In Ad, McCain Breaks With Bush
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

WASHINGTON — Senator McCain is making his most abrupt break with President Bush yet, releasing a new television ad that asserts that Americans are “worse off than we were four years ago.”
The new 30-second spot hails the presumptive Republican nominee as “the original maverick” and criticizes Washington gridlock.
“Washington’s broken. John McCain knows it,” a narrator says during the ad. “We’re worse off than we were four years ago.”
The script continues: “Only McCain has taken on Big Tobacco, drug companies, fought corruption in both parties. He’ll reform Wall Street, battle Big Oil, make America prosper again. He’s the original maverick.”
The message is a departure for Mr. McCain from seven months ago, when he was asked in a Republican primary debate whether Americans “are better off than they were eight years ago.”
BROKEN:
“I think you could argue that Americans overall are better off,” the Arizona senator replied. He acknowledged that “things are tough right now,” but he cited a strong economy with low inflation, low unemployment, and job creation. “I think we are better off overall when you look at the millions of jobs that have been created, the improvement in the economy, etcetera.”
Mr. McCain has moved increasingly in recent months to distance himself from an unpopular incumbent and a national party whose brand has been badly damaged. He rarely appears in public with Mr. Bush, and Vice President Cheney reportedly will not even attend his nomination at the Republican National Convention next month in St. Paul, Minn.
On specific policy issues, Mr. McCain has criticized the Bush administration over its handling of the Iraq war, its lackluster efforts to combat climate change, and the absence of a comprehensive energy strategy.
But in the ad Mr. McCain casts a far wider net and, in effect, condemns Mr. Bush’s second term as a failure.
The McCain campaign declined to elaborate on the ad and whether Mr. McCain had rethought his assessment of the Bush presidency as the economy has slipped in the last seven months. The Republican has also been a frequent critic of Congress, a body whose approval ratings are even lower than those of the president.
A White House spokesman would not address directly the ad’s assertion that the nation is “worse off” now than before the president began his second term. “The president has said he does not intend to be commentator in chief on the race,” the spokesman, Trey Bohn, said. “Each candidate has to run on his vision for the future and their plans for the country.”
A former Republican opponent of Mr. McCain’s and a top contender to be his running mate, Mitt Romney, last night offered a more nuanced answer to the question of whether Americans are better off now than four years ago. In an appearance on MSNBC, the former Massachusetts governor praised Mr. Bush’s national security policy and said he had made the nation safer. “We’re better off in that regard,” Mr. Romney said.
But he noted that the economy had worsened during the same period. “We’re not in as good a position economically,” he said.
Though Mr. McCain did not mention his Democratic rival in the commercial, the Obama campaign drew attention to his claims of political independence and suggested they were exaggerations. “Senator McCain wants Americans to forget that during the Republican primary, he said that Americans were better off than we were eight years ago, and that he thinks we’ve made ‘great progress economically,'” a campaign spokesman, Bill Burton, said in a statement. “He wants us to forget that he’s fully embraced the Bush policies he once opposed, and bragged about supporting those policies ‘more than 90 percent of time.'”
The ad and Mr. McCain’s embrace of the “maverick” image are also an attempt to rebut aggressive efforts by the Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee to tie him to Mr. Bush. The DNC released a new video yesterday highlighting financial support of Mr. McCain’s candidacy by the oil industry, and the committee unveiled a Web site called TheNextCheney.com, which compares each of seven potential McCain running mates to the current vice president.
While the McCain strategy may appeal to swing voters dissatisfied with the economy and the Bush administration, it risks turning off conservatives who still hold the president in high regard. The tactic is also a break from the course Mr. Bush pursued in 2004, when he won re-election by mobilizing the party base.
“Many conservative Republicans chafe at the use of words like ‘Big Oil’ to describe an important industry in our economy,” a Republican strategist who advised Mr. Romney during the primary, Kevin Madden, said. “But the McCain campaign is betting that there are far more voters who will give John McCain a chance at the polls because he is talking tough on these issues than there are voters who will penalize him for doing so.”
The ad, he said, is “an appeal to the ‘big middle’ of the electorate — blue collar Democrats, independents, and reform-minded Republicans — who are angry at Washington and both parties for our current problems.”