"John McCain, who's spent 20 years in the Senate challenging Republican Party orthodoxy, is having a hard time establishing himself as its champion," writes reporter Edwin Chen of the Bloomberg News Service in a pretty good analysis of the problems plaguing John McCain's latest bid for the White House.
Through fund-raising prowess, endorsements and his standing in polls, McCain, 70, has tried to create an aura of inevitability around his presidential campaign; the free- wheeling ``Straight Talk Express'' bus caravan of his 2000 bid is now a buttoned-down juggernaut that's trying to please the Republicans' many factions.
It may not be working. Conservatives, especially religious activists with whom he clashed in the past, remain suspicious of him; meanwhile, some backers who admired his maverick streak are disillusioned with his appeals to the conservative base. Polls show him losing ground to former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, and the Arizonan seems visibly uneasy cast as a pillar of the Establishment.
Chen reports that the McCain campaign has a solution to McCain's falling poll numbers:
The antidote for declining poll numbers will be a less-structured style that lets McCain be McCain. The senator's favorite forum in 2000 was the town-hall meeting, in which he'd trade quips and banter with the audience while providing crisp answers to their questions. Glimmers of the old McCain began surfacing during a recent campaign swing.
The new approach might be right for McCain, but it's a style change that doesn't address McCain's core problem: He's most appealing to voters as an insurgent, a maverick, but he's running to be chosen the leader of the party by the members of that party, not to take it over in a coup.
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