Economist: McCain's Savvy Bid to Grab the Change Mantle

TW: McCain has anchored and excited the religious right with Palin and is now running as hard as he can as the "maverick change agent". At a minimum this effort may dilute Obama's core campaign theme of change.

McCain's "change" is different, it is executional change as opposed to policy change as in he would do what W. Bush tried to do but do it well- like invading places like Iraq. I would argue on social issues with the Palin pick he is signaling the religious right he would do better implementing the religious right's agenda by doing it with a smile as opposed to the raw, purely partisan plod of the W. Bush Administration. This is a strong electoral strategy.

Note the Economist article does not frame an executional implementation example relative to the economy. Presumeably because there is a paucity of economic policy other than all taxes are evil emanating from either W. Bush or McCain.

Economist:
"What Mr McCain is really offering is a very specific kind of change: of governance, not of policy, from George Bush.

Mr Obama's camp, like this cartoon, has a point: on the major issues, Mr McCain has either long shared Mr Bush's positions or recently adopted them. The list is as long as you want it to be: on taxation, Iraq, Afghanistan, abortion, immigration, education and health care, there is now little or no difference between the two Republicans. On the environment, Guantánamo, torture, gay rights and a few other issues, Mr McCain maintains slight but real differences either in emphasis or in substance. One is hard-pressed to think of a big issue where there remain big disagreements. The McCain-Feingold campaign-finance reform comes to mind, but that is now yesterday's news.

What Mr McCain is pitching is not that he is different in instinct from the president. Rather, he is saying that he will do what Mr Bush should have done better. Whether fighting wars or climate change, Mr McCain says implicitly that Mr Bush was incompetent, or misled by special interests. In this sense, Mr McCain's campaign manager was right to say that this election is "not about issues". It's about trust and character, for the McCain team. They are taking a risky bet: that Americans still want the conservative policies Mr Bush pushed, because they are fundamentally conservative.

Mr Obama's bet is quite different. He bets that Americans...attitude towards imperial government in Iraq and elsewhere has moved dramatically, that inequality has started to compete with tax levels in voters' list of worries, and so forth. In its own way, this is a risky bet.
So this election is indeed about the issues, in a way. If Americans are as conservative, deep-down, as Mr McCain thinks they are, he will win, because he is offering Mr Bush's policies with a dash of reformist vigour. Mr Obama really is all about base-level change. We will learn a lot about the country by who wins in November.