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McCain battles a nemesis, the teleprompter
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 | Race for the presidency The trips, the speeches, and the moments of Decision ’08. A look at the campaigns of Barack Obama and John McCain. more photos |
The more careful McCain, said by some to be overly scripted, has received some withering critiques. “His rhetorical style can best be described as ‘tired mayonnaise,’ ” the comedian Stephen Colbert declared on “The Colbert Report” before inviting viewers to enter the “Make McCain Exciting Challenge.”
Peter Spaulding, the chairman of Mr. McCain’s campaign in New Hampshire, said he recently saw a McCain speech on television that was “just atrocious.”
Dan Schnur, Mr. McCain’s communications chief during his 2000 presidential campaign, said, “Besides his convention speech, the only time I would even put him behind a podium at all between now and the end of the campaign is when he’s announcing a policy position.”
Mr. McCain’s advisers, who bristle at the idea that they are trying to transform the candidate, say that his lack of smoothness merely reinforces his reputation for authenticity.
“Voters are looking for credibility and are wary of polish,” said Mark McKinnon, a former consultant to Mr. McCain’s campaign. “At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter which candidate can more deftly read a teleprompter.”
Indeed, Mr. McCain and his advisers seem to be trying to present him as a kind of anti-Obama whose weaknesses as a political performer underscore his accessibility to regular voters.
“John doesn’t ever want to be something that he is not,” Mr. Salter said, including trying to pass himself off as a larger-than-life figure on stage. “There’s nothing in there about him that wants to be rarefied.”
Mr. McCain and his surrogates appear to be taking a page from the primary campaign of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, which made a point of praising Mr. Obama’s speaking skills both to erase any expectation that she could match them and to imply that Mr. Obama was more of a performer than a leader. Nicolle Wallace, Mr. McCain’s new senior adviser, said the campaign would focus on having the candidate interact face to face with voters, “not from a center stage in the middle of a stadium.”
In an interview on his campaign plane, Mr. McCain said “my strongest environment is clearly the impromptu.” He added, “I don’t mean that in a way that denigrates Senator’s Obama’s speechmaking skills.”
He shrugged when asked whether he is improving as a speaker. “It’s fine, it’s fine,” he said. “It’s coming along.”
“I will continue to make mistakes,” he added.
He said he was trying to be “extra vigilant” about not giving unnecessary offense, knowing that the wisecracking humor that might charm cynical reporters might not do the same for earnest voters.
He sheepishly volunteered that he received complaints after a recent Newsweek profile of his wife, Cindy, said that he sometimes referred to her alma mater, the University of Southern California, as the University of Spoiled Children.
Mr. Salter bemoans the current environment, in which, he said, “the press creates the expectation that you better not stumble on a word, or tell a joke that Mr. Rogers wouldn’t tell, or you’re going to be in trouble.”
There are any number of Web videos of Mr. McCain to prove the point. They include the moment he playfully called a young man a “jerk” at a town-hall-style meeting in New Hampshire last year after he asked Mr. McCain if his age made him a candidate for Alzheimer’s disease in the White House (Mr. McCain typically uses jerk as a term of affection), or when he suggested to Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show” that he brought him a special gift from Iraq — an improvised explosive device.
Mr. McCain speaks often about his love of the “give and take,” the “more informal settings where I think I’m at my best.”
“It’s not an ego thing,” he said, “just where I think I’m most effective.”
When asked if it would be possible to run “the town meeting campaign” that he credited with providing him a decisive victory in New Hampshire, where he held 102 such events, Mr. McCain said, “Absolutely.”
The ease with which he presided over such a gathering in Cincinnati on June 26 was strikingly different from the difficulties he had with his speech in Las Vegas the day before. “I believe that town-hall meetings are the essence of the process,” Mr. McCain said to an audience at Xavier University, gripping his microphone with two hands. He talked about why it is important to engage with people across the political spectrum: “conservatives and liberals and libertarians and vegetarians,” he said.
A downside to such meetings is that they can become forums for people to ask about anything, including parochial concerns. One student, for example, asked Mr. McCain what he would do to ensure that commercial airlines continued to operate out of the Cincinnati airport.
Mr. McCain managed to steer his answer to energy, the theme of the week. “This is the reason for Project Lexington,” he responded.
This story, McCain Battles a Nemesis, the Teleprompter, originally appeared in The New York Times.
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