McCain: The pause that refreshes

last updated 8 January 2015

Sen. John McCain now has a luxury that most presidential candidates can only dream of, said Michael Cooper and Michael Luo in The New York Times. “Time.” With Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton still preoccupied with their bruising fight for the Democratic nomination, the presumptive GOP nominee can use this period “to ramp up his lackluster fund-raising,” repair battered relations with his party’s right wing, and begin the process of finding a running mate. But while “the lull will give the McCain campaign some breathing room,” there is a downside. The Democratic nominee might emerge from the intra-party fracas tougher and sharper, and that contest is sure to dominate media coverage for months to come, leaving McCain largely out of the public eye.

That’s the least of his problems, said William Kristol, also in the Times. By most measures, 2008 should be a Democratic year. President Bush’s approval ratings are in the basement, and anyway, “it’s rare for a party to win a third consecutive term in the White House.” During the primary season, Democrats have been raising far more money and attracting far more voters than have Republicans. And economic downturns tend to favor Democrats. That’s why McCain “will have to take risks,” and one surefire way to “upend the normal dynamics of this year’s election would be a bold vice presidential choice.” Imagine the electricity if McCain chooses a hawkish Democrat such as Sen. Joseph Lieberman, a non-politician such as Gen. David Petraeus, or even Supreme Court justice and conservative hero Clarence Thomas?

That could be too much electricity for the party establishment, said Hendrik Hertzberg in The New Yorker. At the top of most GOP insiders’ wish lists are a bunch of sitting or former governors, including Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, Charlie Crist of Florida, and two of McCain’s vanquished primary opponents, Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee. Notice all of them happen to be white males—not exactly a heart-stopping prospect when Democrats will be running the first black or the first woman to head a ticket. But there is someone whose presence on McCain’s ticket would make history of its own: Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Nobody could say the first black woman to run U.S. foreign policy isn’t qualified to be president. Yes, McCain would lose the votes of his party’s “hardened racists and incorrigible misogynists.” But surely most Republicans would relish the opportunity to vote for a black and a woman “without abandoning their party.”