McCain on theRopes in Missouri

The Republican candidate risks it all in a handful of key states by distancing himself from Bush’s legacy and accusing Barack Obama of being a socialist.

John McCain is going to have to make some choices. Two of his advisors anonymously told CNN that the campaign plans to stop running in three states which, while still relatively in play, have been deemed out of their reach: Colorado, where his running mate Sarah Palin made a campaign stop on Monday, New Mexico and Iowa. The Republican strategy will be to shift a large amount of effort in Pennsylvania, whose 21 electoral votes would allow them to reach the 270 count of needed electoral votes, given that North Carolina, Florida, Missouri, Nevada and Ohio stay red. Nothing is less certain.

On Monday in St. Charles, a residential area in a suburb of St. Louis, McCain didn’t draw in the crowds; between 2,000 and 2,500 supporters at a rally in a Republican stronghold isn’t very impressive. The contrast was striking, especially since an Obama rally two days before brought 100,000 people under the emblematic arch of Missouri’s capital. The reporter from the Los Angeles Times saw it as, “a symbol of defiance where the Republican candidate gets confronted in this crucial state,” where voters have always picked the winner of the presidential election since 1904, the sole exception being 1956 (when Eisenhower trumped Stevenson).

McCain has been hammering a twofold message at each of his three stops in Missouri: “Barack Obama wants to raise taxes in order to redistribute the wealth,” and “I am not George W. Bush.” The two themes came out in the final presidential debate last Wednesday: the first message, from an exchange about “Joe the Plumber,” and the second from McCain’s best retort of the night: “Senator Obama, if you wanted to debate George W. Bush, you should have run four years ago.”

“Why didn’t McCain run four years ago-like he did four years before that?” asked New York Times columnist Frank Rich last Sunday: “Instead, McCain campaigned for Bush’s reelection, congratulating Bush for the political choices he had once opposed and letting America slip into the bottom of the hole where we find ourselves today.”

The commentary is pointed of course, but it illustrates the dilemma of a candidate cornered between two contradictory images: the reformer and the keeper of the status quo, between the straight-shooter who boasts of repeatedly breaking ranks from his own party and the recalcitrant partisan of pure, hard Republican orthodoxy. Which one is the real John McCain?

A Taxation Conversion

In fiscal matters, the conversion is right line with his ex-rival George W. Bush even though he had once denounced his “gifts to the wealthy” back in 2000. The tax increases on annual incomes of more than $250,000 a year now and the tax cuts that Obama is proposing are what John McCain called on the Fox News channel, “a redistribution of wealth,” which is a form of socialism. “But at least in Europe,” he said, “those Socialist leaders that he [Obama] much admires at least clarify their objectives. Critics call up the fact that the $250 billion buyout of toxic loans by the federal government proposed by McCain is also a form of redistribution and that the level of government participation in the banks is a form of statism that reeks of socialism.

This gives McCain even more of a reason to distance himself from Bush. “The last eight years have not worked out, have they?” he says in one of his television spots. He has some ground to make up to convince the public that things will change under him; close to half of the people polled in a survey from the Washington Post and ABC think that he would follow the same policies as Bush. Concerning taxes, a study from CBS shows that in spite of the promises to not raise them, 53% of the respondents don’t believe McCain, while only 51% believe that Obama would make their taxes higher.

More troublesome for McCain is the sharp improvement of his rival’s image in another poll published Tuesday by the New York Times: 53% of voters have a favorable opinion of Obama, about the highest number tabulated for a presidential candidate since the paper and CBS began to track this rating over twenty-eight years ago. Not only has McCain remained at a favorable opinion of 36%, but his negatives have also increased from 35% to 45% in one month. And the Sarah Palin effect has been otherwise negative: the running mate now tracks a 41% unfavorable opinion, an 11 point increase.