Wouldn't McCain's campaign have been far more successful if he had run as a centrist?
Obama's voting record is categorically liberal, so we can reasonably expect him to govern as a liberal. However, he ran a centrist campaign.
Before the election John McCain was perceived as a Republican with an independent streak. After the Republican primary, where the candidates vie to out-conservative one another, isn't it conventional wisdom to "move to the center"? Yet the McCain campaign continued to court the right-wingers as if he didn't have the nomination locked up. If any Republican could have had a chance to "move to the center" it would have been John McCain, independent-minded as he has been in the past on certain key issues. Instead his campaign lurched to the radical right.
It is astounding to me that McCain forgot the lessons of 2000. Bush beat him in the primaries because he "out-conservatived" him and went on to win the election by "moving to the center." It is highly probable that McCain would have governed the country as a centrist, but the choices which he made during his campaign have more than likely ruined that opportunity.
Obama, on the other hand, had no problem distancing himself from the lefties who helped him beat Clinton. He came out of the gate as Mr. Centrist and didn't look back. I believe that if McCain would have done the same to the righties in his party, and by extension, picked a more sensible, right-center Republican as a running-mate, then he would be in a far more favorable position at the moment.
Instead, his campaign, shockingly, even at this late hour of the campaign, is offering nothing but right-wing riling attacks on Obama. I don't think people realize yet how embarrassingly, shamefully pathetic his campaign has been in this regard. Centrist Obama is out there offering a vision and a clear message, and McCain's campaign is barking and frothing like a rabid dog in a very small cage.
Things could have been very different. McCain has made it very easy for Obama.