By Robert Schlesinger
Reading today’s NYT story by Elisabeth Bumiller about John McCain’s attempts to court the GOP, it struck me how much the Arizona senator has inverted my old neighbor Richard M. Nixon’s aphorism about the primaries. You run to the right in a GOP primary, Nixon used to say, and then steer back to the center once you have the nomination.
His reputation as a straight-talker notwithstanding, McCain has seemed to do loop-dee-loops over the last year-plus: Assiduously courting the GOP base before re-embracing his non-comfortist roots when his campaign seemed defunct last summer. Now, with conventional wisdom having come full circle and awarded him the nomination (even if, as usual, the voters haven’t been officially consulted yet), the Arizonan is heading back to the right.
The “more substantive challenge for Mr. McCain is how to retain independents and moderate Democrats as he increasingly woos the right to try to rally the party around his candidacy,” Bumiller writes in the Times. Before Florida, McCain’s primary wins came on the strength of independents crossing over and even in the Sunshine State he lost among self-described conservatives. Having the nomination apparently in his grasp, McCain is having to keep catering to his conservative critics rather than start his move to the middle.
Old Tricky must be befuddled.
