Yet these assets are pushing a campaign that’s shorter on substance than it has to be. In place of a detailed contrast between the GOP’s shortcomings and failures and the real change that’s promised, the McCain campaign seems content with zingers and chants. Those things are fine and natural ornaments for the election-year tree — but they do require a tree.
 
McCain and Palin have nothing to lose and everything to gain from being honest with America’s Republicans about where Bush and Congress have erred. All of them already know. None of them are about to run to the Democrats. And the central message of the McCain-Palin campaign — this year, true reform truly puts country first — can only really soar on the back on an honest reckoning. ~James Poulos

James understandably wants an honest reckoning of Republican failures, but as I’m sure James can see there is actually a lot to be lost electorally by emphasizing how many things the GOP did wrong and failed to do during the period of unified government.  One of the reasons why the McCain/Palin ticket seems to stand for little aside from the trinity of War-Drill-No Earmarks is that there is essentially nothing else that the candidates can say that is deeply critical of the Bush administration or the old GOP majority in specific terms without implicating one or both of the nominees in the GOP’s errors.  Hence the need for vague general statements about reform and accountability–to hold the GOP accountable for its failures would obviously mean voting against McCain, or at the very least not voting for him.  Did the administration abuse its power, break the law and trample on the Constitution?  McCain was there backing them up almost every step of the way.  Did the federal government impose new unfunded mandates on local school districts through NLCB?  John McCain voted for NLCB and still supports it.  When McCain has not gone along with the administration, he has since backtracked (on tax cuts) or he has not mentioned his opposition (he opposed Medicare Part D) because he assumes it will be an electoral liability.        

This is not helped by the divergent views of the GOP nominees in certain areas (e.g., stem-cell research, ANWR, climate change) that end up blunting different aspects of the ticket’s appeal to certain Republican and independent constituencies.  For that matter, as we have been discussing, the anti-earmark message is contradicted in important ways by Palin’s record, in addition to being an incredibly trivial thing to make a major part of the campaign.  The lack of substance in the campaign is a function of McCain’s own aversion to detailed policy knowledge (if Palin is the candidate of the gut-level connection, McCain is the candidate of gut-level policymaking), but it is also an expression of the complete inability to recognize other Republican errors and missed opportunities and to focus instead on a crusade against pork on the profoundly mistaken assumption that pork was a principal reason why the GOP lost control of Congress.  They cannot present an honest reckoning to the public because they have yet to make such a reckoning themselves. 

Even in their tacit Gustav-induced acknowledgement of failure at the federal level concerning the response to Hurricane Katrina there was no reason to think that similar cronyism and incompetence would not prevail in a McCain administration, except that we are all supposed to believe that McCain is significantly different from the man whose policies he backs almost all of the time.  At the heart of all of this are McCain’s positions on immigration and Iraq, which have been such powerful drags on the reputation of McCain and the GOP respectively.  McCain now plays down his “comprehensive reform” position, and he talks obsessively about the “surge,” but he has no intention of running against the Bush administration on these matters.  Thus we are necessarily left with a McCain/Palin message that is either trivial (earmarks are bad!), insufficient (we should drill more!) or crazy (fight the Russians!).  What should trouble us all the more is that McCain and Palin are clearly being rewarded for running this kind of campaign, and McCain has gained considerably the more he and his supporters have embraced symbolism and vacuous attack ads as the keys to Republican success.