From W.'s Playbook - George W. Bush's presidential campaign

National Review, March 6, 2000 by Ramesh Ponnuru

How McCain is running Bush's campaign

IF George W. Bush has been showing more irritation and frustration than compassion lately, it may not be just because John McCain whipped him in New Hampshire. Maybe Bush resents the fact that McCain is running Bush's campaign--and running it better than Bush is.

Bush had designed a campaign strategy to adapt to the political world Bill Clinton created. Clinton's legacies were three. First, he defeated conservatism. Conservatives had previously succeeded because liberals seemed bent on offending middle-American sensibilities--pandering to racial militants, coddling criminals, tolerating welfare dependence. Clinton took away those easy targets, and without them conservatives were unable to make the case against his program of government activism.

Clinton's second bequest was the weakest political culture in American history. Public disengagement from politics is not, to be sure, Clinton's doing alone. Its causes are manifold: peace and prosperity; the habitual denigration of politics by conservatives and libertarians; a strain of political paranoia that has infected the popular culture since Watergate. The result is a voting public that often justifies its own laziness with a pseudo-sophisticated cynicism: Why pay any attention to politicians, since they're all liars and thieves anyway? President Clinton's own perfidy so reinforced this impression that it became, perversely, an excuse for him: Everybody does it, so let's just "move on." Clinton lowers the temperature of politics. By raising a thousand and one issues in his State of the Union speeches, he effectively ensures that there are no issues. Except for one "issue": character. Clinton's negative example has increased its importance.

For Bush, the roadmap of post-Clinton politics was clear. Big government was popular, so he wouldn't attack it. Political disagreement was unpopular, so he would be nice and eschew wedge issues. He would run on character, promising to restore dignity to the Oval Office, pledging never to embarrass us.

What is McCain's strategy but a 200-proof version of Bush's? McCain promises not just to refrain from embarrassing us, but actually to make us proud. His campaign is about nothing but character. Any issues he raises are mere illustrations of the theme. The campaign-finance "reforms" he proposes are less important than that he is a reformer. His emphasis on raising military pay is a way of reminding us to give POWs their due. The exit polls from New Hampshire showed that no public-policy issues were decisive, in either party; what moved Republicans to vote for McCain was "moral values," i.e., character.

Bush's "compassionate conservatism" has appeal to a sentimental culture; but our culture is so sentimental that it pre tends to yearn for sterner virtues. Voters do not want a leader who will ask them to do something for their country; they want one such as McCain, who will give them a stirring sensation by only seeming to ask them to make great sacrifices.

There's no way Bush can beat McCain on character--not when McCain is a war hero and highlights it 24-7, subtly and directly. Indeed, nobody but McCain could have knocked Bush over in the primaries. Now that he has, Bush can't just take punches at McCain on the issues; first he has to get voters interested in issues. No wonder Bush is having trouble finding his footing.

McCain's campaign is better suited than Bush's to the public mood of 2000 in other respects as well. The boom in individual investment is the dominating fact of American life right now. Soccer moms are keeping an eye on the markets; IPOs are the stuff of twentysomethings' conversations. Bush's tax plan pays no attention to any of this. McCain, on the other hand, offers tax shelters to help people invest for their retirement, education, and health expenses. He hasn't talked much about this part of his tax plan, but at least it's there.

More than anyone else in the race, McCain is using the Internet both as an issue and as a campaign tool. He has raised more than $7 million off it. If the donors who were excited by his New Hampshire blowout had sent those checks through snail mail, McCain might not have had the money in time to use it to best advantage in South Carolina. McCain's opposition to Internet taxation, meanwhile, puts him squarely on the side of the New Economy. (Oddly, however, McCain's plan to close "corporate tax loopholes" raises taxes on advertising, which can't be good for Internet firms.)

McCain learned about the power of the Internet to fuel an insurgent campaign from Jesse Ventura, who used it to great effect in his winning race for governor of Minnesota in 1998. A month after the election, McCain sent one of his aides to the state to study how he had done it. Obviously, one of the other things McCain learned from Ventura was that independent voters were becoming more active.

George W. Bush may have been running a perfect campaign for the Republican primaries; John McCain would try to ensure that there would be as few of them as possible. In New Hampshire, Bush won among voters who identified themselves as Republican. McCain, however, crushed him among independents--and they made up 41 percent of the total, a record.