Rebranding Republicans: McCain's Conundrum

[babylonsister]

William Bradley

Rebranding Republicans: McCain's Conundrum

Posted June 6, 2008 | 07:26 PM (EST)


While Barack Obama is at last able to claim the Democratic nomination, John McCain has had the luxury of months to work on "rebranding" a Republican Party grown very tarnished due to the economic downturn and the deep unpopularity of George W. Bush and the Iraq War. But a day spent recently following McCain around California points up how difficult a task he has in store. And how short he remains of the mark.

McCain's conundrum was obvious even before his defensive attempt this to counter-program Obama's victory speech, in which he protested a bit too much about how different he is from Bush even as his campaign was confirming that he is now in line with the president in agreeing that surveillance of international phone calls and e-mails need not be approved by the secret FISA court, which has routinely rubber-stamped requests.

In a sense, it shouldn't be hard for McCain. He's a famous man, a famous war hero, a famous maverick. He has his own image. He ran against Bush, and was savaged by him. He's famously bucked the party line. But it may be one thing to be an insurgent in an unpopular party, as he was in 2000. It may be quite another to be its nominee.

I hooked up on the road with McCain late last month in California's glitzy Silicon Valley and rural Central Valley. Far from departing from Republican orthodoxy, McCain, who did not seem a happy warrior, mostly embraced it.

He was joined at an economic roundtable in Silicon Valley by several tech titans, and the politician who succeeded in rebranding his own Republicanism, Arnold Schwarzenegger. It was in California, with Schwarzenegger's backing, where McCain essentially won the Republican nomination, knocking out Mitt Romney. It was in California where Schwarzenegger, after veering disastrously to the right in a 2005 special election, recast himself as a global warming-fighting/infrastructure-building centrist and easily sloughed off Democratic attempts to make him out to be a Bush clone.

But in his California trip, McCain hewed pretty heavily to the party line, even as he said he aims to make a real run at the state in which Bush and the Republican brand are in the dumpster. In Silicon Valley, the Vietnam War hero talked up the need to cut greenhouse gases, his hoped-for silver bullet talisman demonstrating his non-Bushieness. But he also talked up Bushonomics: Lower corporate taxes, disdain for the capital gains tax, reduced regulation. And he attacked Obama for wanting to "unilaterally renegotiate NAFTA." The same thing his roundtable moderator and national co-chair, billionaire former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, said. Some Republicans, fearful that the governorship will go back to the Democrats after the term-limited Schwarzenegger departs at the end of 2010, look to this former Romney national finance co-chair to make a run.

But these very positions were contradicted by a new poll showing most voters in very sharp disagreement. And certainly voters in industrial swing states mistrust this sort of free trade dogma.

more...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-bradley/rebranding-republicans-mc_b_105776.html

[speedoo]

1. As if McCain is actually able to actually think in terms of "rebranding".

I don't think he is. I think he may have some vague strategic ideas, but his cronies like Lieberman are probably throwing ideas around, trying to come up with something.

What has he accomplished over the last month or so while Obama's been busy with clinching? Not much, it appears.

[Alcibiades]

2. True

And I really do think that Lieberman's a liability for him. Everything he touches turns into poop.

McCain's response to Obama's claim that McCain voted with Bush 95% of the time has been that Obama voted with Bush 40% of the time. Not the right answer, though I doubt there is one.

[Demeter]

3. I Know How I'd Rebrand the GOP

With hot irons depicting a lazy elephant. And the skull and bones.

[Joanne98]

4. We need to start to work on our own GOP branding project.