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Comment''Senator, you have a few minutes?"
"For you, Steve? I have all day. Have a seat."
"I wanted to talk to you about a new theme. You had a great convention, good bounce --"
"Thanks to you. My friend, the job you've done since you took hold of my campaign--move over, Karl Rove. He's got nothing on Steve Schmidt."
"Thanks, sir. So we want to capitalize on your bounce and deal a little more firmly with the age issue."
"Steve, you know how many times we've been around that track. I'm 72, and I look every day of it. We can't get around that. The voters know me, and they've already figured in my age. And we've got Sarah now. She's a pep pill."
"Our tracking polls show age is the public's biggest remaining concern about you, sir. People love Sarah as running mate or VP. But when we test the words 'President Palin' ... "
"So? What are you suggesting?
"We need to go on offense. Our theme is that Barack Obama is too old for the job and that the public needs a younger, more vigorous brand of leadership. OK, here are some scripts we're looking at."
"Wait, wait, wait. Wait. Do you need time off? I can give you a few days. Take some time. You've earned it."
"No, Senator. If you'll just look at these scripts --"
"Steve, April Fool's Day is seven months off. You want me to say Obama is too old to be president and I'm not?"
"Yes."
"I'm younger than Obama?"
"Not younger, exactly. More youthful. You have more, um, youthiness. What is 72? That's just a numeral. Same two digits as 27. It's ink on a driver's license. You have the adventurous spirit of youth. You're the innovator, the reformer. You may be older in years. You're older technically. But you're younger in qualifications. That's the age that really matters. Qualificationswise, you're entering your prime, and you have the experience to prove it. You're like Reagan, although you're even younger, though not technically.
"Whereas your opponent? Tired ideas. 'Bitter.' Same old fresh face as in 2004. His best days are already behind him and he never accomplished anything. Peel back the public-relations front and the media hype, and he's over the hill."
"Steve. This is preposterous. You can't honestly ask this head of white hair to go out there and say I'm younger than Barack Obama. I'm a grandparent."
"So is Sarah, in a few months. Grandparents aren't old anymore. They're the new aunts and uncles. Especially in Alaska. Look, let me give you some context--why I think we have a good shot here."
"I'm all ears."
"You may have heard of the law of the excluded middle. No? It's from philosophy. Logic, to be specific. It says that if X, then not not X. Wait, bear with me. If a statement is true, then the negation of that statement cannot also be true. Otherwise everything could be true at once. You'd have fuzzy logic."
"Steve --"
"We've figured out something. The law of the excluded middle is not in the Constitution. We looked. It's not in any contract our party ever signed. It wasn't even written by Republicans. It was written by left-wing academics.
"So at the convention last week, we send the former mayor of New York City to go out on prime time and ridicule Obama for being 'cosmopolitan.' We make Rudy Giuliani, Mr. Manhattan, the spokesman for small-town values. According to Democrat logic, he should be laughed off the stage. But the response goes off the charts.
"Why? Across America, people are fed up with so-called logical 'laws' that they never agreed to and that insult their values. They're ready to fight back against cosmopolitan logic. We've tapped into that!
"Look at Mitt Romney. The former governor of Massachusetts gets up there and bad-mouths the East Coast. No one bats an eye. Then he says, 'We need change, all right: change from a liberal Washington to a conservative Washington. We have a prescription for every American who wants change in Washington: Throw out the big-government liberals.' As if Ted Kennedy has been president these past eight years. The liberal bloggers said things like, 'Has Romney lost his mind?' But that's Democrat logic.
"Or Sarah. Our side says Obama is too inexperienced to be president. Karl Rove says Tim Kaine, the Democrat governor of Virginia, is too inexperienced to be vice president. So what do we do? We go find Sarah, who has less experience than either of them. Less than anybody in American politics, practically. We put her on the ticket and say she has more than enough experience to be president. Even though Obama doesn't. Maybe that's not cosmopolitan logic, but Americans get it.
"Look at the themes of your campaign. Republicans have messed up in Washington. So, what's the answer? Elect another Republican. Messing up isn't a strike against us. It's a qualification.
"Washington. You've been there 26 years. You're a fixture. So what does that make you? An outsider.
"Government. You run against big government. OK, so Republicans have made it bigger. That only shows why we need Republicans to make it smaller. And who better to bring competence to government than the guys who go around bashing it?
"You run on fiscal responsibility. Get that deficit under control. How better to do that than with big tax cuts, unpaid-for? Who turned surpluses into deficits? Republicans. That's exactly why we need the kind of sound fiscal management that Republicans bring to Washington.
"Rudy and Mitt and Sarah give speeches steeped in contempt for Obama and Democrats and urbanites and liberals. They play the identity-politics card like there's no tomorrow. That's the message on Wednesday. Thursday, you talk about how you're going to bridge the divide, be Mr. Bipartisanship, bring a new respect to politics.
"If you believe what the textbooks say, we're the incumbent party. We've held the White House for the past eight years. We've held Congress for most of that time. So what does that make us? The party of change!
"And you know how we prove that? By offering all the same policies as President Bush. Apart from global warming, we're the same on every major issue. That's how we're going to shake up Washington. Just by being us. 'John McCain is the change. Vote for him and change will come.' That's our message. Of course, when Obama says, 'I am the change,' we say it's messianic. But when you say it, we're campaigning on your biography.
"Sir, the potential here is limitless. When we started down this road, it was just tactics. We were operating on the Rovian principle of hitting the other guy where he looks strongest, not weakest. We figured the best defense was a good offense. Plus, we wanted to exploit the element of surprise. We knew that no one would expect the most idealistic Republican politician of his generation to run the most cynical campaign of his day.
"And then we saw how it was going over, and we realized we were on to something. At the convention, we pushed the pedal all the way to the floor. We nominated a vice presidential candidate whose shortcoming was her lack of any apparent substantive command of national issues. We could have filled that gap. Instead, we gave her a substance-free speech. OK, there were a few lines about oil pipelines in the Caucasus. But we kept them to a bare minimum and played up cultural resentment instead. We substituted snarl for substance. Result? Home run.
"That was when it dawned on us. We're way beyond cynicism here. We've warped out of cosmopolitan logic altogether. We're in a new political space. We're epistemological pioneers! Republicans are the party of freedom and personal choice, right? So what's the ultimate freedom? What's the ultimate choice? 'X and not X--you can have it all!'
"The public wants change and experience. That's what you're promising. They're 90 percent there. All you need to do is help them close the deal. Here, listen to this script:
"Barack Obama says he's 'young.' But is he really? Being young is about more than just talk. Look behind the words, and you'll find the same old policies. From the same old people.
"Anyone can come out of nowhere and claim to be young. John McCain has been proving his youth for decades, ever since he was a young POW in a dark isolation cell in Vietnam.
"John McCain will bring real youth to Washington. The kind of youth that gets results.
"John McCain. A president you can trust to be young."
"Steve. My God. You're a genius. I feel younger already. You could almost make me believe black is white."
"Actually, Senator, I was just coming to that."
This article appeared in the Saturday, September 13, 2008 edition of National Journal.
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