Excellent Advice for McCain

Kate O’Beirne & Ramesh Ponnuru of National Review Online:

What McCain Should Say at CPAC
Democrats think they have John McCain in a trap. He is going to have to spend the time immediately following his clinching of the nomination trying to win over Republican voters to his right. That’s time he won’t spend appealing to independent voters. He could even alienate those independents while courting conservatives.

McCain should prove this theory wrong, and he should do it starting at CPAC tomorrow. There are two temptations to resist. The first is for McCain to spend the bulk of the speech burnishing his conservative credentials. He has tried doing that, and a lot of conservatives are still left cold. Besides, what they want to hear isn’t that McCain has a conservative voting record but that he will fight for conservative ideas. The second temptation is to provoke bitter-end conservative resistance and triangulate against it. That would be a dangerous strategy, one that could make fence-sitting conservatives turn against him. What McCain should do instead is to take the fight to the Democrats, explaining why he’s against Harry Reid’s defeatism, Hillary Clinton’s health-care plan, Nancy Pelosi’s obstructionism on intelligence gathering, Barack Obama’s tax increases, and even Dennis Kucinich’s Department of Peace.

Conservatives know that McCain can be a tough political combatant. They want to see him turn those skills on the Democrats. They’re tired of being on the defensive. Even McCain’s opponents in the CPAC crowd will have to applaud as he lays into the Democrats.

This is exactly what McCain needs to do, pronto. I've been listening to these talk show folks lately; almost nothing he says to conservatives will work right now. He has to start talking about liberals.

I think it's also not too early for McCain to start laying out a vision for where he wants to take the country, and where he might follow or depart from George Bush. For example, apart from hanging tough in Iraq, would he make the broader freedom agenda in the Middle East a priority? What has he learned from Bush's failures and successes? Give people a bigger picture, maybe some of his apostasies might fade a bit.

Above all, he needs to start talking about how and why he is going to win in November. He might find that helping to lift Republican spirits may go a long way toward changing the conversation.