McCain: Electing the Candidates You Prefer Will Put Them In Charge of the Country
John McCain tries out a new campaign theme:
Republican presidential nominee John McCain on Saturday raised the prospect of a complete Democratic takeover of Washington as a reason to elect him over Democrat Barack Obama in 10 days. [...] McCain said having Democrats in control of the White House, the U.S. House of Representatives under Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and the Senate under Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, would give Democrats unfettered power. [...] “But that is exactly what’s going to happen if the Democrats have total control of Washington. We can’t let that happen. Are you ready for Obama, Pelosi and Reid?” the Arizona senator said.
I’m going to agree with Chris Bowers that there’s something paradoxical about this. Presumably, the reason Democrats are forecast to make gains in the House and the Senate and Obama is leading in the polls is that, yes, most voters want Democrats to take over. This sounds more like a fundraising pitch than a general election argument. Voters prefer a Democratic congress and they seem to prefer Obama as well. To the 41 percent of people who have an unfavorable view of Pelosi, this is maybe a persuasive argument, but to the 59 percent who either like her or are indifferent it’s hard to see this moving the dial. Meanwhile, I doubt anyone even knows who Harry Reid is.
51 Responses to “McCain: Electing the Candidates You Prefer Will Put Them In Charge of the Country”
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October 26th, 2008 at 9:18 am
“there’s something paradoxical about this”
not really.
at the congressional level, most voters like their own rep, but dislike congress as a whole.
their feelings about their own rep are very different from their feelings about congress as a whole.
and their feelings about electing a democrat for their own district may also be different from their feelings about the entire congress being democratic.
mccain is just trying to turn the general dislike of congress into a reason for each voter to dislike their particular democratic candidate.
plus, in addition, there is a fairly widespread dogma that we should all prefer divided government as a check against legislative excesses.
at any rate, that’s what the republicans always say when a democrat might get into the white house.
i agree this whole line of mccain’s is bullshit, but it’s not incomprehensible; he’s trying to make me think that i’m voting for the whole congress, not just my own rep, because feelings about the two things diverge.
October 26th, 2008 at 9:20 am
One thing the McCain/Palin campaign has shown is that what they take for granted that ALL Amercians know (Nancy Pelosi is a Communist, Harry Reid eats children, Obama is the monstrous love child of Stalin and Hitler) is really only known by people who listen to the likes of Mark Levin, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh. They have mistaken Hannity’s America for the United States of America.
Thus the puzzlement on their part when they roll out an attack on Pelosi and Reid and the vast majority of people scratch their heads in puzzlement.
On the other hand, the whole country knows how badly the Republicans have fucked up the country and don’t believe the whole “Who are you going to believe, me, Sean Hannity or your own lying eyes” shtick.
And the funny thing is, that while the “effete Republican elite” personified by Frum, Will, Noonan, Parker, Brooks, etc. KNOW that the Dittohead faction in the Republican party isn’t a majority even among Republicans, much less the public at large, the wrench-turning machinery in the party doesn’t realize that the public at large doesn’t respond to the “Pelosi/Reid” dog whistle.
I don’t even think they’ll learn their lesson in Novemeber – they’ll just crank that Dittohead/Hannity’s America bullshit to 12.
I rub my hands in glee at that prospect.
October 26th, 2008 at 9:24 am
In a sense, I think you are missing the point. I may prefer the Democrats as a party, but I would also prefer them not to have complete control over all branches of the government.
I say this earnestly, power corrupts. Checks and balances are meant to keep our elected leaders honest, without a split government, one of the greatest checks is removed.
In normal circumstances I would not want this to happen, in many ways I still wish it wouldnt happen. With that said…I can’t trust the Republicans to take their responsibility to GOVERN seriously, so I have to put my faith in the responsibility of one party alone. This is not a situation I like being in.
October 26th, 2008 at 9:36 am
Well, they CAN make a strong case….”One-party rule is terrible! Its a disaster!! They’ll f*ck it all up!!! How do we know? Look at what WE did with 6 years of Republican absolute control of Washington! I mean we REALLY just blew it! You want that again???”
October 26th, 2008 at 9:54 am
Matthew’s right on this one. The divided government argument is an “inside baseball” argument that most voters don’t understand or don’t buy if they do understand it. The dislike of congress is driven as much by Dems who don’t think the congress is doing enough, but would never consider voting for a Republican, as it is by people who dislike the thought of a Democratic majority. The generic party preference polls demonstrate pretty clearly that most voters don’t fear a Pelosi/Reid congress.
That said, while it is an argument born of desperation and unlikely to work, it is (just about) all McCain has got at this point, so it probably isn’t a bad tactic on that level.
Mind you, as someone who loathes the Republicans at every level, but isn’t too thrilled with the Dems either for a host of reasons, I’d probably prefer the Dems to fall short of 60 votes in the Senate. But it’s not going to stop me from voting for Obama, and the Democratic house & senate candidates. And I live in a state where 2 of those 3 races are seriously contested.
October 26th, 2008 at 9:59 am
Oh, well–another day, another strategic direction for the Republican campaign.
But an appeal to “divided government” isn’t necessarily a sham, or a bad idea. Divided government wasn’t all bad, back in the 1990s…the question is, what is McCain really driving at with this pitch?
It’s certainly not enough to make seven per cent of the electorate change their votes for President. The country has already made up its mind that it wants to elect Obama; this is too weak and too abstract a point to raise.
Does it suggest that McCain has come to his senses and realized he won’t win, and so is now focusing his efforts on keeping the filibuster alive in the Senate?
Good call, if he has, but we’ll have to see where he spends the next week: Kentucky, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, Virginia? Or (snicker) Pennsylvania?
October 26th, 2008 at 10:03 am
No matter how hard they try, neither Reid nor Pelosi seems scary to folks. Reid’s so mild-mannered and Pelosi’s a grandmother.
I’m sure the Republicans would much rather run against the specter of Ted Kennedy or Hillary Clinton, but Ted’s health and the impact of Hillary’s presidential run has ruined that for them.
October 26th, 2008 at 10:06 am
i just read david frum’s piece in the wapo in which he concedes that mccain has lost, and says that republicans have to pour everything into holding the senate.
after reading that, what jumps out on rereading the mccain quote above about “obama, pelosi & reid” is how much it amounts to a concession speech on his own part.
i mean, “unless you elect republicans to congress, we’ll have obama, pelosi & reid” really means: we’re going to have obama, no matter what happens in congress.
so i think he’s feeling the pressure from frum and others not to bring down the whole party with him.
October 26th, 2008 at 10:10 am
Hm, “Vote for me, I’ll bring gridlock to Washington and make sure nothing gets done!”
Yes, thats a winning message. Especially because it really draws the contrast between OBAMA=CHANGE and MCCAIN=SAMEOLDSHIT. Just the thing to turn the race around.
I think my favorite part of the dog-whistle attacks have been the recent senate adds attacking the DSCC, like mcconnel’s one about schumer or the one in Mississippi that musgrove took money from the village people or used the same backdrop as some candidate in georgia did. Its like the republicans see their political enemies and think everyone else in america is as scared of them as they are.
October 26th, 2008 at 10:14 am
This is yet another failed Republican “Back to the Future” argument. OOHH-Scary-Pelosi didn’t work 2006, it won’t work in 2008.
October 26th, 2008 at 10:24 am
Cindy McCain questioned Obama’s character yesterday in New Mexico. They still haven’t learned…if you live in a glass house…you should keep your stones in your pocket!
October 26th, 2008 at 10:32 am
i dunno, roschelle.
i’d say cindy does a pretty good job of keeping mccain’s stones in her pocket.
or maybe in a vise.
that’s one scary woman, and i could almost feel sorry for what mccain’s going to face after she sees that she’ll never be nancy reagan.
October 26th, 2008 at 10:45 am
Good point. What people want is for voters in other states and districts to vote for divided government while allowing themselves to vote for whomever they want. Voters like pork in their district, but want voters in other districts to punish pols for bringing in pork.
October 26th, 2008 at 11:01 am
At recent rallies McCain would say “I am not George Bush” and the crowd would roar. It didn’t make sense.
Other than being Obama-contrary, what were they applauding?
October 26th, 2008 at 11:07 am
At recent rallies McCain would say “I am not George Bush” and the crowd would roar. It didn’t make sense…Other than being Obama-contrary, what were they applauding?
Clearly, this is a reference to Rene Magritte’s famous “This Is Not A Pipe” painting. McCain is highlighting the fundamental gap between the signifier (himself) and the thing signified (George Bush.)
Such postmodernist rhetoric is just more red meat to the GOP base.
October 26th, 2008 at 11:14 am
The long range question is what will politics and government be like in the U.S. after the Republican Party compeltes its death spiral and there is only one relevant party. Juding by Ted Kennedy and Joe Biden, political office will become even more of a family affair since they both want to make a bequest of their current Senate seats.
Image how odd the 2016 presidential election will be when it is decided sometime between the Iowa caucuses and SuperTuesday since the Republican Party will be irrelevant by then.
October 26th, 2008 at 11:23 am
Presumably, the reason Democrats are forecast to make gains in the House and the Senate and Obama is leading in the polls is that, yes, most voters want Democrats to take over.
Which is why it’s counterproductive for McCain/Palin to be distorting the Democrats’ agenda. If Democrats really wanted to, say, impose socialism or surrender to al Qaeda, voters will have given them a mandate to do so. (If that’s what Democrats wanted, which it isn’t.) This is especially foolhardy when you know you’re losing, as McCain/Palin seem to realize.
October 26th, 2008 at 11:29 am
Presumably, the reason Democrats are forecast to make gains in the House and the Senate and Obama is leading in the polls is that, yes, most voters want Democrats to take over.
I’m not sure that’s true. For my part anyway, I’m quite nervous about the Democrats taking over, but the Republicans must be drubbed if they’re ever to understand the need to reform themselves.
October 26th, 2008 at 11:34 am
I continue to wait in vain for Democrats on the TV box to have the ‘nads to contest this with the clear and simple point that Americans and voters appear to overwhelmingly agree with them on the issues.
Anyone can disagree as to whether that’s “really” true, but you can g** d*** be sure that if Republicans were in the position the Democrats are they would be screaming this point at every opportunity.
I think the Democratic Party is still deeply riven by arguments that ‘OMG pleez let us sort of pretend to be like Republicans just better!’
October 26th, 2008 at 11:36 am
And currently I think the presence of Republicans in power at this point is akin to fecal contamination of food — i.e., I don’t need a bit of fecal matter to balance out my food, even if my food is bland and disappointing. Yet Republicans are telling me that people are afraid of having food that’s just too free of sh*t.
October 26th, 2008 at 11:51 am
Short of a video of Obama biting the head off of a squirrel,
I think the “divided government” argument is the only card McCain has left to play. Its his only available strategy at this point. The problem is, that card is a 2 of clubs and not an ace of spades. It will fail.
October 26th, 2008 at 12:03 pm
Yeah, but then we got to listen to the right wing blogosphere / radio nutsphere to tell us how really the top ranking card is the 2 of clubs, and how the whole card game is a Muslimo-Communist plot since Europe probably got its playing cards from the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt, and then of course Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright used to play poker with Barack Obama.
October 26th, 2008 at 12:20 pm
There’s probably people out there who dig the divided government argument, but I think a lot of those people just think that government is bad in general (so having it divided means it can’t do anything) and probably wouldn’t be voting for Obama anyway.
October 26th, 2008 at 12:47 pm
I’m wondering where anti-Pelosi sentiment comes from, sure she’s from San Francisco but she hasn’t pushed for anything extremely liberal, she’s actually gone out of her way to cave in to right wing and conservative democrats demands.
October 26th, 2008 at 1:33 pm
“In a sense, I think you are missing the point. I may prefer the Democrats as a party, but I would also prefer them not to have complete control over all branches of the government.
I say this earnestly, power corrupts.”
I think a lot of people lack perspective on how governments work in the rest of the world. In most parliamentary style governments, you have unity of executive and legislative power for the ruling party/coalition–the separation of legislative and executive power in the U.S. is pretty unusual. I think the separation of powers in the U.S. was sort of presuming the absence of political parties, which was a huge oversight. The filibuster in the Senate is yet another peculiar anti-democratic tactic.
At the same time, Americans often complain about the “do-nothing congress” and “gridlock”. Well, we get gridlock for a reason! When Congress and the President are from oppositional parties and have practically no common ground for policy agreement, and no impending crisis to force a compromise–of COURSE nothing gets done.
People always want Congress to make the tough, smart, long-term decisions that are “right” for our country. These things do not happen in the context of divided government, because the political reality always makes one party better off if they let the other party take credit when those decisions go wrong. In a divided government, where both parties have to take equal blame, it doesn’t happen at all.
I’ve always been interested to compare the “legislative productivity” of parliamentary systems to the U.S. system and see how much longer it takes to pass laws in our separated system.
October 26th, 2008 at 1:33 pm
To be fair, if I’m reading the article correctly, McCain was in Nevada when he mentioned Reid, so that particular audience would have known, anyway.
I do have a libertarian friend who is big on this “divided government” argument. If you’re coming from a far fringe like this and thus both parties are equally loathsome to you, it might make sense to essentially want gridlock. (I suspect this particular guy is still either gonna vote for Barr, or not vote.) I agree that the promise of gridlock is not gonna have much appeal to a committed Dem, Repub or moderate. Sadly, though, that’s probably enough to qualify it as one of McCain’s better arguments.
October 26th, 2008 at 1:39 pm
The divided government angle holds some water with me. After the Bush administration I think we could stand to have a democratic party hegemony for a while and just get back to 1999 with some kind of national health care. But for people who are to the right of me but to the left of John McCain it might be preferable to have a republican check on democratic power.
October 26th, 2008 at 1:55 pm
Which is why probably half of that anti-Pelosi sentiment comes not from the dittoheads, but from liberal Democrats pissed off with her for not doing more. And while the same goes for Harry Reid, something tells me that the “unchecked Democratic power” argument doesn’t quite ring the tone it was meant to with them.
October 26th, 2008 at 2:21 pm
If I were an independent who was leaning Dem in this election I imagine that being an argument I’d give some weight to.
October 26th, 2008 at 2:25 pm
Like most Americans, I normally prefer divided government. However, the situation isn’t normal. We’ve had one-party Republican rule for eight long years (the present Democratic Congress has been ineffectual). They’ve done a lot of damage.
I think the other party deserves at least eight years of unopposed power to attempt a massive repair job. If the repairs are successful, maybe they should even be rewarded with another four years to try and move this country forward.
October 26th, 2008 at 2:37 pm
I may prefer the Democrats as a party, but I would also prefer them not to have complete control over all branches of the government.
We are talking about the Democrats here. ‘Complete control’ means something different when you’re still wondering whether Reid will kick Lieberwhore out of his committee chair.
October 26th, 2008 at 3:03 pm
Drudge has this as his red center headline:
SHOCK: MATTY MISSES POINT
For instance, MattY probably likes pie. He might like it so much that he eats a whole pie, and then only later gets sick. That’s an example of MattY getting too much of something that had unforeseen side-effects. I’m sure there are second-grade level schoolbooks illustrating that somewhere.
October 26th, 2008 at 3:27 pm
Divided government makes sense when, and only when, the parties among whom power would be divided are fundamentally all sane and moral. The clash of interests can be a really good thing, but not when it means giving kleptocrats and the delusional significant influence over the government’s operations. Conservatives and libertarians would do well to try selling the divided government argument after there’s once again a sane right-of-center party.
October 26th, 2008 at 4:26 pm
What 33. Bruce Baugh said. The Republicans have proven themselves unworthy of a seat at the table, and the American people are reacting accordingly.
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