Open letter to John McCain

An open letter is, of course, the thing you write to someone who’d never read an actual letter if you sent them one, and that’s certainly the case here; as the son of a decorated Navy pilot, I know people whom Sen. McCain considers good friends, but that doesn’t mean he knows me. That said, this is America, so I’m allowed to have opinions anyway, and I have a blog, so I might as well publish them. 🙂 Therefore, here’s what I’d tell Sen. McCain to do if he asked my advice:Name Sarah Palin your running mate. Everyone knew that was coming, of course, since I’ve been beating that drum for a while; I’ve stated my reasons elsewhere and I don’t see any reason to repeat them here.Beginning with Gov. Palin, name your whole team early. Specifically, line up the major Cabinet appointments now, with acceptances, and get those people on the campaign trail. Have your future secretaries of state and defense out across America talking about how you’ll manage foreign policy, and what their part in that (and their approach to it) will be; have your presumptive treasury secretary on the road talking economic policy and solutions to America’s problems, and building trust with voters that the government’s role in the economy will be managed well if you win; put up a well-respected candidate for attorney general and let him calm the waters that were roiled under John Ashworth and Alberto Gonzales. Let them campaign for you by campaigning for their own jobs, making their own cases to the nation for how those jobs should be done.Build a national-unity government. Use the opportunity of picking your senior advisers early to showcase the fact that you, not Barack Obama, are the person in this race who has a history of working effectively across partisan divides. Begin with an intraparty split by choosing Mitt Romney as your intended secretary of the treasury; let him go out there and focus on his economic-policy credentials (thereby shoring up yours) and sell the idea that a McCain presidency will be better for the economy than an Obama presidency.Having done that, work outward: get Sam Nunn to agree to serve as Secretary of Defense, and Joe Lieberman as Secretary of State. Put moderate Democrats, senior statesmen who are foreign-policy realists, in the two main foreign-policy positions in the Cabinet. They’re people you can trust—both their character and their competence—and they’ll highlight the fact that you don’t intend to be the president of (or for) Republicans only. Sen. Obama talks the uniting talk; you can one-up him by walking the walk, in meaningful fashion.If you can find other ways to carry that forward, do so. Bob Casey Jr., for instance, is the son of a pro-life legend in Pennsylvania politics; if he’s still solidly pro-life, offer him a job on the social-policy side, perhaps as Secretary of Health and Human Services. He’s endorsed Obama, so he wouldn’t campaign for you, but he might be willing to accept the offer anyway, if you didn’t ask him to campaign. Fringe benefit there: if you won, Rick Santorum might get his seat back.Tie Sen. Obama so tightly to Nancy Pelosi that he can’t get loose. Right now, he’s trying to win by running to the center, which is what he needs to do; but if he wins, it’s highly unlikely that he’ll govern from the center. In the first place, his slim voting record to this point suggests no such instincts; in the second, all the political forces around him are going to pull him to the left—hard to the left. A veteran politician with a strong centrist track record and base of support might be able to resist those forces and chart his own course; Sen. Obama has neither the experience to know how to do so nor the power base on which to stand, nor for that matter does he have the centrist instincts. I strongly suspect that Speaker Pelosi and the rest of the party’s leaders do not regard Sen. Obama as the leader of their party—he’s too new, too unproven, and he doesn’t have much of a track record with them, either—but rather as its chief PR man, as the guy they intend to use to sell their program. If he wins, it’s more likely to be the Pelosi administration in all but name than a truly independent Obama administration.The key, then, is to make that case. This is Jonah Goldberg’s “pin Obama on the donkey” strategy, but in a more specific form. Make the case to the voters of this country that the person they should be listening to if they want to know what an Obama presidency would look like, in at least its first two years, isn’t Sen. Obama, but Speaker Pelosi, because she’ll be the one calling the shots. Granted, it’s possible he could assert and maintain his independence from the congressional wing of his party—but if he wants to sign any bills, probably not.Remember, this is the 2008 election, not 1976. If you try to run on your biography, you’ll lose. If you try to run on your experience and qualifications, you’ll lose. Yes, you’re far and away the most qualified candidate in this election, but it doesn’t matter. You need to run on vision and foresight, and you need to make that vision clear and compelling. Tie it to your biography, yes—people love stories, if they’re told well and connect with their own lives; tie it to your experience, yes—when you can show that your vision has been right before, as with the surge, it makes your visioncasting more compelling; but it’s your vision for this country that needs to be out front and center, dominating the view. This, really, is where your opponent’s inexperience is relevant: he doesn’t have enough experience for a clear vision, and so his is fuzzy, hazy, long on platitudes (“we are the change we have been waiting for”) and short on concrete details and plans for implementation; as such, whatever he might see in our future, he lacks the ability to get us there.Hire a preacher or two for your speechwriting team. That might sound like I’m bidding for a new job, but I’m not—I like where I am just fine, thanks. I am, however, serious about this. It might be idiosyncratic, but I think you would do well to learn the cadences, and to some extent the rhetoric, of the pulpit in your public speaking. A presidential campaign, honestly, is a much better audition for Orator-in-Chief than it is for Commander-in-Chief, and when it comes to prepared speeches, Sen. Obama has a real edge here—and I’m inclined to believe that he owes a lot of that edge to the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright, who (regardless of what you think of the content of his message) is a fine, fine preacher. I don’t say that Sen. Obama speaks like a black preacher, because he doesn’t, but twenty years of the cadences and rhythms of that pulpit have soaked into him. I think you’d do well to find some equivalent experience to draw on. To the extent that America is still, as de Tocqueville called us, “a nation with the soul of a church,” we prefer a president with the tongue of a preacher; the presidents we’ve elected without that, at least in recent decades, have had special circumstances in their favor. You don’t.Remember Nathan Bedford Forrest. Not his racism, but his view of tactics: the winner is the one who gets there firstest with the mostest. Fight clean and keep your blows above the belt, but strike first and strike as hard as you can; seize the initiative by all ethical means, and do everything you can to keep it. You have already been defined, and by and large that’s not that bad—except for the “he’s old” thing, which can largely be countered by adding a young, charismatic VP (see heading 1, above); Sen. Obama really hasn’t been, and most folks in the media would like to keep it that way. You need to find a way to define him as what his meager record shows him to be—a hard-left politician and a creation of the liberal Democratic Chicago machine—and to do so in a way that will stick in people’s minds. Tying him to Pelosi is part of that (though it’s also for other purposes), but it’s not enough. Sen. Obama’s great political advantage is that voters can look at him and believe that he will be whatever they want him to be; you need to take that away from him, and make it clear that the emperor does have clothes: standard Democratic Party uniform.That’s just a few thoughts, offered free of charge from someone with no more experience than a couple decades’ deeply-interested observation and study of the American political scene. Sen. McCain, I hope they serve, and I wish you success, confident that whatever happens, you will continue to honor the uniform both you and my father once wore, and the country you both served and continue to serve.Sincerely yours, &etc.