John Dickerson at Slate has an interesting look at John McCain’s next campaign tour. (I wrote about that tour and McCain’s general election campaign here.) McCain will be visiting places “Republicans fear to tread,” as the somewhat overwrought headline puts it. The plans include stops in heavily-black urban areas and poverty-stricken rural areas, where McCain will make himself available to voters who don’t often see Republicans in person and don’t often vote for them, anyway. McCain advisers want to highlight the contrast between his style of campaigning — freewheeling, accessible, open — and the style of his likely opponent. Although Barack Obama can be quite good in give-and-take formats like town halls, he does this infrequently. His campaign controls tightly his access to reporters, too, rarely making him available for press conferences and turning down requests for time with him even from publications that might seem friendly. (My repeated requests for an interview with Obama have, not surprisingly, gone unanswered. In fact, my repeated requests for time with Obama press staffers — i.e. the people paid to talk to people like me — have gone unanswered, too.) As Mark Salter, McCain’s top adviser, told Dickerson: “This isn’t just his style. It’s a part of his message.” McCain does well in town halls. He likes them, he told me, because interacting with voters keeps him on his toes. Rather than simply repeating the same lines in stump speeches, he actually has to use his mind to provide answers to their questions. Such a tour, Dickerson notes, is risky.
It’s risky for another reason, too. Although McCain has quietly sought to mend fences with some conservatives who did not support him in the primaries, he has done little of substance to ease their concerns. The risk is not that these conservatives oppose reaching out to voters (and non-voters) who don’t normally vote Republicans. They don’t. It’s that in a campaign with limited time and limited resources, McCain is choosing to spend time with people unlikely to vote for him rather than, say, giving a speech on the importance of missile defense or stopping in at a successful charter school or visiting a pro-adoption crisis pregnancy center. The risk is that such a tour could reinforce the perception among conservatives that McCain cares much less about winning their approval than he does about the approval of his opponents and the news media. Will it matter in November if some conservatives remain unsatisfied with McCain? That’s debateable, but we may be on our way to finding out.
