Given John McCain’s clear disdain for the growth in government spending under the GOP Senate and Congress, (see the video at the bottom of this post), I don’t understand what appears to be a systematic avoidance of all of the places where conservatives, collectively, are meeting. If McCain cannot figure out how to embrace the base of the Party, his quest for the nomination will be a short one. And if you avoid the respected leaders of the Party’s base, over and over, establishing that key dialogue and winning support will be very, very difficult:
From today’s Wall Street Journal Political Diary E-mail (with the video clip I reference below it):
Senator John McCain has raised the ire of his erstwhile media fans by appearing to pander too much to conservatives. Acutely aware of his increasingly snippy coverage, the Arizona Senator has tried to compensate by not pandering in person in front of conservative groups that almost all other GOP candidates are happy to appear before. In just the last six weeks, Mr. McCain has taken a pass on the following events: the mammoth Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, the Heritage Foundation members’ retreat and the National Review conservative summit.
Now he has declined an invitation to speak at the Club for Growth’s winter meeting in late March even though Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney and Senator Sam Brownback are all expected to attend. It’s true that Club for Growth President Pat Toomey has written critically of Mr. McCain’s votes against tax cuts and political free speech (most recently in Monday’s Wall Street Journal) but he has also praised Mr. McCain’s crusades against government pork and in favor of Social Security personal accounts.
"The impression McCain is leaving in recent weeks is that he’s not on the playing field where he should be," says one large GOP donor who contributed to Mr. McCain in 2000 but hasn’t taken out his checkbook this year. "If he wants to convince people he should be the party’s nominee, he can’t run a media strategy that doesn’t involve meeting people who help decide primaries."