In the spring all the McCain camp could talk about was his biography. In the summer it was energy policy and national security and the clever “celebrity” ad attack. All along conservative pundits pleaded, prodded, and urged the the McCain campaign to spell out an economic vision. He needed a big picture,  an appealing explanation of where he stood on domestic policy. Many urged a middle class tax cut. Nothing. The Convention came and went and still nothing. When you spoke with the campaign there was never any sense of urgency or any inkling really that they needed a overarching economic theme.

Then the economic meltdown occured, there was his dash to D.C. (doesn’t that seem like last year already?) and a series of ad hoc ideas capped with the $300B “I’m here from the government to help you with your mortgage” plan. The stock market and McCain’s poll numbers cratered.

With a widening gap in the polls staring him in the face McCain rolled out a series of more ambitious tax cuts. And then the McCain team found Joe the Plumber. He showed that it really didn’t take a genius — just common sense — to sniff out what Barack Obama was up to. Obama, even in a recession, prefers wealth redistribution to wealth creation. Obama let it slip out with not much concern he was giving away the best kept secret in the campaign. And Joe got creamed by the MSM, the Lefty bloggers and irate Democrats.

But what Joe did was give McCain his contrast: socialism vs. market capitalism, high vs. low taxes, Hoover vs. Reagan. How could all those “smart” McCain political advisors have missed this? Well, let’s just say in the midst of a campaign, it’s easy to get lost in the trees. They missed the entire forest: the election is about whether we’re going to veer Left, really Left on taxes, trade, spending, health care and the like. (Really Left because Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid have their hands on the wheel and there’s no brake.)

So after all of this (two years of campaigning) McCain is finally focused on the economy with a rather compelling message. We will have plenty of time to argue if he loses whether a quicker realization and better articulation of this mega-contrast between the candidates’ economic views would have helped. But two weeks these days is an eternity in politics — and that’s especially true if your opponent doesn’t really dispute the premise of your contrast argument.

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This entry was posted on Monday, October 20th, 2008 at 9:09 AM and is filed under Contentions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.