Cue the Ticket Splitters
By Mike Murphy
Every flavor of Democrat--and then some--turned up for the big show in Denver. Hip young Obamacrats, Newport-smoking grudge carriers from Team Hillary stomping around in sensible shoes and, of course, a walking forest of gung-ho environmentalists. The proceedings in Denver were so relentlessly green that even the magnetic hotel card keys were made out of some sort of sustainable wood fiber. (I know because I had plenty of time to study my planet-friendly card key during several trips to the front desk to get it to finally work.) Obama's heavy chore in Denver was to unite all these folks to seize the opportunity of a big Democratic year.
Obama's convention was largely an internal affair. In Minneapolis, John McCain faces a different dilemma. He must reach outside the Republican base and win over ornery independents as a different kind of Republican. Can the GOP put on a different kind of convention?
GOP conclaves work like the docile old horse at the petting zoo. The old mare plods along a path it knows well, the kid is happy riding and the show ends right on schedule with no surprises. Sure, the wealthy pro-choice donors who fund the GOP occasionally break into an uneasy sweat when caught in an elevator crush with a few of the party's pro-life, pro-gun fuglemen, but in the end everybody has a good time, and we usually win the election.
This year everything is different. Pollsters have never recorded a higher "wrong track" feeling about the country in the history of polling. Voters are angry enough to march on Castle Washington carrying pitchforks and Frankenstein torches. While early--and therefore shaky--polls may show a close race for President, the Republican vs. Democrat numbers look bleak for McCain. To win, he will need as many as 1 out of 5 of his voters to be a ticket splitter: someone who will vote Democratic for the House and Senate but pull the lever for McCain before leaving the booth. McCain will get some of those votes for free in the South, but the rest he will have to earn.
Minneapolis is McCain's great chance to define himself to these folks. Ticket splitters eschew partisanship. They don't trust any one party to have all the power. They are happy with divided government, so long as that government can deliver results. The convention's hammering on Obama should be targeted at these voters and portray Obama as an unapologetic liberal who will team up with congressional Democrats to put Washington on a runaway train of pent-up left-wing legislative appetites. That will surely cause moderate ticket splitters to think twice about a President Obama. But the vital issue is how McCain sells himself. He must show these fickle voters that a McCain Administration will be something they can live with: independent, effective and not stridently ideological.
Some argue that McCain needs to use this convention to shore up the Republican base, and that all this namby-pamby stuff will turn off the rank and file. It is true that after years of maverick behavior, McCain will be in the ironic position of having many of his longtime political enemies staring back at him from the convention floor. The creative-destructive caucus in the GOP is small, however, and few crave victory at the cost of self-immolation. And the prospect of an Obama-Pelosi diktat in Washington is enough to make even the most McCain-hating Republican sprint breathlessly to the polls. Ultimately it is a question of simple arithmetic. In 2008, the GOP base alone is not large enough to deliver victory. The free-market party must either move with the market or die.
To attract votes beyond the base, McCain's convention must trumpet his peerless credentials as a reformer. He must engage passionately on middle-class economic issues. McCain's comfort zone may be world affairs, but if he cannot hold his own in a kitchen-table debate with Obama on jobs, schools and health care, he'll visit ticket-splitting kitchens once more on Election Day, but this time as toast. Finally, he must give the convention speech of a lifetime.
It is a myth that McCain cannot give a great speech. True, he doesn't do it very often. But he has given compelling speeches that wrapped powerful arguments in lyrical language about honor, battle and victory. His convention speech has a different purpose: it must welcome and then reassure. It must show in plain language not one party's road to victory but what a McCain presidency would mean to all Americans. This is not the sort of convention the GOP does naturally. But in this difficult year, the Republicans must gallop, not walk, along a different path.
Murphy is a GOP political consultant and was senior strategist for Senator John McCain's 2000 presidential race