Opinion: Time has Run Out for McCain to Craft his Message

By Nathan Shapiro
Op-Ed Contributor

There are about three weeks left before America chooses its next president and McCain is struggling to get his point across—something he should have done before the final stretch of the campaign.

There is a finite time to craft a campaign’s message and disseminate it to the voters and that time is precious. And it can’t be done in the last weeks of the campaign. If you try, it just looks like you’re desperate and confused—both un-presidential traits. It’s what happened to Hillary Clinton in her last stands in late Democrat primary states.

McCain needed to be spending the summer months developing a message that explained to voters why the conservative movement he would lead could solve America’s problems. He needed to tap into great conservative ideas—practical, effective and sound ideas—that could define what the McCain-Palin campaign would stand for.

A candidate’s message must be clear, concise and coherent. Without the right ideological foundation for a candidate to build a campaign around its message will be conflicting and confusing. And I don’t use the word “ideological” in the pejorative sense of being an ideologue—but simply having a well-internalized and consistent worldview.

McCain lacks that much-needed foundation. He has a natural, gut instinct for conservative politics, but has largely avoided intellectual process of developing a political philosophy to guide him. He simply couldn’t tell you why he is a conservative if you asked him.

That would have simply been fine in a center-right country if nothing critical happened until November. But he was blindsided by the economic meltdown. He knew something had to be done, but didn’t have the intellectual framework to decide what. His entire response smacks of desperation and inconsistency—is he pro-regulation or against? For small government or massive government intervention? We don’t know.

Obama, on the other hand, knows he is a liberal and why. He also knows that most Americans don’t subscribe to out-and-out liberal policies so he had to repackage them into a coherent message of “change” that he drummed into voter’s minds for months.

Because of the ideological prism Obama views the world, he was able to craft a coherent-if-mistaken story that fit perfectly in with his campaign's consistently liberal message. He has convinced swing voters that Bush’s deregulation caused this and Obama can use government power to command the economy back on track.

McCain simply acquiesced to that characterization and latched onto the flawed congressional bailout plan because he had nothing else of his own to offer.

It didn’t matter that this crisis is very much tied to the Democrat’s social policies, that McCain had tried to clean up this problem years ago or that our huge government intervention may be making the situation worse. It’s too late to make the conservative case now because Obama was on-point and ready to write the narrative that will drive the debate.

If McCain loses, pundits will be saying the campaign was lost in the last month. But in truth, it was lost long before that by McCain’s failure to lay the right intellectual foundation. And without it he had no hope of conveying an effective plan addressing the economic crisis that may decide this election.

Nathan Shapiro a student at Hofstra University Law School and a Stony Brook University alumnus.