John McCain had two good days late last week. It had been a while. On Thursday, Sarah Palin performed well enough in her debate with Joe Biden to quiet the critics. And, on Friday, the House of Representatives voted in favor of the federal bailout, which the Senate had passed two days earlier. Palin wasn't flawless and the bailout is imperfect. But three days into October, McCain finally had hope that he had stopped his September slide.
But it may not be that easy. The economy will get worse--maybe significantly worse--before it gets better. Over the next month, a series of reports on the health of the economy will be released--and none of them will be good. By a two-to-one margin voters blame Republicans for these problems.
The bad economic news has resulted in bad political news. The Real Clear Politics average of national polls has McCain trailing Barack Obama by nearly 6 points. The state polls are even more worrisome. McCain is down in Florida, down in Pennsylvania, down in Ohio, even down in Virginia. He has largely pulled out of Michigan--once believed to be a winnable light blue state--and he is fighting hard in Indiana and North Carolina, two states that Republicans win without trying in most years. On September 10, the first Gallup daily tracking poll conducted entirely after the Republican convention gave McCain a 5-point national lead. On October 3, the first day of the rest of the campaign, the same tracking poll had him down 7 points.
"As a general matter, we need to get this race back to being about Obama," says one senior adviser to McCain. A second agrees and points to Tuesday's debate as a key opportunity. "Part of what this debate is about, and the home stretch is about, is focusing the attention on Obama."
It's a strategy that has worked before. And it worked in a political environment that looks, in many ways, like this one.
In 1976, the country was still divided over an unpopular war, the U.S. intelligence community was the source of great controversy, there were deep concerns about the rising cost of energy, and the economy was in bad shape. Republican party identification was down. Democratic registration was up. The Republican running that year was a moderate, who was mistrusted by conservatives and who did not want to be associated with his predecessor. The Democrat was new to national politics and almost deified by the media. In mid-July 1976, a Gallup poll had Gerald Ford down 33 points to Jimmy Carter.
Ford's top strategists drafted a 121-page memo for the candidate. "We firmly believe that you can win in November," it declared, with an optimism that must have seemed naïve. The memo described the difficulties facing the campaign--many of which mirror the challenges Barack Obama presents the McCain campaign in 2008. Among them:
* Jimmy Carter has experienced a "rapid rise in national popularity" due largely to his "enormous (media) popularity," which persists despite the fact that he lost "eight out of the last eleven contested primary fights." * The Democratic Party enjoys a 43% to 21% advantage. A GOP candidate will always have difficulty closing a large gap on a Democratic opponent. * Campaign expenditures for both candidates will be the same. We no longer have the previous advantage of being able to outspend our opponent. This is a particular handicap when we are behind. * Carter's popularity is based almost exclusively on his awareness factor. His support is very thin and clearly very vulnerable to deterioration. * It is Carter's "newness" and his image as a winner that has carried him to the heights he has reached thus far.
The memo then assessed Carter's strengths and weaknesses.
Positive * A winner who has "it." A man with real personal appeal; "I like him." * A man with strong spiritual and moral values; an honest man of character. * A family man. * A man who cares about the common man and his problems. * A new kind of politician who is against the corrupt Washington system and will not lie. * A man concerned about government efficiency and dedicated to making the government work better. * A man who seems to deal with and resolve issues in a non-controversial way. * He is seen as an economic liberal and a social conservative. * He is a man with quiet strength; he will not let the politicians run over him. He is in control and will run the country with authority. * Seen as a responsible Democrat--not a maverick; not extreme. Negative * An arrogant man. * A man who wears his religion on his sleeve; he is very self-righteous. Lacks humility. * A man who tries to be all things to all men; we don't know where he stands on the issues. * A man about whom we don't know enough; we really don't know who he is as a person. * A Southerner. * May not be experienced enough to be President.
Ford's strategists believed that voters saw Carter as "mystical, almost evangelical," and they sought to diminish this view with "a major and highly disciplined attack on the perception of Carter." The goal was to transform his positives into negatives. They wanted Carter to be perceived as:
* An unknown. A man whose thirst for power dominates. Who doesn't know why he wants the Presidency or what he'll do with it. * Inexperienced. * Arrogant--(deceitful). * Devious and highly partisan (a function of uncontrolled ambition). * As one who uses religion for political purposes; an evangelic. * As liberal, well to the left of center and a part of the old-line Democratic majority.
To win, Ford strategists argued, the campaign had to improve its communications by "choosing our message, simplifying it and repeating it" and by "improving the speeches and tying them to the overall strategy instead of continuing to develop speeches in an organizational vacuum."
Ford's advisers refined their plan at a high-level meeting at Ford's vacation home in Vail, Colorado, as the campaign headed into the fall. Bob Teeter, Ford's pollster, described the meeting in an interview with a historian from the Ford Library.
"I think the basic decision we made there--and I'm not sure we focused on it quite as clearly as I can now with the advantage of twenty years of hindsight--was to shift the question [mark] off of President Ford and onto Jimmy Carter," Teeter explained.
We raised three questions about him. One, "Was he experienced enough to be president?" Second was, "Did you know enough about him?" The third was, "Did he have enough of a record as a Governor of Georgia?"
The Ford campaign ran a series of ads featuring man-on-the-street interviews with voters discussing Carter. The criticism is mild by today's standards.
Woman: All the things that we read about Jimmy Carter I think are true that he is fuzzy on a lot of the issues. Man: He changes his mind on the stand every other day or so. Man: He contradicts himself from one day to the next. Woman: He's much too wishy-washy. Man: He seems to be a little wishy-washy. Man: Well, if he'd stand up and say what he's for he'd be a little bit easier to understand and to believe. Woman: I like President Ford, a man who will tell you just exactly where he does stand.
The Ford campaign strategy almost worked. By portraying Carter as too much of an unknown and telling voters that supporting the Georgia governor was too risky in such perilous times, Ford closed the gap from 33 points to 2 in ten weeks. (Ford's convention came in the middle of that period, giving him an added boost.)
Several McCain advisers believe their campaign should focus on two very similar questions for the final push of the campaign: Who is Barack Obama, and can he lead the country in these difficult times?
The advisers say the campaign will work to remind voters of Obama's "corrupt" associations with Tony Rezko and with "the terrorist William Ayers." There has been no decision made as to whether the campaign will directly raise Obama's relationship to Reverend Jeremiah Wright. "Rezko and Ayers are clearly in bounds," says a top McCain adviser. "McCain has said he doesn't want to talk about Wright. If others do, then it's a topic of conversation and we can join that conversation."
One McCain adviser says the lessons from 1976 go beyond the campaign. "They were right about Carter. Look what happened to his presidency. We lost more acreage to communism during that time than any other time in history. And the Iranian hostages? And look at the economy."
"The guy was too risky."
Stephen F. Hayes, a senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD , is the author of Cheney: The Untold Story of America's Most Powerful and Controversial Vice President (HarperCollins).