McCain's Next Front: The Economy

John McCain may be a victim of his own success. His early, unwavering support of the military surge in Iraq ended up helping him win the nomination. And as the situation has become more stable over there, it has removed the war from the front pages here, diminishing what was suppose to be McCain's big liability.

As a result, though, voters now overwhelmingly see other issues, specifically the economy, as higher priorities for the presidential contenders. And that creates several real challenges for McCain.

The first is tonal. McCain fairly relishes delivering bad news and telling voters that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. In the primary, that’s what he told distressed auto workers in Michigan, and Floridians looking for a federal catastrophic home insurance policy.

He tried it again last week in a speech in which he admonished homeowners who “bought homes they couldn't afford, betting that rising prices would make it easier to refinance later at more affordable rates” and cautioned voters that “any assistance must be temporary and must not reward people who were irresponsible at the expense of those who weren’t.”

His analysis may have been correct, but it evidently wasn’t what many voters wanted to hear. His two potential Democratic opponents attacked him for ignoring the misery of homeowners. Several days later, McCain followed up with a statement explaining that he really did get it, declaring, “We have a responsibility to take action to help those among them who are deserving homeowners, and as I said this week, I am committed to considering any and all proposals to do so.”

So then his first hurdle: avoid sounding like Marie Antoinette when delivering hard truths to voters.

McCain will face another challenge in convincing voters that he is not a one-trick pony. If Mitt Romney could pull out McCain’s old quotes professing a relative lack of expertise about the economy, the Democrats certainly can. Hillary Clinton has conceded that McCain has impressive national security experience, but either of the Democratic contenders can argue that Americans are selecting a president, not a secretary of defense.

McCain needs to demonstrate proficiency (interest, even) in economic policy. He talks about his lifetime of preparation to fight Islamic terrorism, which he says is the “transcendent challenge” of our time, but voters want to know he is also prepared to deal with their own bread-and-butter issues.

And to the extent that he has talked about economic issues, he doesn’t seem yet to have found a way to do so that actually engages voters. Boasting of his devotion to fiscal discipline, McCain harks back to a Barry Goldwater vision of limited government. But after decades of government expansion and two terms of “compassionate conservatism”—which included a new drug entitlement program, massive domestic spending and the Federal Reserve’s intervention to recue Bear Stearns—even Republicans, not to mention other voters, have become attuned to a more interventionist government.

Simply put, voters want to hear what government will do, not just what plans McCain has for stopping government from doing bad or wasteful things. He’s still talking about the “bridge to nowhere,” but voters also want to hear about what the government will do about foreclosures and the rising costs of education and health care for middle-class Americans.

The conservative economic message that used to win elections, largely centering on tax cuts, has lost some of its punch as marginal tax rates have drifted downward and other concerns, like health care and globalization, have become more potent. To remain relevant, McCain will have to come up with affirmative ideas of his own that are true to his principles yet offer an attractive alternative to those of the Democrats.

McCain is not without such ideas. He actually has a market-oriented plan for making health care more affordable and a program for retraining displaced workers. Now he must be willing to talk about these and other responses to the problems Americans want addressed.

It will be no small task for a man so unaccustomed to telling voters that he feels their pain.