McCain must shore up party base while still pulling in progressives
As Republicans make their way to Minnesota this week, they have a language problem. There's no lofty slogan, no punchy moniker, no bold branding for where they're going.
All last week, reporters in Denver glommed on to and ran into the ground tried-and-true Colorado descriptors chattering on about the Democrats' "mile-high celebration" and "Obama's 'Rocky Mountain High.'"
But John McCain and St. Paul-Minneapolis?
Land of a Thousand Lakes? Twin Cities?
"Twin" is a word the GOP wants stricken from its vocabulary given the country's antipathy toward President Bush.
No, Minnesota is not the land of soaring rhetoric; it's the land of Midwestern understatement. The place where, as Garrison Keillor reminds us, a Swedish farmer loved his wife so much he almost told her.
St. Paul isn't Denver. And John McCain is not Barack Obama. He shouldn't try to match Obama's oratory because he just can't. And he can't match his timing either.
As fate would have it, while Obama's acceptance coincided with the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have A Dream" speech, McCain's acceptance is coinciding with a hurricane. Katrina Revisited is winding up to clobber New Orleans, where "Brownie, you're doing a helluva job" still haunts this party.
But as McCain learned long ago in a Viet Cong tiger cage, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.
And that needs to be his plainspoken, from-the-heart message. The rap against Obama during the primaries was that he was too cool, too cerebral and detached.
The rap against McCain is that he's too hot-tempered, too uneven.
But in many ways McCain has been every bit as emotionally inaccessible as Obama.
Just as Obama is having to change that, so too does this 72-year-old warrior.
And just as Obama had to hit head-on the barbed-wire issues of abortion, immigration, guns and gays, McCain has to find a way to bring in the evangelical base of his party without turning off Republican progressives who have had almost as much of the Bush administration as Democrats have.
Where are the Republican party's legions of young voters, new voters, bloggers and Facebook friends?
McCain needs to make connections he hasn't made yet in the untraditional world because right now Chicago's Studs Terkel at 96 is way more hip.
No state embodies the GOP's challenge more than Illinois.
The state party arrives in St. Paul this week afflicted by chronic anemia.
It can claim not one statewide elected official. It's the minority party in both the House and Senate. And its congressional delegation is shrinking. A special election for retiring Republican powerhouse J. Dennis Hastert saw a rock-solid GOP stronghold put a Democrat in the win column. An Obama avalanche in Illinois could easily bury the election or re-election of Republicans in at least three other races.
This past week in Denver, Illinois Republicans got a good laugh out of all the hugging their warring Democratic counterparts did in Denver. For all House Speaker Michael Madigan's power and might and Gov. Blagojevich's gubernatorial perch, they crow, we have no capital bill, no ethics bill, and we face a Chicago school boycott because of the dismal state of funding inner city schools.
Totally fair criticism.
But Denver proved that there is renewed discipline, an almost enforced togetherness to be found in Barack Obama's Democratic Party nationally and locally.
A group hug for the GOP may not be as silly as it sounds.