Early on, McCain was running ads and making statements that he was a lot like Ronald Reagan. He seemed to have moved away from this, but I wonder why. Did pure Reaganites resent this comparison?
Also, couldn’t McCain have thrown up some of the ole Reagan rhetoric like “watch your wallet” in the debates, etc? Or, would it look bad to recycle the old Republican battle cries? (I know the “Are you better off than 4 years ago” wouldn’t fly this time. )
Last, McCain seemed like a no-name to me. Did it surprise Huckabee supporters that McCain won the Republican primary election?
McCain seemed like a no-name? He nearly won the candidacy in 2000 and was well known before then. He’s been somewhat famous since he was a POW and he’s been a Senator for years.
Was he more of a no-name than Barack Obama to you?
Huckabee is more of a no-name than him, right?
I just realized I might be getting whooshed. If that’s the case, ignore my post.
With regards to changing campaign tactics, I think that McCain was running as a disciple of Regan (puke) until the Swift Boat tactics got to him. What I mean by that is that Bush won in '04 because he successfully attacked and brought down John Kerry’s war record; the one thing that was supposedly unassailable. Rove and Co. thought that if they could undermine that, everything else would come down like a house of cards, and they were right. Come back to this year and Rove’s mark was seen again when McCain tried to be an agent of “Change” in order to undermine that as one of Obama’s major campaign tenets. The problem is that Obama is a much more nuanced politician than Kerry was/is and the takeover wasn’t ever completely successful, despite bringing Governor Palin into the mix to demonstrate that they meant business when they wanted to come in and change things in Washington.
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