A look at the states in which a campaign chooses to run a national ad can provide an important window into the campaign's electoral strategy. Just as I did last week with U.S. Senator Barack Obama's "Country I Love", I've created a map of U.S. Senator John McCain's ad buy for "Global."
In order to properly contextualize the geography of the buy, here again is the electoral map with the states NDN considers core Democratic and core Republican.
And here is the same map with a green layer showing the states where the McCain campaign is airing its ad.
Jake Berliner posted the ad here and provided some analysis of its content, calling into question McCain's green credentials. But while the subject of the ad is climate change, the opening lines reveal a not so subtle political message, "John McCain stood up to the President and sounded the alarm on global warming five years ago." Of course, it's no secret that McCain has been trying to distance himself from the President and clearly he sees his stance on climate change as providing evidence of his independence. But while the presumptive Republican nominee seems to believe that this is an important issue for him politically, he apparently hasn't taken the time to fully understand the policy side of his climate change stance. Just as McCain disturbingly flubbed the taxonomy of religious groups in the Middle East on multiple occasions (see Simon's post "Old Man McCain"), he's been tripping over his own feet when describing his cap-and-trade policy. In various forums, he has insisted that he supports a non-mandatory cap as a part of a cap-and-trade plan despite the fact that this is inconsistent with the plan he supported with U.S. Senator Joseph Lieberman last year as well as with what is written on his own website,
John McCain Proposes A Cap-And-Trade System That Would Set Limits On Greenhouse Gas Emissions While Encouraging The Development Of Low-Cost Compliance Options.
The only way to read this and not come away thinking that McCain is contradicting himself is to somehow believe that the limits mentioned above are non-mandatory. So either McCain doesn't understand his own plan or he favors non-mandatory limits on greenhouse gases, a position which would render his cap-and-trade plan entirely ineffectual. These, my friends, are not very good options.
For more on the candidates' emerging electoral strategies, see Simon's posts "Cillizza Looks at Obama, McCain Strategies" and "The Audacity of the Obama Buy."
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