Ad watch: Channeling his inner Perot
By Dante ScalaNot sure if John McCain's ad is up yet here, but I suspect we'll see it a lot in the coming weeks. Here's the script:
ANNCR: Washington's broken. John McCain knows it. We're worse off than we were four years ago.
Only McCain has taken on big tobacco, drug companies, fought corruption in both parties. He'll reform Wall Street, battle Big Oil, make America prosper again.
He's the original maverick.
One is ready to lead -- McCain.
Populist stuff like this makes establishment Republicans a little queasy (Take on big tobacco and drug companies? Reform Wall Street? Battle Big Oil?), but this sort of ad could be a winner among independent voters. Remember how well Ross Perot did here in the 1990s -- 23 percent in 1992 (four points higher than his share of the national vote), 10 percent in 1996 (two points better than nationally). Like 1992, it's a time of economic turmoil and little trust in governing institutions, and candidates who successfully cast themselves above party could prosper.
A Republican has not won 50 percent of the presidential vote since Perot. It might take a Republican running a Perot-type campaign to reach that mark again in the Granite State.
Dante Scala teaches American politics at the University of New Hampshire and blogs at Graniteprof.
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Washington's broken....
... so we need someone who's been in Washington for 25 years to fix it? That's a pretty big gap in logic.
I tend to think that this kind of "Washington's Broken," populist-pandering rhetoric has been used too many times (by Democrats, Republicans, and Indies alike) to be at all believable. It's the same message Obama is trying to sell, so if it has any effect at all among independent voters, it'll probably just cement the support of those who are leaning McCain already. Among truly undecided independents, I think the message will just be political background noise.
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