Dems: McCain No GOP Maverick

Wed, January 09, 2008 - 6:16 PM

Has Maverick John McCain become George W. Bush 2.0?
That’s one of the claims made in a memo circulated today by Democratic National Committee strategists targeting the Arizona senator, the GOP victor in Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary.
The aim is to depict McCain as now unacceptable to many independent voters, who are likely to be the key swing bloc come November’s general election.
“McCain loyalists might shout ‘Mac is Back,’ but it is only a short time before people remember why he went away to begin with,” writes DNC research director Mike Gehrke.
Gehrke goes on to cite news coverage from last year chronicling McCain’s then-plummeting poll numbers and his eventual fall from the perch early front-runner for the GOP nomination.
Much of that coverage blamed McCain’s problems to his sudden efforts toe the GOP establishment line, and reach out to the hard-core Republican base.
Such moves included his accepting a speech at Liberty University in Virginia at the request of the late conservative religious leader Jerry Falwell. It also included his voting to make permanent Bush tax cuts that he once criticized, and being the most prominent congressional defender of the war in Iraq (although McCain insists he started raising concerns early on about how the war was being executed.)
Despite McCain’s victory on Tuesday in New Hampshire, Gehrke writes that McCain now faces problems with independent voters because of that strategy to court the conservative base of his party -- even if some may have forgotten it.
“Republican partisans might buy the changes and even be happy with then,” writes Gehrke. “Mainstream pundits with a weak spot for his personal story and prickly personal style might overlook them.”
But Gehrke writes that exit polls of actual voters show that “McCain’s reinvention of 2007 has left him “with deep lingering problems with independents.”
He notes that 32 percent of the voters in the New Hampshire Republican primary in 2000 were independents, and that McCain that year won 61 percent of them. This year, while substantially more independents voted in the Republican primary, he wrote that McCain’s share of their votes fell to 38 percent.
“McCain’s reinvention as a right-wing partisan might convince the Republican base that they don’t have to worry about Maverick McCain standing in the way of a radical right-wing agenda,” writes Gehrke.
“However, swing voters who are looking for the Maverick McCain might be puzzled when this version of John McCain shows up at their doorstep, with his new baggage in town,” the memo concludes.

-- Billy House