How to Beat Obama

Peter Wehner over at Real Clear Politics give some sage advice:

Senator McCain’s line of attack against Senator Obama, should Obama become the Democratic nominee, ought to be on Obama’s liberal stands. As best as I can ascertain, apart from calling for merit pay for teachers, Obama is a conventional liberal on every significant national issue. Senator McCain needs to focus like a laser beam on that fact.

I should add an important caveat: invoking the liberal label is not enough. Especially against Obama — who is skilled, dexterous, and projects a sense of being non-ideological — much more will be necessary. Senator McCain needs to make deep, sustained arguments on behalf of liberty, limited government, constitutionalism, the family, and American strength and military power (from prosecuting the Iraq war to a successful conclusion to effective terrorist surveillance policies) in confronting militant Islam. He then needs to lay out a robust governing agenda based on those governing principles. And he needs to present himself as a reformer of our institutions, which is something that does come easily to McCain.

Making the case against Obama’s liberalism will bring howls of protest from reporters and columnists who once held McCain up as a courageous “maverick” and who took particular delight when he antagonized conservatives. John McCain’s days as the mainstream media’s favorite Republican are about to end. One can already anticipate the avalanche of columns denouncing McCain as a flip-flopping, unprincipled panderer.

The mainstream media will insist that using the liberal label is so 1980s. Such name-calling, we will be told, is anachronistic, “old and tired,” simple-minded, and a sign of desperation. It may have worked against Michael Dukakis in 1988, they will argue, but we are a better and wiser nation now.

McCain should reject such counsel.

If Obama should win the Democratic nomination, John McCain should go straight at his record — with precision, without rancor, and relentlessly. John McCain will not win a personality contest against Barack Obama; no political figure in America could. McCain will have to base his campaign on a set of creative, forward-looking ideas that meet the challenges of our time. He will have to make this a race about ideas and about ideology.