Companion thread.
I’d guess the Democrats are frankly spoilt for choice here. “Vote McCain for war with Iran” could resonate. What else could they run on that would and will really hit home with the voters McCain needs to catch?
Maybe use his age as a negative, suggest senility or somesuch.
They will probably fight hard enough with each other that the fallout from democratic nuclear holocaust wafts over to McCain, and he’ll die of democratic nuclear holocaust radiation.
Not if he suffocates under the mantle of succession first.
The Democratic nominee will probably portray McCain as “more of the same old same old,” and after today’s endorsement from Bush, they won’t be too wrong. McCain had a half-dozen chances to become something truly new and different over the past six or seven years, but never really did. He continued to suck up to the Bushies, even after it was obvious that the American public was disgusted with its president (how long has Bush’s approval rating been below 50%?) I was surprised that McCain carried Bush’s water for so long and so faithfully, and if anything causes him to lose the election, that will probably be the thing that does it.
The Democrats also have to make sure independents learn about McCain pandering to the same religious ‘leaders’ that Bush did. Make sure they know about John Hagee and the anti-vaccine crowd.
This links McCain to the Bush who cared more about interfering in the Terri Schivo case than responding to the tsunami or New Orleans disasters.
Ditto. Jon Stewart played this up nicely, that McCain wants to run on “experience” but also wants people to forget about the poor choices he made in recent years or his past associations with failed Bush policies. Expect pics like these to get a lot of play. Bush is running approvals in the low 20s (at best), and McCain can’t distance himself too much from him without pissing off the base. The Dems are best off hammering away at this, and if Obama (pleaseohpleaseohpleaseohplease) is the nominee, the difference will be that much more striking since the GOP won’t have the same amount of (tired but convenient) red meat against him as they will of the entire Clinton dynasty.
I saw somewhere (I know, I know) that had an ad calling him John McSame, letting people know that to elect him would be like giving W a third term. I think that meme might catch on in this era of McDreamy’s and what not.
YMMV
I’ve heard a lot of references to 8 years of Bush/McCain, as if he were Bush’s VP running for president.
I intend to start a rumor that McCain is a Republican. I’m not sure it’s true, but that should be enough to torpedo the old fart’s chances if anything will. 
Rather a nasty fork McCain finds himself upon. He can’t afford to ditch the remaining Bushivik loyalists, all 20% of them, he needs them desperately. Therefore, he cannot publicly repudiate Bush policies, so the charge that he is simply an extension of Bush will stick. At the same time, some of those very same Bushies remember McCain as a harsh critic of Bush policies (the “maverick”), so he has to suck it really hard to get their blessing.
As well, he has locked himself into a war that is already unpopular. If things don’t get any worse, it will still be unpopular. It is vanishingly unlikely that it will improve so much in the next Freidman Unit to make it popular, and stands a reasonable to fair chance to go totally tits up. And he’s married to it.
McCain’s going swimming in the shark pond, with a backpack full of bowling balls.
This is the part I never understood about McCain. After the Bushies raped him in North Carolina in 2000, he distanced himself from the White House, and why not? Rove et al fucked him over pretty good. I understand that he stood with the president on the war in Afghanistan – hell, even I stood with the little twerp then. But Iraq gave McCain a perfect opportunity to repudiate Bush and be a real pain in the ass, and give the Republicans a possible choice in 2004. (Yes, :rolleyes: H. Clinton “voted for the war” in Iraq, but not really. The decision to go to war had already been made; the Republican-controlled Congress had little choice but to fund it.) But McCain went running back into Bush’s arms for the most disgusting session of political make-up sex ever, and they’ve been lovers ever since.
If McCain had stepped smartly away from the president in 2003 and stayed away, he’d be seen now as a principled hero who is anything but the same old GOP spear-carrier. And that isn’t just hindsight – not-very-well-informed pundits (can you say Keith Olbermann?) were calling for McCain to do that very thing as the war was being launched! So had he done the right thing in 2003, he’d be perceived as the most courageous man in America, and the Dems wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of taking this election. And McCain could tell the 20% of Americans who still think Bush is being a good president to go piss up a rope, because he’d have 80 percent of the country behind him.
If he wanted to be seen as bold and innovative … well, he should have been bold and innovative.
Like Chuck Hagel?
The poor guy practically got drummed out of the GOP:
With a good alternative in the race, it’s time for national Republicans to tell Hagel that he’s on his own.
I like it. Bush needs to be attached to McCain like cement galoshes. Make sure that if he tries to go left, which would be the reasonable thing for him to do, he can only do it by repudiating Bush. It has the added benefit of being reasonably honest, since McCain himself has flip-flopped into supporting the Bush agenda.
In terms of viral strategies, the Democrats might alienate the religious right from McCain by highlighting McCain’s rejection of some of their more extreme demands: prayer in schools, creationism in schools, his distaste for waterboarding, that kind of thing. Now, they’ll never vote for Obama, but if the RR stays home on election day, McCain will be in real trouble. And where will this have greatest effect? In the Bible Belt, which also happens to have a large black population, a traditional Democratic demographic and a strong source for Obama in particular. I’m just spitballing here, but Obama could maybe flip Virginia or Louisiana. In any event, that might force the Republicans to devote resources to places they thought were unassailable.
He’s already acknowledged that he has to convince the Merkin Pipple that the war is being won and is worth it, or “I lose”. He did retract that immediately, since no active candidate dares mention the L word, but it says here he had it right the first time.
The Dem strategy will be to point out all the ways he’s sucked up to Bush and toed the party line, and yes, wants more of the same. Oh, and expect to hear a lot about his admitting he doesn’t know much about economics. That’ll go over well, won’t it? They won’t even have to mention him looking and sounding old and tired - he’ll do that himself.
I kind of fancy the John W. McCain moniker some lefties have tagged him with.
The loss of integrity is what does it for me. After the way he was treated in North Carolina in 2000, to turn around and support this administration in order to get sloppy seconds on the Oval Office after Bush was through with it? And McCain dutifully lines up next at the gang bang.
Five years in a bamboo cage and the North Vietnamese couldn’t break the man, but a hint that they might let him become president and he folded like a cheap suit. There’s a lesson there about ambition for us all, I think.
It is a weakness of democracy that we can’t impose power on the worthy and unwilling.
Can’t, I’m busy the next four years, sorry.