McCain's Wholesale Politics Problem
In a town meeting in Cincinnati the next day, Mr. McCain would again slip up on the name of the Massachusetts town, where, he noted, “Americans asserted their independence once before.” He called it “the Lexiggdon Project” and twice tried to fix his error before flipping the name (“Project Lexington”) in subsequent references.
Retail politics is informal. small crowds. Kissing babies, shaking hands, speaking off the cuff. Sen. John McCain is a gifted-retail politician. He's used his Straight Talk Express to great effect. Conservative pundit Tucker Carlson wrote about the McCain's retail effect
In his book Politicians, Partisans, and Parasites: My Adventures in Cable News, Tucker Carlson explains the source of many journalists' attraction to the Arizona senator: "McCain ran an entire presidential campaign aimed primarily at journalists.... To a greater degree than any candidate in thirty years, McCain offered reporters the three things they want most: total access all the time, an endless stream of amusing quotes, and vast quantities of free booze."
Aside from a campaign that has been terribly run, McCain seems to be a particularly poor whole sale politician. He flubs his soundbites and can't read from a teleprompter. National campaigns depend on wholesale politics. The NYT reports:
--MbA politician who has thrived in the give-and-take settings of campaign buses, late-night TV couches and town meetings, he now is trying to meet the more formal speaking demands of a general election campaign.
By his own admission, Mr. McCain is not a great orator. He is ill-suited to lecterns, which often dwarf his small stature, and he tends to sound as if he is reading his lines, not speaking them. His shortcomings have been accentuated in a two-man race, particularly because the other man — Senator Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee — can often dazzle on stage.
Mr. McCain and his advisers know that Mr. Obama’s ability to excite huge crowds will make for an inevitable podium mismatch for the older, softer-spoken Republican. “We’re going up against a guy who is off the charts,” said Mark Salter, Mr. McCain’s longtime Senate chief of staff and campaign adviser.
To better compete, Mr. McCain is undergoing a subtle but marked transition as a political performer, said aides and people who have watched him. As part of a staff shakeup that was announced Tuesday, he brought in a new adviser — Greg Jenkins, a former White House official and Fox News producer — who will oversee the producing and staging of Mr. McCain’s events. Mr. Jenkins is considered an expert at political stagecraft, oversaw many of President Bush’s appearances and served as executive director of the 2004 inaugural committee.
Mr. McCain is working closely with aides like Brett O’Donnell, a former debate consultant for Mr. Bush, to improve his speech and performance. He is working to limit his verbal tangents and nonverbal tics. He is speaking less out of the sides of his mouth, which can produce a wiseguy twang reminiscent of the Penguin from the Batman stories, and he is relying less on his favorite semantic crutch — the phrase “my friends” — which he used repeatedly in his campaign appearances. He also appears to be trying to exercise restraint, advisers and campaign observers say, when speaking off the cuff, wisecracking in town meetings and criticizing his opponent. In recent weeks, for example, Mr. McCain seems to have reined in the sarcasm he has directed at Mr. Obama. (In May, for example, he said of his opponent, “With his very, very great lack of experience and knowledge of the issues, he’s been very successful.”)
Alan Schroeder, a journalism professor at Northeastern University, said, “There’s a danger of sarcasm becoming nastiness, and McCain seems to be conscious of that line.”
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