"We love ya big guy, but for heaven's sake don't call us. We'll call you."
That's the official word from McCain's High Command to the occupying regime of George W. Bush, as reported this morning by the New York Times after a weekend what-to-do-about-George strategy session in Arizona.
"Senator John McCain's campaign advisers will ask the White House to deploy President Bush for major Republican fund-raising, but they do not want the president to appear too often at his side," reveals the Times, as revealed to it by the behind-the-eight-ball boys.
Things like that must be put ... uh, delicately. In effect, they need George's money -- oh, how they need his money -- but let's face it: he's drenched in voter-repellent. This may be America but 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is seen by the vast multitudes as enemy territory. Thanks a lot, George, for greasing the skids of your would-be Republican successor with molasses.
Nevertheless there's that matter of dangled money, which in politics, as in life, has a certain magnetic charm -- a certain pull in the way of patching up bruised relationships. You know, like ones in which you were falsely excoriated before a third of your base for having fathered an illegitimate child, costing you your dream of a lifetime and leaving you wandering in the wilderness for years.
But the thought of those plain brown envelopes stuffed with right-wing cash has McCain's advisers feeling that Christian warmth of forgiveness. "We were dyspeptic jerks who held grudges," said one, perhaps merely in happy anticipation of getting back on a payroll that actually pays. Every month.
Yet there's a second "nevertheless." And this one, practically speaking, may be a whole lot tougher to overcome than the emotional stuff.
As the Times understated the political undertow, the McCain camp is staring down the barrel of a "difficult calculus" -- that of "using Mr. Bush enough to try to make the tough sell of Mr. McCain to conservatives but not so much that he will drive away the independents and some moderate Democrats that Mr. McCain is counting on in November."
The problem, of course, is that using Mr. Bush at all -- which they've already conceded they must do -- will approach the equivalent of Alf Landon having had Herbert Hoover dragging behind him on the 1936 campaign trail; of taking a dire calculus and making it immeasurably dismal.
Every time John and George are caught together on camera, the improbable pair will remind voters -- moderates, independents and even that handful of thoughtful conservatives -- that the latter just spent eight years, as Jonathan Rauch of the National Journal has painted the GOP's smiley face, sponsoring little more than "ruthless partisanship ... fiscal recklessness ... polarization ... presidential monarchism ... [and the] erosion of U.S. credibility on human rights." All are welcome to add to this list of U.S. fortunes-reversal, and they will.
The solution, says Rauch, is McCain. "If the Bush years were snakebit, think of McCain as an antivenin.... Wise Republicans know, to begin with, that the party is lost if it cannot rebuild its own center and appeal to the country's."
In short, McCain and some message of moderation can overcome the electorally narrowing megalomania of Karl Rove. The center shall set him -- and his party -- free.
But there's problem with that, too. A really big one. And it's already been foreshadowed by none other than one of McCain's own media advisers, Mark McKinnon, who "told National Public Radio last week that although he supported Mr. McCain, he would not be part of the senator’s campaign if Senator Barack Obama was the Democratic nominee because he ... would be uncomfortable in a campaign that would inevitably be attacking him."
McKinnon has seen the handwriting on the wall. It is, of course, axiomatic that every presidential campaign gets nasty, but this one is about to become the platinum standard for nastiness -- precisely because McCain's center will fold, and precisely because it is the independent-magnet of Obama that he'll be running against. McKinnon knows that, he can smell it. And he wants nothing to do with it.
He knows that as McCain's camp watches critical swing states turn from purple to blue, McCain may have no choice but to revert to the Rovian strategy of turning out the base. What to do about those moderates and independents flocking to Obama's camp? Subject them -- which is to say Obama -- to withering fire, not so much to energize the Republican base but to suppress the critical one of Obama's.
And when that mothering invention of necessity comes, you may indeed see Herbert Hoover dragging behind Alf Landon.