Say what you will about John McCain, the man's a tremendously energetic campaigner.
The Arizona Senator seems to absorb the energy of a crowd, and he never flinches from engaging his audience. Today's Los Angeles Times has more:
John McCain was in his element: a crowded town-hall meeting in an open-air Fort Myers, Fla., seafood restaurant. He strolled from one side of the room to the other with a microphone in one hand, jabbing his finger in the air as he called for honorable victory in Iraq and better veterans healthcare.
When a heckler shouted "4,000 American dead!" and "Bring them home!" McCain paused and asked him to wait his turn. "We all know America is divided by this war, as this gentleman is here, and we're frustrated and saddened by it," he said calmly. When it came time for questions, McCain handed his heckler the microphone to ask the first one.
The moment wasn't just vintage McCain. The exchange convinced Charles Matthews of North Fort Myers to vote for the Arizona senator instead of Mitt Romney.
McCain believes town-hall meetings are a major reason he is the leading Republican candidate for president. "Let's face it," he told reporters recently. "That's why I succeeded in New Hampshire and South Carolina."
But even the candidate admits that the format is best suited to the single-state campaigns he has run up until now. On McCain's campaign bus last week, advisor Steve Schmidt framed the reality: "You can't appear one-on-one in front of 100 million people," he told McCain and a clutch of reporters.
As he covered nearly 1,500 miles Saturday, touching down for rallies in three states where he spoke for about 15 minutes each, McCain confessed nostalgia for his old style of campaigning.
"I miss the town-hall meeting, and we'll try to have more of them as we go through this campaign," he told reporters in Nashville. "People deserve to have an opportunity to not only see my message but ask [me] questions and have the dialogue that I think is important."
Looking ahead to Tuesday, when voters in 21 Republican state primaries and caucuses will cast ballots, the campaign is devoting far more of McCain's time to one-on-one interviews, abbreviated rallies and television-friendly events. McCain insists on keeping the town halls, but he and his aides appear to have negotiated a middle ground: fewer of them, mixed with round-table events and speeches in which he succinctly hones his message.
"He's going to do it the way he wants, and the campaign is going to have to accommodate him," said longtime advisor Mark Salter.
Kathleen Hall Jamieson, professor of communication at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, said that one of McCain's great challenges will be translating the authenticity he conveys in those exchanges into sound bites for the evening news.
"The immediate audience sees that he engages people of a different point of view, he doesn't patronize them, he tries to persuade them and listens to what they have to say. That's very impressive," Jamieson said. "The national audience rarely gets to see that."
She added that for McCain, who is 71, the town-hall format also negates questions about his age because he moves briskly from topic to topic. In rallies and speeches, she said, he sometimes seems bored. "He is less effective when speaking to a mass audience," Jamieson said.
I've often thought that McCain's stilted behind a podium, but perhaps he can take the town-hall format to new heights as a straight-talk commander-in-chief.
Daniel Henninger provides an awesome example of McCain's ability to rouse a crowd, at the Wall Street Journal:
When Mr. McCain took the stage in Sun City, the applause was polite. When he finished, he got a standing ovation. He has been at this game a long time, and his ability to sense and ride the emotional flow of an audience is astonishing.I'm watching McCain on cable news right now. He's stumping on Iraq, clarifying the differences between his campaign and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama's.
It discomfits some, including me, that Mr. McCain seems like a live, capped volcano. But in front of an audience like this, and before a younger group two days later at the Tampa Convention Center, he stood with that tight, little upper body of coiled electricity and plugged his message of honor, commitment and threat straight into the guts of his listeners.
Rudy Giuliani's antiterror message has been strong and credible, but it was almost an abstraction compared to the meat and potatoes of the McCain presentation.
He asks veterans to stand. About 70 men rise, to great applause. He's talking about the "transcendent threat of radical Islamic extremism" and from there to homicidal doctors in Scotland and arrests in Germany. "Al Qaeda is on the run, but they're not defeated!" He wraps himself, justifiably, in the "Petraeus" surge. And then, "My friends, doesn't the president deserve credit that there hasn't been another attack on the U.S.?" They are going nuts. It wasn't demagogic. He does it with tone and timing. You can almost see his eyes calibrating.
Retail politics still matter, and in an era of terror, war and loss of national self-esteem, John McCain is a retail politics powerhouse.
"If you remember one thing, my friends," McCain implores, "al Qaeda is on the run, but not defeated...as president I will listen to our commander in Iraq, General David Petraeus, and we will never surrender!"
That's a message for November.
Photo: CBS News
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