Blogs For John McCain’s Victory » Finally, A New Narrative

Finally, A New Narrative

July 4th, 2008 at 06:57pm Geoff

This past week it was announced that McCain senior advisor Steve Schmidt would be taking over day to day operations of Sen. McCain’s presidential campaign. The change is welcome. As Rick Klein et al wrote on ABC.com’s The Note yesterday, Mr. Schmidt “brings discipline, decisiveness, and determination to his new role — and most importantly, the perception of all three qualities for the journalists and GOP insiders who were almost ready to give up on McCain…No more silly backdrops, whiffed opportunities, and bad travel decisions; instead, a taste of the Bush/Arnold swagger for the final four-month stretch.” Finally, we should begin to see Sen. McCain’s disparate domestic policy proposals condensed within a coherent theme and narrative attractive to the American people.

To that end, Yuval Levin crafted a compelling narrative for Sen. McCain a few weeks ago in The Weekly Standard that I would personally advise his campaign to adopt. Mr. Levin writes that many of this republic’s problems are ultimately attributable to the incapacity of its institutions to adapt and operate within the twenty-first century. In response, “McCain should paint a picture for the public of the moment we are in: confronted on the one hand with a justified crisis of confidence in our institutions and on the other with proposals from the Democrats driven by a set of liberal ideological commitments that would exacerbate the problem by carelessly expanding government.”

More specifically, Democrats see the failure of American institutions and propose more gasoline for the fire–expanding our failing institutions instead of reforming and fixing them. Sen. McCain ought to call them on it and counter that “what we need is not more government but a government better suited to the times and to the concerns of the American family,” i.e. health care, education, the child tax credit, etc. (Emphasis added)

He can name this agenda “Reforming America’s Institutions to help America’s families.”