McCain is getting little attention

Sen. John McCain is getting somewhat bashed by his own party, especially some of the heavyweight popular spokespersons in talk radio. He’s not all that popular with too many folks, conservative Republican or otherwise.

Over the weekend, I traveled to a family wedding in a critical swing state in the Midwest and talked with a cross-section of people there about the candidates, learning even more about the mistrust of Sen. Obama. And the grudges against McCain, including some Vietnam veterans who turned on him with the last GI bill vote.

His renegade reputation has been in question lately. It’s either, ‘where is it?’, or ‘why is he expressing it in THIS way?!’.

So I’m at the airport today reading the weekend Wall Street Journal and coming across some interesting articles on John McCain. Especially since very few media are doing any real coverage of him these days. Understandably so. Which is the point of Peggy Noonan’s column.

Mr. McCain just can’t get as much coverage as Mr. Obama, or the coverage is dutiful and therefore deadly. “McCain Unveils Proposal.” “McCain Responds.” At Google News there are 97,000 stories on Mr. McCain as I write this column, 138,000 on Mr. Obama. You know Mr. McCain’s problems. He’s old, he’s angered everyone along the way, he never seems to mean it. His stands seem like positions. He bebops from issue to issue and never seems fully engaged in the real meat of policy, the content of it.

Also, we all know him. This, in time, will become a benefit to him—a big one. At the moment, early on, it’s not. Mr. Obama has the lightning, he’s new, he’s still just being discovered.

Please, let’s discover all we can about our two presidential candidates. Obama is already good at captivating audiences, including the media. Noonan has some advice for McCain.

What can Mr. McCain do? It’s still early, a lot of history has yet to unspool, we’ve entered summer and the shallow part of the campaign, the doldrums, there’s a little space. He should take advantage of it and have some fun.

This would be a good time for him to get interesting again. And he’ll find it easy because he is interesting. That’s why the boys on the bus loved him in 2000. That’s why the Republican base rejected him in 2000. He was hot and George W. Bush was—well, let’s call it mellow. Mr. McCain attacked Christian conservative leaders while Mr. Bush played them. Republicans were trying to recover from eight years of interesting. They didn’t want more.

I used to think what Mr. McCain’s aides thought after he started winning: He has to change now, be more formal, more constrained. That was exactly wrong.

If it’s not in the man’s nature, let him be the person he is, and not molded to media ‘handlers’.

Noonan says we need more of “McCain unplugged”.

The fall will be dead serious. At this point why not be himself, be human? Let him refind his inner rebel, the famous irreverent maverick, let the tiger out of the cage. It won’t solve everything but it will help obscure some other problems. His campaign is still not in great shape, his advance operation is not sharp—the one thing Republicans always used to know how to do!—he has many aides and few peers, and aides so doofuslike they blithely talk about the partisan impact of terror attacks.

That was really stepping in it. All the campaigns have had more than their ‘moments’. This is another one for McCain. He was trying to stay on topic. It’s happened to the Obama campaign a number of times now.

Let’s find out more about who they are. What their policies and principles are.

Along those lines….I came across this op-ed piece in the WSJ today and found it very interesting, as boring as it had the potential to be. Granted, I was stuck at a gate with an ongoing delay, so venturing further into the newspapers than I otherwise would have. But afer all, this was Phill Gramm.

It’s way too long a pice to parse down here at length. But whoever we elect as next president of the US, they will have to deal wisely with the issues Gramm raises in this piece, issues most Americans may find dry or boring or out of their immediate radar range. So let’s take it in snips:

Mr. Gramm pounces: “When you help a company raise capital, to put its idea to work, and you create jobs, those jobs are the best housing program, education program, nutrition program, health program ever created. Look, if a man in one lifetime is responsible for creating 100 real jobs, permanent jobs, then he’s done more than most do-gooders have ever achieved.”

His dialogue gets into the real competition between the two worldviews at stake in this election. Good stuf to pay attention to.

“Why is America the richest country in the world?” he asks. “It’s not because our people are more brilliant; it’s because we have a better free-market system. Why has Texas created 1.6 million jobs in the last 10 years whereas Michigan has lost 300,000 jobs and Ohio has lost 100,000 jobs? Because governance matters, taxes matter, regulation matters. Our opponents in this campaign are so dogmatic in their goal of having more government because they love the power it brings to them that they’re willing to let it impose costs on the working people that they say they want to help. I am not.”

Hers’s anothe interesting snip:

To Mr. Gramm, the silver bullet is the veto pen. Here’s his explanation: “If McCain is elected, he’s going to have one thing Democrats in Congress desperately want: control of the money. And his ability to promote his agenda – the tax cuts, his foreign policy – will depend on his willingness to say no. Bush simply signed everything. They could blackmail Reagan by threatening to cut defense. But there is nothing John McCain wants from Congress. He wants to cut defense. There’s no place they can take him in cutting spending that he’s not willing to go.”

That’s a more formidable opponent that anyone has credited John McCain with being. As Peggy Noonan urges, this summer ‘down time’ is prime time to reorganize that campaign. And all prevailing political wisdom aside (that would be the collective wisdom that has gotten Washington nowhere for several years not), it’s time to let the candidates be themselves. And then Americans will know who they’re about to elect.