Below The Beltway

It seems that Republican Party insiders are starting to express concern over their candidate’s chances in the 2008 General Election:

In not-for-attribution interviews, a number of Republicans were neither optimistic about his chances nor positive in their assessment of his campaign so far.

“I think we’ve got a world of problems,” said one Republican strategist with extensive experience in presidential campaigns. He said this came home to him with a thud when he watched Obama and McCain give speeches last Tuesday, with the Democrat speaking before “20,000 screaming fans, while John McCain looked every bit of his 72 years” in a speech televised from New Orleans. This Republican cited the liberal blogger Atrios’ description of McCain’s speech with a green backdrop that made McCain “look like the cottage cheese in a lime Jell-O salad.”

For McCain to stand a chance of winning, the operative contended, the campaign, the Republican National Committee, or an independent group will have to finance sustained negative ads developing a broad assault on Obama’s credibility as a national leader at a time of terrorist threat. McCain, however, has gone out of his way to aggressively discourage such activity, the operative pointed out, which, he argued, may kill McCain’s chances.

The problem with this theory, though, is that simply going negative on Obama isn’t going to be enough to win the election. You really don’t need to look any further than Hillary Clinton’s failure to defeat Obama while raising these same issues to see what that’s the case. Yes, that occurred in the context of a Democratic Primary but the fact that it didn’t work is strong evidence in favor of the argument that national security simply isn’t going to be the defining issue in this campaign. If it was, then Hillary Clinton should have been able to clean Barack Obama’s clock.

Poll after poll is showing that the top issues on voter’s minds all relate to the economy. A McCain campaign focused on attacking Barack Obama over national security issues is just as likely to turn voters off as it is to attract them.

As one political analyst notes, this isn’t necessarily a wise strategy to follow in an election year when the deck is stacked so heavily against Republicans:

Tom Mann of the Brookings Institution argues that “McCain continues to embrace Bush policies on the most important issues, relying on a reputation for independence and moderation that could be lost in the heat of battle with Obama and the Democrats…. At the end of this long interlude, the only rationale for his election that has emerged is that Obama cannot be trusted to lead the country at a time of great danger because he is too inexperienced, naïve, liberal, elitist, and out of touch with American values. ‘Elect me because the other guy is worse.’ Not much of an argument in the face of gale-force winds blowing against the Republican Party.”

And then there’s Bay Buchanan, who argues that McCain may have already lost because his campaign will not have control over the defining issue of this campaign:

John McCain is relevant only in so far as he is not Barack Obama. The Senator from Arizona is incapable of energizing his party, brings no new people to the polls, and has a personality that is best kept under wraps. And while his strong suite is experience, especially on military matters, it was gained almost entirely in Washington, a city that 80% of Americans now believe has miserably misled and mismanaged the nation.

And along comes Barack Obama, with the image of a young, optimistic, outsider who hasn’t spent the last 20 years of his career playing the Washington game. Try as they might, I think it’s going to be incredibly hard for McCain to run an effective campaign against that image not matter what he does.