Editor’s note: Much recent coverage of the presidential race has focused on reports of conflict and backbiting inside the McCain campaign as the Republican presidential candidate struggles to make up ground on Barack Obama. Is McCain to blame? Is Sarah Palin to blame? Are McCain’s top advisers to blame? Who mishandled whom? What’s missing is a sense of perspective about the enormity of McCain’s task and the determined — some would say heroic — way in which he keeps going against tremendous odds. In many respects, it’s a wonder McCain is standing at all, much less within striking distance eight days before the election. Byron York’s cover story in the current issue of National Review is about the obstacles McCain faces, and what they mean for this race.
John McCain sewed up the Republican nomination last February, but his cash-strapped campaign didn’t conduct its first serious poll until April. At that time, McCain still enjoyed the luxury of planning for the general election while Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were busy slugging it out. But when pollster Bill McInturff briefed McCain’s inner circle, he had some sobering news to deliver. “He said, ‘This is going to be the worst environment since 1992 for a Republican, and it could get even worse,’” top McCain aide Charlie Black told me recently. Black paused a moment before adding, “And now, it’s gotten worse.”
Not just worse — historically so. No Republican since the members of Congress who ran in the Watergate midterm elections of 1974 has faced as many obstacles as John McCain does now. Among them:
The difficulty of succeeding a two-term president of one’s own party — a feat accomplished only once since Truman succeeded FDR.
The even greater difficulty of succeeding a two-term president of one’s own party who has a job-approval rating of 25 percent and a disapproval rating of 70 percent, as George W. Bush had in a recent Gallup poll.
The historically high proportion of Americans who say the country is on the wrong track — as high as 90 percent in a recent Washington Post survey.
The enthusiasm gap, with far fewer Republicans than Democrats saying they are fired up about supporting their candidate.
The Republicans’ deficit in party identification, which ranges between five and ten percentage points.
The financial crisis, including the 5,500-point fall in the Dow Jones Industrial Average between November 2007 and October 2008.
The war in Iraq, with nearly 4,200 Americans dead and a majority of Americans judging that the gains have not been worth the cost.
Republican gloom on Capitol Hill, where nearly two dozen House Republicans have chosen to retire rather than face reelection, while Democrats stand a chance of winning a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.
Barack Obama’s enormous advantage in fundraising.
McCain’s continuing problems with the Republican base, which persist despite his selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate.
It’s difficult to imagine a more daunting set of circumstances. Inside the campaign, McCain has displayed his well-known stoicism, mixed with a dose of black humor, in the face of each new obstacle. Among his staff, it has become something of a mantra to say that whatever has to be done, no matter what it is, will have to be done the hard way. “You could think of this as trying to summit a mountain,” one senior aide, who asked not to be named, told me. “Both campaigns have to summit the mountain. In most elections, one campaign has some kind of advantage over the other — maybe they get a ten-minute or a half-hour head start — but both sides have to climb the same face of the mountain. In this election, we’re not climbing the same face of the mountain. They’re climbing the side of the mountain with boardwalks and latte stands and playgrounds for the kids, and we’re climbing the side of the mountain with axes and ice picks, and one slip and you’re dead.”
BEARING THE BURDEN
Ask McCain’s top aides about the obstacles and they’ll remind you that before the financial crisis hit, as recently as mid-September, the race was tied. On September 17, the RealClearPolitics average of polls showed McCain and Obama each with precisely 45.7 percent of the vote. The message Team McCain took from the numbers was that McCain had overcome the challenges that could have sunk his campaign in the previous months. “You had the red states red, and in the blue states, we were coming on,” the senior adviser told me.
And then came the financial meltdown. “We’re not talking about a bad jobs number, or a day of bad economic news,” the aide said. “No — this was a global financial crisis the likes of which the world has not seen since 1929.” The crisis stopped McCain cold and helped Obama surge to his biggest lead of the race. The McCain campaign had one more obstacle to surmount. But the problem for the campaign was that, in the eyes of many voters, the economic crisis wasn’t a totally new, discrete event but rather a continuation of some of the existing problems McCain thought he had overcome. People have been worried about the economy for quite a while, and many of them blame George W. Bush. Their new anxiety in the crisis showed up in even lower job-approval ratings for the president, and the Bush Burden — which McCain thought he had escaped in September — returned with a vengeance.
It’s something McCain has struggled with from the very beginning, when he began contemplating a second run for the presidency after the failure of his 2000 primary battle against Bush. In 2006, as McCain laid the groundwork for his present campaign, it appeared his biggest problem — and also the best opportunity to differentiate himself from Bush — was the war in Iraq. Bush seemed to have no idea how to stop Iraq’s growing sectarian violence, and his approval rating fell with each new episode of mayhem. At the beginning of the year, it stood at 43 percent in Gallup. A few months later, it was 31 percent, with a disapproval rating of 65 percent.
At first, McCain and his team thought Bush’s situation would improve. “I’ll be honest with you, I didn’t think his rating would stay at Nixon-like levels,” John Weaver, who was a close McCain aide at the time, told me recently. “I thought it would go up.” But it didn’t. And with each tick downward, McCain had more work to do. When George H. W. Bush campaigned to succeed Ronald Reagan in 1988, Reagan’s Gallup approval rating was in the middle 50s, with a disapproval rating in the mid to high 30s. McCain never expected to be running to succeed a popular president, but he was surprised to see Bush fall into the 20s and stay there. It was at that point — with Bush down, pressure to withdraw from Iraq increasing, and Republicans wobbling — that McCain defied the president and made the bet that won him the Republican nomination. Even some of McCain’s closest advisers weren’t on board. “There was definitely nervousness about the surge, and not everyone supported the idea,” former McCain aide Mark McKinnon told me in an e-mail exchange. “On the other hand, when it came to matters of national security, we all deferred completely to McCain, trusting his judgment over our own.”
CONTINUED 1 2 Next >
