McCain Running From Bush Means Obama Loses Advantage (Update1)
By Michael Tackett
Sept. 8 (Bloomberg) -- For John McCain and Barack Obama, the race for the White House is a battle of the old and the new -- and it has little to do with age.
The U.S. presidential election is shaping up as a contest over the old America of Ohio's shuttered factories and Michigan's fading auto plants, as well as the newer America that loops from Northern Virginia's suburbs through the Sun Belt and west to Colorado.
While a sputtering economy and an unpopular war may give the Democrats an edge heading into the eight-week sprint to the Nov. 4 vote, other issues lurk in the background. Chief among them is whether Americans are ready to elect their first black president in Obama, 47, an Illinois senator.
``Democrats go into '08 as very clear favorites because of the obvious facts,'' says Merle Black, co-author of ``Divided America: The Ferocious Power Struggle in American Politics'' and a political science professor at Emory University in Atlanta. ``In that sense, it looks like Obama's election to lose.'' Still, Black adds, ``he might lose it.''
McCain leads Obama by 50 percent to 46 percent among registered voters, according to a weekend USA Today/Gallup Poll. The surge following the selection of McCain's running mate Sarah Palin marks a turnaround from a poll taken before the Republican convention, when he lagged by 7 percentage points.
Still, many Republicans say they have a disadvantage. Arizona Senator McCain, 72, is ``either tied or behind in every swing state,'' says John Weaver, a former top adviser. ``It's an uphill battle, cobbling together 270 electoral votes.''
In Play
Republicans face voter dissatisfaction over someone whose name won't be on the ballot -- George W. Bush, a president with approval ratings that are among the lowest in history.
Bush is ``the unspoken name in every aspect of the debate,'' says Andrew Kohut, director of the Washington-based Pew Research Center.
McCain's campaign is betting it can keep Florida and Ohio, two states Bush won in 2004, while adding Michigan and Pennsylvania, two states he lost.
In Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan, ``the group in play is the white working-class voter who had reservations about Obama but think they have been harmed by the economy,'' Kohut says.
The Obama campaign, meanwhile, is seeking to expand the Electoral College map in the South, pouring millions of dollars into Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia. It also has paid staff working in historically Republican states like Alaska, North Dakota and Montana.
The Palin Factor
McCain's choice of Sarah Palin as a running mate galvanized the Republican base that has been wary of McCain because of his clashes with religious leaders he once termed ``agents of intolerance'' and his sponsorship of a campaign-finance law. Her Sept. 3 acceptance speech drew raves from Republicans inside the St. Paul, Minnesota, convention hall and around the country.
Still, the Palin selection may give Democrats an opening to question McCain's decision-making because the Alaska governor, 44, has been in office for just 20 months.
In choosing his own running mate, ``Obama started early and was thorough from the start,'' says former Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey, 65, a Democrat who's now president of the New School University in New York. The Democratic nominee considered his selection of Senator Joe Biden, 65, of Delaware as ``the most important decision of his campaign,'' Kerrey says.
By contrast, McCain ``waited until the last minute,'' he says. ``If this is the way he does it -- and I like John a lot -- this is not good.''
While winning the base is important, both campaigns also will try to capture the broad middle of the electorate. The McCain campaign, saddled with Bush's unpopularity, says it has already started to blunt Democratic attacks that a Republican victory would amount to a third Bush term.
Redefining Republicans
``I think we literally redefined the Republican Party and the stakes of this election,'' Rick Davis, McCain's campaign manager, said on Bloomberg Television. Davis said that McCain wants to ``turn the page'' from Bush's politics.
Democrats say the McCain effort won't work. Despite the Palin pick, ``the essential architecture of this race is the same, which is that they continue to cling to the tattered banner of a failed policy, and we continue to talk about change,'' says David Axelrod, 53, Obama's chief political strategist.
Palin is ``basically to the right of her party, and he's down the line with the basic Bush policies,'' Axelrod says.
Both campaigns will try to wring every vote from core supporters. For Obama, that means blacks in urban areas; for McCain, it's rural white conservatives.
`Very, Very Good'
In the last two presidential elections, Republicans dominated the ``ground war'' -- dispatching legions of volunteers into key precincts where they knew they could turn out their voters. Ed McFadden, who advised Fred Thompson on his presidential primary bid, says Republicans are confident they can do it again.
``Typically, you don't see the get-out-the vote program really kick into high gear until after they understand what the ticket looks like,'' McFadden says. ``The get-out-the-vote is going to be very, very good'' with Palin on board.
``We have the network and system in place that to some degree just has to reconnect,'' he says. Republicans also look to state ballot initiatives focusing on hot-button issues like immigration and gay marriage in states including Florida, Oregon and Arkansas to encourage their supporters to the polls.
But getting out the vote will be different this time because of the record amount of money -- $390 million so far --that Obama has raised, and because of the impact of new technology.
Young Voters
The use of the Internet and text-messaging may drive the outcome, particularly among the young voters who have been among Obama's most enthusiastic backers. The question is whether they will come to the polls in large numbers in November; if they do, it would be the first time since the voting age was lowered to 18 in 1972 that they will substantially affect the result.
Obama's campaign is conducting a massive voter-registration drive. Steve Hildebrand, his deputy campaign manager, says three states -- Florida, Michigan and North Carolina --- have more than 400,000 new voters; Georgia and Pennsylvania have more than 300,000. Most of the new voters favor Obama, he says.
Internet advertising has resulted in ``thousands and thousands of click-throughs onto sites where they can register to vote,'' he says, and ``it's something we'll continue through the general election.''
Foreign Policy
The conventions provided the first set pieces of the campaign; the next will be Sept. 26, when McCain and Obama meet in Oxford, Mississippi, to debate foreign policy, the first of three scheduled confrontations.
The conventions represented the last events of the campaign over which the candidates could assert much control. Though they will try to script as many moments as possible, the election may be determined by how they react to unanticipated events.
McCain's big challenge is trying to keep the White House in Republican hands while not allowing himself to be yoked to the incumbent president. McCain and Palin ``have got to show an understanding of the economy, and demonstrate empathy for people who are negatively impacted,'' Weaver says.
Democrats will use Bush's record to make that difficult. ``This will be a referendum on the way things are today relative to eight years ago,'' Kerrey says. ``The American people want something different.''
