All the failed strategies

Michael Barone:

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What I find most striking about this nominating season is that every candidate's strategy has failed. Yes, each party will still nominate someone. If one rule of a zero-sum game is that all players but one must lose, another rule is that one must win. But not because his or her original strategy worked.

Mr. McCain was lucky that his strategy failed first. He hoped to win as the next-in-line Republican, with the benevolent neutrality of the Bush White House enabling him to raise vast sums of money as the Bush campaign had in 2000 and 2004. By late June 2007, it was clear that the money wasn't coming in, and Mr. McCain's strategists were fired. At which point he decided to keep flying around the country and wait for others to make mistakes -- and for the surge in Iraq, which he had long advocated, to work.

As a political consultant, I always disliked strategies that depended on events and decisions outside your campaign's control. But Mr. McCain had no other options. Mirabile dictu, other candidates proceeded to make mistakes and the surge started to work.

Mitt Romney's strategy of changing positions to win the early contests was foiled by Mike Huckabee in Iowa and by Rudy Giuliani's decision to withdraw from New Hampshire, opening the way for Mr. McCain there. Fred Thompson's decision to delay his announcement to avoid an embarrassing finish in the Iowa straw poll left him past his peak when he did announce, while his campaigning in South Carolina probably siphoned off enough votes from Mr. Huckabee to give Mr. McCain a 33% to 30% victory.

The collapse of Mr. Giuliani's wait-till-Florida strategy opened up the state to Mr. McCain and delivered the Cuban-American bloc, which produced half his popular vote margin in his 36% to 31% victory. And it enabled Mr. McCain to win 198 delegates in Northeastern states, where Mr. Giuliani's backers imposed winner-take-all rules.

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I think there's something more to these strategic failures than just an unusually large number of bonehead decisions. Most of the people running most of these campaigns are competent and experienced in the work of adapting a candidate to an electorate, and an electorate to a candidate. The problem, I think, is that in this election cycle we are moving on unfamiliar ground.

For a decade from 1995 to 2005, we operated in a period of trench-warfare politics, with two approximately equal-sized armies waging a culture war in which very small amounts of ground made the difference between victory and defeat. It was pretty clear what the major issues were, what strategies were necessary to win a party's nomination, how to maximize your side's turnout on election day (and, increasingly, in early voting).

But times change. Somewhere between Hurricane Katrina in August 2005 and the bombing of the Samarra mosque in February 2006, I believe we entered a period of open-field politics, in which voters and candidates are moving around -- a field in which there are no familiar landmarks or new signposts.

Democrats entered this cycle assuming that cries for immediate withdrawal from Iraq would be rewarded. But the success of the surge has penetrated even Democratic skulls; Mr. Edwards, the precipitate withdrawer, is out and Mrs. Clinton, the most cautious of the withdrawers, is ahead. Mr. McCain's surge in the polls owes something as well to his advocacy, going all the way back to 2003, of an Iraq surge strategy. His standing in the polls nationwide, and in key primary states, rose over the Christmastime polling pause -- a gain that may have to do with voters' response to the news of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto on Dec. 27, when polling resumed.

Mostly absent from political coverage, and even from many of the candidate debates, has been discussion of public policy. Voters lacking signposts in this open field have responded in ways that don't make much sense: Republicans concerned about the economy tilted toward Mr. McCain, who once said he didn't know much about the economy, and Democrats eager to withdraw from Iraq tilted toward Mrs. Clinton. The ideas vacuum in campaign 2008 still remains to be filled, and opinion may still take sharp and unpredicted turns.

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Their are nine more months for the remaining candidates to make mistakes that will lose the election. The remaining players all have that ability in spades. Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are clueless when it comes to warfare and would make terrible leaders based on what they have said so far about the surge. McCain on the other hand is clueless about his own base. His arrogant treatment of those who disagreed with him was anything but respectful, and now he ask those he disrespected to respect his differences. That is a tough sale.

McCain will probably get the unenthusiastic support of his conservative critics but it will never be for him. It will be against the Democrat nominee. What that means is he is not going to get their ground game that made the difference for President Bush in 2004 and they are probably going to heed his call to get the money out of politics by sitting on their wallet. I think his media base will turn on him too. The Democrats he crossed the aisle to support will vote for Democrats and all those Democrats who voted for him in open primaries will vote for Democrats.

For McCain to win he better hope Democrats keep on making mistakes. So far they have, especially when comes to the war in Iraq. Democrats like to talk about the President's failed strategy in Iraq, but their 2007 strategy of betting against the troops and Gen. Petraeus has got to be one of the most cynical and self destructive strategies by a party in history. The statements by both Obama and Hillary Clinton about the success of the surge indicate they have learned nothing from their mistakes.