John McCain’s campaign has had a rough go lately--at least that’s what his 2008 rivals would have you think. First, there have been the whispers about money, that McCain won’t even match the somewhat lackluster $12 million he raised during the first three months of the year by the time candidates file their second-quarter numbers. (His campaign says it’s not so, that they are on target to raise more. The truth is, absent some leak of finance records, we really won’t know until after June 30--the second quarter deadline.) There’s the talk about supporters jumping ship en masse for Fred Thompson--something that hasn’t really happened yet. Perhaps the only real disappointment that is confirmed is McCain’s clear slide in the polls lately. He’s down in Iowa and New Hampshire and took a big hit in this week’s Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll, which found him ranked third behind Thompson among likely GOP voters and just two points above Mitt Romney, a guy whose poll numbers haven’t kept up with his pace as the GOP’s fund-raising frontrunner.
But, as the New York Times reports today, Romney seems to be picking up steam because he’s spending millions of dollars on advertising. And in this story is perhaps another McCain problem: The head-scratching analogy. The Times quotes John Weaver, McCain’s longtime political adviser, talking about Romney’s surge in the polls. He says that Romney’s up because his early ads have created an “artificial impression they are doing well.” “They are very soft numbers because it’s done in a vacuum,” Weaver says. Fair enough. But then he says this: “It would be like, if on a busy intersection, a hamburger chain puts up a store, and they’re the only hamburger chain around. People would buy their hamburgers there, but after a period of time, Burger King and McDonalds move in, and the hamburger chain wouldn’t do as well.” So, like, McCain is a Big Mac? And Romney is a quarter pounder pound single from Wendy’s? And people tend to like Big Mac’s better? Hmm. There are many strange things about comparing the presidential race to the fast food wars, not the least of which is your Gaggler’s difficulty in figuring out where Giuliani and Thompson play in all of this. Is Rudy a Whopper? Is Thompson a Quarter Pounder with Cheese? After all, he and McCain do have similar records, so chances are, they’d appear on the same menu--but under different buns.
