The Republicans

McCain trots on

Is John McCain seeking a new southern strategy?

AS SOUND and fury dominates the Democratic race, on the Republican side the candidate quietly plods on. It is unclear precisely how much John McCain is benefiting from the prolonged scrap between the Democrats, which is widely assumed to be gradually eroding the reputations of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Certainly Mr McCain is spared, for now, the expense of devoting resources to besmirching his rivals.

Mr McCain is getting less attention than his Democratic opponents, but he is using his time to lay foundations for the general-election campaign. Most obviously he is distancing himself from George Bush. Last week Mr McCain made it plain that he is trying to break with the past with a visit to the South. He toured places where presidential candidates, let alone Republican ones, almost never visit. He called in at Gee’s Bend, a poor black corner of Alabama, and Inez, a tiny Kentucky coal town where Lyndon Johnson declared a war on poverty (a third of Inez’s residents remain below the poverty line). He also went to New Orleans and denounced the miserable official response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

Some of this is a canny move on race. In 1980 when Ronald Reagan launched his own presidential campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi, a town notorious for the murder of three civil-rights workers in 1964, the Republicans emphasised “states’ rights”. That pleased parts of the South, especially among those who thought that desegregation was a bad idea. Now Mr McCain is turning against those Republicans who want to use race to appeal to white voters. He forcefully criticised North Carolina’s Republicans who have produced attack adverts against Mr Obama using footage of anti-American remarks made by his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. He called such adverts divisive. The tour of the South had other purposes. He visited two southern states—Louisiana and Arkansas—that could possibly swing to the Democrats in the autumn.

Beyond the South he is looking for a national strategy for the coming months. A “victory fund” has been set up led by an activist, Lewis Eisenberg, a former partner at Goldman Sachs, and Carly Fiorina, who was the boss of Hewlett-Packard until 2005. Another Silicon Valley connection is John Chambers, the chief executive of Cisco Systems, who advises Mr McCain on technology.

Whereas Mr Bush campaigned and won his two elections with a team that centralised control, Mr McCain is opting for 11 “regional managers” who will take daily decisions in the states under their command. He is recruiting, in part, from his Republican rivals’ campaigns. But not everyone in the party is reassured: some fear that Mr McCain is employing the same model that he was using when his campaign almost imploded last summer.

Mr McCain is also tending to his relationship with the party’s right-wingers, who launched a short-lived insurgency against his nomination in January. He has held meetings with conservative congressmen, setting out his stall on abortion and tax cuts. This, and the fact that Mr Obama is now almost as much an anathema to conservatives as Mrs Clinton, has helped to get the Republicans squarely behind their man.

In turn, of course, he will also have to appeal to independent voters, and he is hopeful enough to think a Republican candidate could win in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Minnesota—the latter has not voted for a Republican presidential candidate since 1972. Some of the more optimistic in his team even make noises that California is in play. This may be stretching it a bit. The Democrats won California by ten points in 2004. But Mr McCain clearly has ambition—an essential quality for somebody who seeks the White House.