Republicans.”
Those Republicans interviewed by the Times said McCain’s campaign should have “planted doubts “about rival Democratic candidate Barack Obama’s associations with 1960s-era radical William Ayers months ago, rather than waiting until the last few weeks of the campaign.
“Doing so now,” they said, “makes Mr. McCain come off as angry, grouchy and desperate, playing into the Democrats’ hands.”
Perhaps. But some Republicans want even more drastic measures.
“It’s time for John McCain to fire his campaign. He has nothing to lose,” wrote conservative editorialist William Kristol in the New York Times. “The McCain campaign, once merely problematic, is now close to being out-and-out dysfunctional.”
Kristol said his campaign should “let McCain go back to what he’s been good at in the past — running as a cheerful, open and accessible candidate. Palin should follow suit. The two of them are attractive and competent politicians. They’re happy warriors and good campaigners. Set them free.”
Kristol says the recent polls showing Obama pulling ahead “suggests the failure of the McCain campaign’s attacks on Obama. So drop them.”
Some observers say it’s too late. McCain’s campaign has already opened the Pandora’s box of racism and hatred.
The McCain campaign was its ugliest last week when, according to Fred Hiatt in the Washington Post, it “cast Obama as dangerous, dishonest and un-American.”
McCain angrily promised to name those who caused the nation’s worst financial crisis in decades. He blamed Obama and his “cronies,” and the “corruption” that Obama had “abetted in Washington.” Meanwhile, almost as if there were no meltdown, his running mate remained stuck on attacking Obama for “palling around with terrorists,” noted Hiatt.
The tipping point may have come this Saturday, when John Lewis, a widely respected Democratic congressman from Georgia, had enough of the McCain-Palin attacks on Obama.
For Lewis, and many other Democrats, the recent heckling of Obama at Republican rallies, where he has been called Arab, Muslim, traitor, terrorist, friend of terrorists, Barack Hussein Obama, amounts to code words that reflect latent or overt racism inspired by the first presidential nomination of an African-American by a major party.
Lewis said earlier that he was “deeply disturbed by the negative tone of the McCain-Palin campaign” and that the Republican running mates are “playing with fire.”
McCain quickly hit back, branding Lewis’s remarks “shocking and beyond the pale” and calling on Obama to immediately repudiate them.
The Obama campaign said while Lewis was right to condemn “hateful rhetoric” the Illinois senator did not believe McCain or his policy criticism were comparable to Wallace or his segregationist policies as governor of Alabama in the 1960s.
Republicans replied that race is indisputably a backdrop against which this campaign has unfolded, but said that does not mean opposing Obama or using harsh words is racist.
“Put another way, simply because Obama is black does not mean that the expression ‘not one of us’ as he has been called at Republican rallies, is an appeal to the worst instincts of voters,” wrote Patrick Healy in the New York Times.
Palin refrained from personal attacks on Sunday and yesterday, instead hammering him on the issues of taxes and late-term abortions.
Then, she said: “We know who the bad guys are...” and a man in the Ohio crowd screamed: “Obama!” It was unclear if Palin heard him; as she did not address his remark.
The issue of race has, until now, mostly been an undercurrent in the presidential contest between McCain and Obama, who would be America’s first black president. It remains unknown how much of a factor it will play in the Nov. 4 vote.
