McCain Campaign Research Articles

Crafting character, moving history: John McCain’s political identity in the 2008 presidential campaign

ABSTRACTA recurring critique of American campaigns is the normative assumption that campaigns, particularly at the presidential level, ought to concern important matters of public policy and that voter decision-making and judgment ought to be only, or primarily, based upon the considered judgment of public policy positions and platforms. This essay impiously seeks to bring history, theory, and possibility to the analysis of campaign practice in the service of appreciating and enhancing an understanding of political images and political identity construction. Specifically, we explore the numerous rhetorical manifestations of Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s political identity in the 2008 campaign. While all candidates employ such identity strategies, McCain did so with a particularly frank acknowledgment that he was privileging character over consistency, identity over issues. Attending to the rhetorical arguments of identity and political image that emerged from the McCain campaign in 2008, and that emerge every presidential campaign cycle, allows for the critical, indeed normative, engagement with presidential campaign praxis and democratic political deliberation as it operates meaningfully for millions of American voters every four years.

Appropriation of Mainstream News: How Saturday Night Live Changed the Political Discussion

This study analyzes the sourcing role alternative news outlets can play for mainstream news by focusing on one particular late-night comedy program. Quantitative and qualitative content analyses were conducted on the how journalists framed Sarah Palin's 2008 interview with Katie Couric prior to and following a Saturday Night Live (SNL) skit that parodied the exchange. Findings suggest that before the skit aired journalists tended to overlook the interview or attribute blame to those in the McCain campaign. After the skit was aired, however, journalists overwhelmingly attributed the fault to Palin herself and raised questions about her qualifications for office, especially when the SNL skit was included or referenced in the news story. Furthermore, a qualitative reading analyzed the context of including the skit by journalists and found that when the skit was used as a lead-in or reference, journalists tended to attribute the blame to Palin, yet gave agency of the critiques to others. This incident demonstrates the way that alternative news sources such as commentary, parody, and online content are increasingly being incorporated into the mainstream information environment.

Imagined Nation

We believe that the best of is in small towns that we get to visit, Sarah Palin told a cheering North Carolina crowd during the 2008 election campaign. real America was not located in Washington, she elaborated, but in these wonderful little pockets, [these] hard working ... pro-America areas of this great nation (qtd. in Eilperin). Within hours the McCain campaign was scrambling to reframe words, but the damage was done. Is the VP candidate saying that small towns are more authentically American than, say, suburbia or cities? asked an outraged Huffington Post (Stein). While American pundits expressed obligatory shock and anger over comments, foreign journalists greeted remarks with a shrug. She didn't need to enumerate [Real America's] salient characteristics, the Irish Times remarked to its readers. Educated by a steady stream of Hollywood movies and American novels, the rest of the world knew exactly what Palin's Real America referred to: it was midwestern, Republican, small-town, second-amendment just-folks. It was apple-pie and Uncle Sam. It probably looked a lot like Lake Wobegon, Minnesota (Powers 11).I revisit this minor political controversy as a means of illustrating certain popular assumptions about national identity, places, and literature. remarks try to make political capital of the popular assumption that authentic national identity is rooted in place. In its response, the Huffington Post reveals another powerful cultural assumption by framing juxtaposition of a small town with Washington, DC, as a manipulative rehash of the binary of country and city, tradition and modernity, knowable communities (Williams 165) and alienated urban life. Irish Times, on the other hand, not only acknowledges the currency of association of small towns with real America, but also draws its readers' attention to the role played by literature, and in particular, Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon series, in constructing this image of the small town as touchstone for American identity. Inherent in remarks and in the controversy surrounding them is a debate over how should be imagined. That real America is, as the Irish Times points out, a fictional construct is not the issue. What is at stake in invocations of a real America is what, and who, gets excluded from idealized visions of the United States.Neil Gaiman's American Gods (2001) tackles the imaginary nature of American identity head on, using the tropes of epic and urban fantasies to interrogate the stresses and contradictions of the imagined community. Ostensibly focusing on a national conflict between the modern gods of credit card and freeway, of Internet and telephone (138) and the ancient gods imported to the United States by immigrants, the plot of Gaiman's critically acclaimed novel becomes a springboard for the author's exploration of the role of literature and space in the construction of national identity. As the narrative follows a human ex-convict who finds himself in the employ of the American incarnation of Odin on a road trip across the United States, Gaiman repeatedly stages his protagonist's failure to locate a stable, real America as a means of dramatizing the importance of fiction to social constructions of place and nation.This article begins by considering J. R. R. Tolkien's representation of place besieged by industry in On Fairy Stories (1947), arguing that Tolkien's fetishization of place left an influential legacy for genre fantasy writers. After discussing the ways in which urban fantasy fiction such as Charles de Lint's Moonheart (1984), Tallulah (1991), and The Invisibles (1997), and Megan Lindholm's Wizard of the Pigeons (1984) adapted Tolkienesque fantasy's representation of place, I turn to a close reading of American Gods. American Gods, I argue, not only challenges fantasy literature's tendency to idealize place, but also the arguments of certain geographical and anthropological theorists of space, who see the spaces produced by globalization as eroding local and national identities. …

Swine Semantics in U.S. Politics: Who Put Lipstick on the Pig?

Swine Semantics in U.S. Politics: Who Put Lipstick on the Pig?

Barack Obama Meets Celebrity Metaphor

Common knowledge suggests that elections are won or lost based on demographics, finances, and other structural elements. Whether candidates win or lose, however, is a matter of action. Symbolic identification, metaphor, and an unfolding narrative—and how they are managed and interpreted in the flow of events—determine who will emerge victorious from the democratic struggle for power. The McCain campaign’s effort to cast Obama as a celebrity, with the hollow trivialities and self-aggrandizement of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, proves to be one of the most dangerous episodes for the Obama campaign. In response, the Democrats must adjust the staging of Obama’s Thursday night acceptance speech in Denver as a performance of purpose and gravitas, rather than glitz and adoration.

The Contemporary Effects of Vice-Presidential Nominees: Sarah Palin and the 2008 Presidential Campaign

This paper reviews the politics of vice-presidential selection from the point of view of both the scholar and campaign strategist. Using John McCain's selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008, we first explore academic theories of vice-presidential selection and assess the ways Palin either succeeds or fails to meet the expectations of those theories. We go on to explore the specific factors the McCain campaign considered when selecting a vice-presidential nominee and assess Palin's performance in addressing those factors. We conclude with a discussion of Palin's impact on the outcome of the 2008 election.

Lingering Questions: The Fairness Doctrine and the 2008 Presidential Campaign Coverage in Western Pennsylvania

The purpose of this study was to examine whether or not the demise of the Fairness Doctrine caused measurable bias in the news coverage of the 2008 Presidential Campaign between Senator John McCain (R) and then Senator Barak Obama (D). The demographic area involved Western Pennsylvania and included the markets of Altoona and Johnstown as well as the Pittsburgh television stations; both their local as well as affiliated national network coverage. A group of ten recorders were assigned to time and evaluate news stories on specific channels shown during the evening news shows on Tuesday, Thursday and Friday evenings from October 1, 2008 through Election Day, November 4, 2008 (The evenings were chosen randomly and were based on the availability of the recorders.) The results indicate that while the McCain Campaign received more news coverage than the Obama Campaign, that there were more negative news stories about McCain. In addition, and not surprisingly, there was less coverage of the Campaigns on the smaller stations called “Local-Local” for the purposes of the study. In the final analysis, it was shown that although there was more coverage of the McCain Campaign there were also more stories that were shown which could be construed as negative. Also included was a sub-analysis of selected Campaign Advertisements broadcast. No definitive conclusions were reached as to whether or not the Fairness Doctrine and related Election Laws should be reinstated or broadened. However, several additional studies are suggested including a replication of this study for the 2012 and 2016 elections as well as the possibility of conducting this methodology in a different but demographically similar market.

The Presidential Sweepstakes 2008: Education with a Whimper, Not with a Bang

FOR PERSONAL reasons, Louis Armstrong's sung refrain of more in his famous rendition of Mack the Knife comes to mind this election cycle. Just as Armstrong called for another rendition, this is the seventh time Kappan has asked me to solicit education essays from the two presidential candidates. That's 28 years! Tempus fugit! How time flies and how issues repeat themselves. But there are also differences, and in this election cycle education is treated not with a bang, but a whimper. While education as a national issue continues to command the public's interest, it is just barely on the candidates' radar. I speak from experience. In March, on behalf of Kappan, I invited the three leading presidential contenders--Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and Barack Obama--to submit essays about their educational platforms. The promise of reaching 50,000 readers--the nation's education elite--is no small matter, one that elicited a strong response the first six times around. This time, nothing from the two candidates still left standing by convention time. Much personal badgering ensued and finally one of the campaigns--Obama's--submitted the speech that appears in this issue. Unhappily, McCain's campaign did not submit an essay, and what runs here is a pastiche taken from the candidate's web site. The necessity to revert to Plan B raises questions I perforce must ask: Is this emblematic of the low regard in which the campaigns hold the issue? Is it attributable to campaign fatigue? Is education once again off the national table? Is the web and its progeny (whatever they may be) simply going to shoulder aside print journalism? Is it all of the above? NOBODY HAS ANSWERS Because the candidates and their advisors cannot possibly think education is unimportant in the 21st century, there must be another possibility. I suggest this explanation: No one is sure what to do at the national level, least of all John McCain. In part, the reason is not hard to fathom. The tools available to Uncle Sam are either too blunt or too controversial to effect the changes that education needs, and interest groups are more easily mollified with silence than detailed position statements. Silence is golden (or ignorance is bliss, if you prefer). Not surprisingly, candidates are reluctant to touch what looks more and more like a third rail. Federal programs are viewed as too crude to reach the classroom when nuance is essential or too controversial (e.g., national standards, national tests) to raise in a campaign. There were reasons George Bush was able to turn 100 years of Republican antipathy to a strong federal role in education on its head--and leaving teacher unions, which had resolutely supported a vigorous national role, to lament the form this federal role eventually assumed. In this connection, remember that Bush took on education because of his experience in Texas--where the issue played well--and because his polling showed that education was an issue that would actually move voters, especially soccer moms, in campaign 2000. …

US election: Questioning the candidates, part two

Barack Obama accepted Nature's invitation to answer 18 science-related questions in writing; John McCain's campaign declined. Here are Obama's answers to additional questions that did not appear in our print magazine. Wherever possible, Nature has noted what McCain has said at other times on these topics.

US election: Questioning the candidates

Barack Obama accepted Nature's invitation to answer 18 science-related questions in writing; John McCain's campaign declined. Obama's answers to many of the questions are printed here; answers to additional questions (on topics including biosecurity, the nuclear weapons laboratories and US participation in international projects) can be found at http://www.nature.com/uselection. Wherever possible, Nature has noted what McCain has said at other times on these topics.

The Bush Presidency after 9/11: Shifting the Kaleidoscope

In a wide-ranging essay, Professor Marc Landy explores the significance of George W. Bush’s emergence as the Republican Party presidential nominee in 2000. Describing Bush as the candidate who could bridge the two major wings of the GOP, Landy shows how the insurgency of the “Bull Moose” McCain campaign burnished the conservative credentials of Bush, without hurting him among the pragmatists in the party. Landy explains how September 11 challenged fundamental policy tenets of both parties with significant electoral consequences in the future. September 11 revealed the limits of Democratic “moralism” in international policy, especially if this stance marks them as anti-American among key Democratic constituencies and swing voters. The Republicans, on the other hand, face the domestic dilemma of preserving their commitment to limited government without compromising the effectiveness of homeland security. Landy concludes by pointing out opportunities for the president to achieve “greatness” in his handling of international policy.