The Tough Fight

The Tough Fight

Late yesterday, John McCain announced a campaign shakeup was underway, shifting the focus of his presidential bid in the hopes of building stronger momentum.

Something in his messaging just isn't seeming to resonate with the voters. Something seems to be missing, and the simple truth of the matter is that the longer it is left, the more time the issues surrounding his campaign have the chance to fester, giving fodder to the Obama campaign to create a greater divide.

By Citizen Correspondent Wyatt McIntyre

Date Posted: 07/03/08

Reader Rating:

In Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism, Philosopher George Grant's 1965 defense of former Canadian Prime Minister John George Diefenbaker, which offered a stinging rebuke to those he considered to be conspirators in the demise of the Prairie Populist for the raise of Eastern intellectual and former Diplomat Lester Bowles Pearson, he concluded with a simple sentence, "Whatever the difficulty in philosophy the religious man has been told that process is not all." It was a stark conclusion about the nature of political re-alignment and the cause and effect of policy shifts versus the fundamental structure of election strategy applicable not just to Northern politics but to politics in general.

There is little doubt that the basic sentiment expressed by Dr. Grant, written in the deeper theological language he was known for, was a correct assessment. Though policy plays it's part, process, not policy, perhaps as often as we like to say we vote based on the issues, tends to dominate the political medium and becomes the primary method by which elections are won. Now granted, there are always that group of people that do vote solely based on policy, spending time pouring over platforms or researching voting histories to determine where or how someone stands or stood on the issues important to them but the more time that passes the more that number seems to dwindle, if it was even a great number to begin with.

Yesterday, amidst a number of problems that had been plaguing his campaign, Republican Presumptive Nominee and Senior Senator from Arizona John McCain announced a campaign shift. A year after what had become known as "Black Monday", the time last year when, trailing in the polls and finding his campaign was broke, the fundraising well dry, he shook his campaign with an organizational restructuring that included a large round of lay offs of campaign staff from the bottom to the top, Senator McCain announced a new campaign shake up. The hope, that he would able to shift the focus of his campaign, and offer a stronger direction after a series of missteps that have hurt him in his chances of winning election.

In other words, his strategy is not working, somewhere amidst the end of the Republican Primary and end of the Democratic Primary a series of miscalculations have caused him to slip in the polls, finding himself trailing his principle rival, Illinois Senator Barack Obama, in all the tracking numbers.