McCain the Maverick adopts one the absolute worst Democratic ideas...

One of the most underreported, but important, aspects of Barack Obama's successful campaign for the Democratic nomination is how he ran largely on an overarching and broad narrative and rejected the interest group politics that has defined Democratic politics for an entire generation. The post-Watergate generation of Democratic operatives looked at the electorate as a series of voters aligned with a series of interest groups. The calculus was simple: appeal to enough of these groups and put together a coalition that gets you enough votes to win an election. The strategy went something like: teachers-plus-veterans-plus-labor-plus-African Americans = 50.1%. It was simple, allowed for the empowerment of the most active interest groups on the left, and was the roadmap used by most national Democratic campaigns in recent decades. But it didn't work. Sure, Bill Clinton won in 1992 and 1996, but both of those wins owed a lot to Ross Perot.

Obama's campaign has been about a much larger narrative - about the kind of America he wants to work towards as President - and much less about specific messages targeting the specific interest groups. To be sure, he talks about (and to) veterans, teachers, union members and the like. But his overall message is a broad narrative intended to reach a majority of the electorate, not a series of slices of the electorate. He is Barack Obama the candidate of hope and aspiration, not Barack Obama the candidate of teachers, union members, women, blacks and Hispanics.

The broad narrative is precisely what Ronald Reagan did successfully in 1980 and 1984. And to a degree, it's what George W. Bush did in 2000 with his calls for compassionate conservatism and ending the division in Washington - appeals not to specific groups, but to the entire electorate.

John McCain's pick of Governor Sarah Palin was more in the tradition of old fashioned Democratic interest group politics than in the tradition of Ronald Reagan's Morning in America. The pick was designed to 1) compete for the disaffected Hillary voters, and 2) shore up the evangelical base. It's an attempt to get 1) women, and 2) evangelicals on board with McCain. There is no doubt that picking Palin undercuts McCain's macro message about Obama's purported "inability to lead." And the campaign either failed to vet or failed to care about the significant distractions caused by the bizarre revelations about Palin's family, the investigation into the firing of a highway patrol officer, and her connection with a strange separatist group (remember when they wanted to make patriotism an issue?). But it appears that McCain was much more concerned about appealing to these two interest groups than they were about preserving his campaign's narrative.

The problem with interest group politics is that it focuses precisely on a few individual trees at the expense of the much larger forest. Sarah Palin may very well rally some evangelicals around McCain's candidacy - but they are not the types that were going to ever vote for Barack Obama. But by taking a clearly calculated political move to appeal to a narrow set of voters in the most important decision of his campaign, McCain is seriously risking his image as a straight-talker that rejects politics as usual and represents the values and priorities of the every important "people like you."

And there is evidence that the risk isn't working out. As GOP consultant Frank Luntz found in focus groups of undecided voters for the AARP, only 1 in 25 of those asked liked the Palin choice. A focus group is not a quantitative survey, but the results of those groups are not a good sign for the McCain campaign.

As one Hillary voter who leaned McCain noted in the groups, "I change my mind almost every day, but right now I'm wondering where the John McCain I really liked in 2000 went, what happened to the moderate?"

McCain may well be served politically by adopting a handful of Democratic policy initiatives to enhance his maverick credentials, but adopting the old Democratic tactic of interest group politics isn't the smartest move his campaign has made.