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The John McCain Problem
John McCain has 3 things going for him this election year.
1. He is a War Hero (of sorts).
2. He is considered a maverick in a time when being conventional is a problem.
3. He has a very beatable opponent
However... He has two very big problems. The obvious one is the war in Iraq. His views are clearly on the wrong side of public opinion now that public opinion has finally figured out what a mistake the war was.
McCain's more perplexing problem; however, is his courting of the far right. McCain was never a darling of the conservative wing of the Republican party. His strength in the 2000 primary election was the middle road Republicans and Independents. However; thanks to George W. Bush no far right candidate got very far in 2008 and the Republicans ended up with that middle-of-the-road candidate. Now that he is the presumptive nominee all the Republican consultants and party insiders have jumped in to try and move him to the right. The hope is that he'll seem tolerable enough to the right wing to gather their votes without fully alienating is 2000 base of moderates and independents. The consultants are hoping that McCain's speech to Liberty University in 2006 will go along way to appeasing the right and they're hoping the moderates will simply forget about that speech.
The problem with this strategy is that the religious right usually sees through half-assed conservatives and the moderates will certainly question his "maverickness" if he simply panders to the right.
Against any conventional democrat (probably a southern democrat) the McCain strategy would probably not have a hope in hell of success.
The only thing he has going for him is that the Democrats have put up a very risky candidate. Obama represents a portion of the Democratic party that has not won an election in more than 60 years - the Liberal portion. The last 3 candidates to come from this wing of the party (Mondale, McGovern, Humphrey) all met with crushing defeats. And NO, John Kennedy was not from the liberal end of the party in 1960. He just seemed liberal when compared with Richard Nixon. And he won by the thinnest of margins.
The key to this election, like most elections, is the South. No Democrat has ever won the presidency without carrying at least a portion of the South. When Republicans carry the majority of the South they always win (look it up!).
The question, then, is whether the black vote and women in the South will be sufficient to carry enough states to combine with enough of the balance to carry the election of Obama.
The farther McCain moves to the right, the more likely this might occur because women will vote in ever greater numbers against him. McCain got the nomination because he didn't represent the far right. He might just hand Obama the election if his advisers tell him the far right will stay home on election day if he doesn't appeal to them.
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