Boston Globe: "McCain's Mitt strategy"

McCain's Mitt strategy
By Joan Vennochi, Globe Columnist
January 25, 2007

WHAT'S JOHN McCain thinking?

"He has Mitt on the mind," said a Romney campaign consultant who requested anonymity.

"Mitt on the mind" is code for worrying that conservatives will ultimately desert Senator McCain for Romney in New Hampshire and across the country.

"Mitt on the mind" also explains why Rob Gray is now on board McCain's presidential exploratory committee as New England political strategist. Gray worked on Romney's 2002 gubernatorial campaign and knows well his record of conversion from moderate to hard-core conservative. Gray also relishes political hardball, although his latest effort amounted to an embarrassing whiff.

Gray played a critical role in Kerry Healey's losing 2006 campaign to become governor of Massachusetts. In that case, Gray took a moderate Republican with potential appeal to female and independent voters and turned her into a candidate with little appeal beyond a narrow conservative base.

The Healey campaign infamously blitzed the air waves with an ad featuring a woman walking alone in a dark parking garage while a narrator attacked Deval Patrick's efforts to try to free a convicted rapist. It was supposed to nail the woman's vote, by scaring women away from Patrick. Instead, women fled from Healey. The ad came out of the shop of media consultant Stuart Stevens, one of three strategists from President Bush's advertising team recently hired by McCain.

Can this recipe for political disaster in Massachusetts become a blueprint for winning a presidential primary in New Hampshire?

Turning McCain into a candidate with appeal to a narrow conservative base would be a plus in a GOP primary. However, it is also hard to accomplish on its own, given McCain's long, unhappy history with conservatives.

The next best option is to make conservatives as suspicious of Romney as they are of McCain.

Surprise! Someone is trying to do just that. A YouTube.com clip, posted anonymously this month, forced Romney to explain liberal positions he took in a 1994 debate when he ran against Senator Edward M. Kennedy. The Romney consultant quoted above believes -- without offering any evidence -- that the McCain campaign did it "without fingerprints."

If so, it represents a smart departure from typical political attack ads. The YouTube.com clip simply showcased Romney's own words. It left it to viewers to draw their own conclusions about the larger political meaning. Romney is still dealing with the political fallout.

Polls put McCain and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani ahead in New Hampshire right now, but Romney is well positioned to overtake them in a contest that is still a year away. McCain definitely needs a Granite State win. His stunning victory there in 2000 launched the "Straight Talk Express" on an exciting, but ultimately losing effort to win the GOP nomination.

Back in 2000, McCain was the victim of political hardball at its ugliest. After defeating George W. Bush in the New Hampshire primary, the campaign headed to South Carolina for a bitter showdown.

In an opinion piece published in the Globe in 2004 under the headline, "The anatomy of a smear," McCain's campaign manager Richard H. Davis recounted what happened next: The McCains have an adopted daughter who was born in Bangladesh. Anonymous opponents suggested that McCain's Bangladeshi born daughter was his own, illegitimate black child. "In the conservative, race-conscious South, that's not a minor charge," Davis wrote, calling it "the perfect smear campaign." The attacks badly hurt McCain's presidential prospects, as well as the McCain-Bush relationship. The two men have since repaired it, to McCain's political disadvantage.

Today, McCain has big political problems with independents who don't like his support for Bush's policy in Iraq. He is belatedly beginning to reframe it. In an interview with Politico.com, he blamed Vice President Cheney for a "witch's brew" of a "terribly mishandled" war. He also criticized former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, saying he "will go down in history . . . as one of the worst secretaries of defense in history."

Refighting the 2000 presidential campaign isn't the path to victory for McCain in 2008. But learning from his mistakes can help. In 2000, he wasn't prepared to fight back. This time, McCain looks like he is preparing to play some hardball of his own in 2008.

He has nothing to lose, except whatever is left of his image as an unconventional outsider who stands for something other than politics as usual.

That's something else for McCain to think about.