HOW MCCAIN CAN WIN (Steven Stark, Boston Phoenix) 1) Running Left If McCain runs as a traditional conservative – just repeating a mantra of no new taxes, support for the conservative social agenda, and a continued presence in Iraq – he’s toast. Instead, as political analyst Dick Morris has suggested, he needs to run counter to some Republican principles and become a rampaging populist on certain issues – attacking outrageous executive pay, corporate greed, and high credit-card fees, for instance. 2) Running Right How does McCain run right at the same time? By taking positions on the various initiative campaigns that will get hot in the fall. 3) Attacking Congress Obama is going to spend the whole campaign trying to tie McCain to George W. Bush. Fair enough, but there is an institution with even less favorable public-opinion numbers than the president: the Democratic Congress. Taking a page from Harry S. Truman’s uphill 1948 campaign, McCain should spend the next six months running against Congress and warning that, if the Democrats control both branches of government come January, the country is in for the kind of change it may not want to endorse. 4) Picking a Veep If McCain uses his veep choice to move right and stay traditional, Obama remains the only candidate of change in the race. And this year, that’s what voters want.
OBAMA SEEKS TO CLARIFY HIS DISPUTED COMMENTS ON DIPLOMACY (Jim Rutenberg and Jeff Zeleny, New York Times) In an interview on Wednesday, Mr. Obama, of Illinois, sought to emphasize, as he and his aides have done continually over the last few days, the difference between avoiding preconditions for talks with nations like Iran and Syria, and granting them automatic discussions at the presidential level. While Mr. Obama has said he would depart from the Bush administration policy of refusing to meet with certain nations unless they meet preconditions, he has also said he would reserve the right to choose which leaders he would meet, should he choose to meet with them at all. The issue presents one of Mr. Obama’s biggest political and policy tests yet as he appears headed toward a general-election contest against Senator John McCain of Arizona: How to continue to add nuance to a policy argument that he views as a winning one, without playing into a fierce round of accusations that he is either shifting positions or appeasing the enemy. Already the McCain campaign was accusing Mr. Obama of “backtracking,” particularly in the case of whether he would talk with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran… In the interview Wednesday, Mr. Obama conceded that he might need to do a better job explaining his policy.
MCCAIN’S UNDERTOW (Vaughn Ververs, CBS News) McClellan charges (among other things) that the war in Iraq was sold to Americans through a “political propaganda campaign” that was “all about manipulating sources of public opinion,” according to a copy of the book previewed by the . Most strikingly, McClellan concludes about the war: “What I do know is that war should only be waged when necessary, and the Iraq war was not necessary.” Should Hillary Clinton somehow still win the nomination, such accusations may have less impact since both she and McCain voted to give President Bush the authorization to go to war. But Obama just received new talking points to bolster his argument that it is judgment, not the experience McCain is selling, which is the more important quality for a president. Obama, whose early opposition to the war has helped him get within inches of the Democratic nomination, will certainly hammer this point home… McCain was thought to be best positioned to avoid the undertow because he is not viewed as a typical “Bush Republican” and because he has clashed with the president in the past. But when it comes to the war, there’s been little distance between the two men. Allegations that an unnecessary war was sold to America through a propaganda campaign certainly won’t help McCain gain that distance he’s been seeking from Bush in recent months.
TEAM MCCAIN: READY FOR PRIME TIME? (Michael Scherer, Time) Fall campaigns for president require massive organizations. What’s more, McCain is likely to face the biggest, baddest team on the block. … [Obama’s] organization ticks like a clock, has had an unwavering message and has kept a firmly fixed inner circle. McCain, meanwhile, is still formulating his general-election pitch and struggling to build his core team. He is also trying, for the second time in as many years, to create a campaign that can win on a big scale. His previous attempt to run as the institutional candidate, with a projected nine-figure budget, failed spectacularly last July and nearly forced him out of the GOP race. Though his campaign is leaner than his rival’s, McCain says he is happy with the progress.
FEMALE VP HOPEFULS CONTRAST WITH CLINTON (Ben Adler, Politico) Like Hillary Rodham Clinton, the three other women most frequently mentioned as possible running mates for Barack Obama are widely recognized as shrewd, trailblazing politicians who would provide critical ballast to an Obama-led presidential ticket. But according to interviews with Republicans in their home states, Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano and Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill differ from Clinton by two important measures: They’ve managed to win elections without developing polarizing personas, and they’ve shied away from emphasizing gender in their campaigns.
ON POLICY, OBAMA BREAKS LITTLE NEW GROUND (Perry Bacon, Jr., Washington Post) When Obama… decided to run for president after only two years in the Senate… he effectively dismissed the importance of policy proposals, declaring in one speech in early 2007, “We’ve had plenty of plans, Democrats,” and in another: “Every four years, somebody trots out a white paper, they post it on the Web.” He cast his “new kind of politics” in terms of his ability to transcend divisions and his unique biography and offered few differences on issues from Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton and the other Democratic presidential candidates. But now this approach faces a new test from Sen. John McCain. The GOP candidate is making an aggressive appeal to independents by emphasizing his past and present stances against party orthodoxy, particularly his proposals to combat global warming. Obama has not emphasized any signature domestic issue, or signaled that he would take his party in a specific direction on policy, as Bill Clinton did with his “New Democrat” proposals in 1992 that emphasized welfare reform or as George W. Bush did with his “compassionate conservatism” in 2000, when he called on Republicans to focus more on issues such as education.
PELOSI VOWS TO PREVENT FIGHT AT DEM CONVENTION (Carla Marinucci, San Francisco Chronicle) House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she will step in if necessary to make sure the presidential nomination fight between Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama does not reach the Democratic National Convention–though she believes it could be resolved as early as next week. Pelosi predicted Wednesday that a presidential nominee will emerge in the week after the final Democratic primaries on June 3, but she said “I will step in” if there is no resolution by late June regarding the seating of delegates from Florida and Michigan, the two states that defied party rules by holding early primaries. “Because we cannot take this fight to the convention,” she said. “It must be over before then.”
CANDIDATES SPLIT SHARPLY ON BUSH’S NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND LAW (Anne Marie Chaker and Amy Chozick, Wall Street Journal) Barack Obama attacked a key plank of John McCain’s education platform, taking up an issue that has been on the back burner amid a campaign dialogue dominated by war and the economy. The candidates’ biggest disagreement on education policy comes over President Bush’s No Child Left Behind law, which threatens sanctions if schools don’t meet certain standards of achievement. Sen. Obama wants to overhaul the law, while Sen. McCain wants to extend it. “We must fix the failures of No Child Left Behind,” Sen. Obama said Wednesday while touring the Mapleton Expeditionary School of the Arts, a Colorado public school.
MORE: Obama Wonks It Up in Education Speech (Karl Vick, Washington Post) In his prepared speech on education, Barack Obama included a great deal to answer the charge that his campaign is long on soaring rhetoric and short on the earthbound specifics required to actually govern. For more than 20 minutes, the Illinois Democrat laced the language of uplift and challenge with the acronyms of education and reform: GEAR UP and TRIO, a proposed Service Scholarship program to replace retiring teachers, a Teacher Residency Program to recruit them at mid-career from other professions, and the Career Ladder Initiative to reward teachers who mentor others.
CHAMPIONS OF TRANSPARENCY CLOSE FUNDRAISERS (Josh Gerstein, New York Sun) Both Senator McCain and Senator Obama have reputations as crusaders for transparency in government and campaign finance, but neither presidential contender has shown much interest in letting the sun shine in on their own fund-raising events. Press accounts of fund-raisers President Bush held with Mr. McCain in Phoenix on Tuesday night focused on a decision to move the events to a private home to accommodate Mr. McCain’s desire not to spend a lot of time on camera with the outgoing president, who is suffering from dismal approval ratings. However, little of the news coverage dwelled on or explored the decision by the senator of Arizona to exclude reporters and press photographers from virtually all of his fund-raising events. Mr. Obama skewered Mr. McCain for the secrecy surrounding the joint fund-raiser with Mr. Bush, which produced only a few seconds of video of the president and the presumptive Republican nominee together at a nearby airport… Some reporters said Mr. Obama’s critique would have had more credibility had he not followed it up by excluding cameras from his own fund-raiser yesterday at a Denver hotel… The level of access to presidential fund-raising at the moment is far more limited than in 2000 or 2004, according to reporters who covered those races.
