John McCain, who has surged to the front of the GOP pack coming out of Iowa, feels rejuvenated in New Hampshire. The New York Times reports:
Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign wheeled out a confetti gun on Saturday in Peterborough to boom a festive end to his 100th town-hall-style meeting. It was the same place he began his New Hampshire primary campaign of 2000.A win tomorrow will replenish the McCain warchest, however, as the victory momentum carries over into an uptick in financial contributions.
Mr. McCain, a Republican, is methodically returning in these last days before the New Hampshire primary to the same venues he visited in that campaign, in which he defeated George W. Bush by 18 percentage points. He is surrounded by many of the same New Hampshire aides, telling many of the same jokes, appealing to the same voters and promising what seems like unlimited access to the state’s residents and reporters.
“It’s superstition,” Mr. McCain said Sunday. “And a bit of nostalgia.”
Yet there are crucial differences between this campaign and the one of 2000, and they reflect how Mr. McCain is in many ways a different candidate running a very different campaign in a very different time.
Mr. McCain, 71, is now more likely to wear a suit and tie as he paces his circles before audiences of voters, microphone in hand, head lowered as he waits for the next question.
The issues that he used to define his iconoclastic form of Republicanism have changed with the times. Talk of government reform, overhauling campaign finance and fixing Social Security has given way to national security and terrorism, scolding discussions of wasteful Republican spending, and global warming, an issue he said voters in this state placed on his agenda.
“It’s mostly the same old team on board, but it’s a different set of circumstances,” he said. “We’re in two wars. And we face the threat of radical Islamic extremism. We are in a little bit of a different environment.”
Mr. McCain has nowhere near the resources he did in 2000. His once gold-plated campaign organization collapsed last summer, unable to raise the money needed to sustain it. Mark McKinnon, his media adviser, is putting together advertisements for Mr. McCain at cost — allowing him to at least hold his own with his main opponent, Mitt Romney, on the air in the final hours of the campaign here.
Eight years ago, Mr. McCain would send invitations to 20,000 voters to try to ensure a good turnout for an event; this time, his aides said, they could typically afford just 5,000 mailers. Some of his closest aides — Mark Salter and Charles Black — say they are forgoing paychecks for now.
And the tone of Mr. McCain’s advertisements — and his attacks on opponents, arrows sheathed in jokes — have grown more acerbic. That, his aides said, reflected the lessons he learned in 2000 after an embittering defeat by Mr. Bush in South Carolina; in that showdown, which pretty much ended his presidential hopes for that campaign, Mr. McCain refused to run attack advertisements responding to Mr. Bush.
In New Hampshire in 2000, Mr. Bush took issue when Mr. McCain ran an advertisement saying, there is “only one man running for president who knows the military and understands the world.”
This time, to make the same point about Mr. Romney, also a governor with no foreign experience, Mr. McCain has run advertisements on the Internet that show jarring images of terrorists in masks holding guns. One of his main television ads spotlights Mr. Romney’s changing positions on some issues, and highlights an editorial in The Concord Monitor calling him “a phony.”
And Mr. McCain’s post-New Hampshire prospects, should he win on Tuesday, are if anything less certain than they were in 2000, when he left this state confident that he would beat Mr. Bush. He has barely any organization in Michigan, the next state to vote, said Saul Anuzis, the state Republican chairman there. Mr. McCain was forced to lay off all but one of his staff members because of his financial difficulties.
McCain's looking ahead to November, in any case, declaring Sunday that he'd beat Barack Obama in the general election (via Memeorandum).
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