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.

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