The Next 60 Days: McCain's Tactics

Had a conversation this morning with someone who is decidedly conservative, and who worries that Obama will win. I mentioned that it's my thought that the election is still Obama's to lose, but that McCain's tactics were emerging--and may well be the undoing of Obama.

McCain's selection of Palin was the first of his final tactical moves. With that, McCain underlined his "reformer" theme--and he immediately played that in his acceptance speech: "I will fight for YOU [against the special interests and the Establishment]..." He only mentioned GWB once in his speech, and that reference served to point out McCain's insistence on The Surge.

McCain's second tactical move will be to point out Obama's indecisiveness, or insecurity-with-himself. Rudy Giuliani had fun with that tendency, (in a speech moved 'down' in the calendar to immediately precede Palin's acceptance, thus getting more viewers of the Rudy oratory.) Rudy's recitation of flips and flops was lengthy and effective.

Lo and behold! What appears but a column from Spengler. Here's the excerpt of interest:

...Obama is the most talented and persuasive politician of his generation, the intellectual superior of all his competitors, but a fatally insecure personality. American voters are not intellectual, but they are shrewd, like animals. They can smell insecurity, and the convention stank of it. Obama's prospective defeat is entirely of its own making. No one is more surprised than Republican strategists, who were convinced just weeks ago that a weakening economy ensured a Democratic victory.

Biden, who won 3% of the popular vote in the Democratic presidential primary in his home state of Delaware, and 1% or less in every other contest he entered, is ballot-box poison. Obama evidently chose him to assuage critics who point to his lack of foreign policy credentials. That was a deadly error, for by appearing to concede the critics' claim that he knows little about foreign policy, Obama raised questions about whether he is qualified to be president in the first place...

(Spengler was making the case that Obama should have taken HRC as his running-mate.)

As to the first tactic:

McCain doesn't have a tenth of Obama's synaptic fire-power, but he is a nasty old sailor who knows when to come about for a broadside. Given Obama's defensive, even wimpy selection of a running-mate, McCain's choice was obvious. He picked the available candidate most like himself: a maverick with impeccable reform credentials, a risk-seeking commercial fisherwoman and huntress married to a marathon snowmobile racer who carries a steelworkers union card. The Democratic order of battle was to tie McCain to the Bush administration and attack McCain by attacking Bush. With Palin on the ticket, McCain has re-emerged as the maverick he really is.

Further:

McCain has certified his authenticity for the voters. He's now the outsider, the reformer, the maverick, the war hero running next to the Alaskan amazon with a union steelworker spouse. Obama, who styled himself an agent of change, took his image for granted, and attempted to ensure himself victory by doing the cautious thing. He is trapped in a losing position, and there is nothing he can do to get out of it.

Obama, in short, is long on brains and short on guts

And McCain has a book plus several chapters on "guts", which is written in his own blood.

I think McCain's third tactical move will be to highlight, again and again, the "small-town" values--but paste them into an "American Values" backdrop, in an attempt to fly above the race- and class-baiting of the Obama campaign's operatives and surrogates. In other words, McCain will steal Obama's "post-partisan" foofoodust and make it his own.

That, my friends, is OODA-Loop post-graduate application.

By the way, Spengler's column is decidedly non-partisan; he has plenty of ammo to fire at Palin, McCain, Biden, and Obama. Worth the read.