McCain campaign strategy takes on a new tone

Cultural affinities, which President Bush played on heavily to paint 2004 Democratic nominee John F. Kerry as elite and out of touch, are now central to the campaign strategy of GOP presidential nominee John McCain.

The Arizona senator appeared to float above the culture wars Thursday night in a nomination acceptance speech that criticized "partisan rancor" and promoted his history of working with Democrats. And he is an unlikely standard-bearer for the forces of family values, given his admissions over the years of his failures as a husband, or for the advocates of small-town living, with his millionaire wife and multiple homes.

But this week's events demonstrated that McCain's campaign has settled on its final-stretch strategy to defeat Barack Obama: portraying Republicans as in sync with mainstream America and Democrats as the cultural fringe.

The most convincing evidence of this development came Wednesday in the star turn by McCain's vice presidential running mate, Sarah Palin, who cast herself as a symbol of small-town values and a mother whose family experiences "the same ups and downs as any other, the same challenges and the same joys."

It is a symbol that will now be pitched to middle-class and blue-collar workers, who make up a large share of undecided voters, including many of the white working-class Democrats in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Ohio who are skeptical of Obama.

These are the voters, GOP strategists say, who may be struggling economically, detest President Bush and oppose the Iraq war -- but still may vote based on a visceral sense of which candidate respects their way of life.

"This is going to be a values election," said U.S. Rep. Thomas M. Davis III, a key strategist for national Republicans. "This is going to be almost a replay of 2004 in terms of the cultural alignments."

The strategy worked for Bush four years ago. Yet its effectiveness this year is uncertain. Democratic voter registration has surged in several battleground states, and voters worried about the economy say they generally favor Democrats over Republicans. The economy, rather than any cultural issues, consistently ranks highest among voter concerns. But GOP strategists believe that despite those disadvantages, the public remains culturally conservative.