Seeking to build on maverick image, McCain touts environment

While Obama has been increasingly turning to the general election, John McCain has been preparing for 4 month now (incredibly enough, that's how long has passed since Super Tuesday!). His latest move: campaigning on the environment. In what his campaign had advertised as a major policy speech on global warming, McCain earned the headlines he wanted today, for example the New York Times's "McCain Differs with Bush on Climate Change."

McCain plans to tout environmental issues in order to appeal to independent voters. With politicians like Schwarzenegger focusing on the environment, there is a growing drift away from the business Republicans' stance and independents especially are paying attention to the issue. McCain believes he can build on his maverick image with this issue and build a strong base by anchoring moderate Republicans and independents (who might be tempted by Obama) to his side. Remember, independents swinging towards the Democratic Party was a major reason for the country's dramatic turn leftward in 2006, and McCain is perhaps the only candidate Republicans could have nominated to stop the bleeding.

Another reason McCain will seize the environment is that this topic allows him to appear like a maverick without actually moving to the center at all: All he needs to do is offer a break with President Bush and given how dogmatically far-right the current Administration has been on environmental issues, pretty much anything McCain proposes will earn him centrist credentials. In fact, even professing that he "believes in global warming" could do the trick! Similarly, McCain was left looking like a lefty pacifist during the GOP debates just for opposing torture, something that most people wouldn't even have thought was an issue until a few years ago.

It's hard to give McCain credit for things as simple as believing global warming or opposing torture, headline like the New York Times suggest that he will get what he wants out of them: the impression of offering a different kind of Republican regime. And thus the fact that McCain's proposals fall short of what is needed to truly combat global warming goes mostly unnoticed -- for instance the fact that McCain's cap on carbon emissions is significantly inferior to even what the Lieberman-Warner Senate bill is proposing.

Finally, this story suggests an important advantage McCain has had in starting the general election in early February. He has been able to spend the first few months of the year courting the disaffected Republican base, secure the support of Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee and various conservative leaders and burnish his credentials on the right. Now that the general public is paying more attention to him again, McCain has already taken care of that part of the equation and is ready to move on to the second part of any general election campaign -- moving towards the center.

Yet, Robert Novak reports today that some elements in the evangelical community are not ready to embrace McCain just yet because (1) they want to wait for Huckabee 2012 and (2) they consider that an Obama presidency is a plague that America 'deserves' for its sins. Novak adds that these groups remain marginal for now but that enough evangelical leaders remain skeptical by McCain that this could prove a major problem for the Arizona Senator in the fall unless he does some reach out. We saw in 2000 that evangelicals don't mind just sitting at home.