Starting the General Campaign Right. Mac's best road trip

Check out today's WSJ article McCain Campaign, in Relaunch, Seeks Tighter Message Focus:

John McCain will spend the coming week talking about the economy, but the Republican presidential candidate isn't expected to say anything new. Rather, he will repackage proposals he has already outlined -- ones the campaign fears nobody heard.

"We don't think we've made the case eloquently," Doug Holtz-Eakin, the campaign's policy director, said. The McCain makeover involves a complex task: How to control a politician best known for ask-anything town-hall meetings and long, rambling conversations with reporters on his campaign bus -- and, now, on his campaign plane, dubbed the Straight Talk Express.

A top adviser says they considered cutting back on those formats but concluded they couldn't. "It's John McCain, it's his brand," strategist Charlie Black said. "The fact he is engaging with average citizens and with reporters is part of his brand."

So the campaign will try to find ways to better manage what comes out of these sessions. Aides say they will push Sen. McCain for tighter delivery and to contain diversions -- if not completely eliminate them. One senior adviser said the message will be executed "crisply" from now on.

Until recently, Sen. McCain began town halls with his standard stump speech that touched briefly on a variety of issues, from immigration to the economy.

Now, most town halls will begin with a scripted speech wound around a topic of the day. Sen. McCain is then supposed to weave that topic through his answers and come back to it at the end. He will still take questions on any topic from audience members. But the campaign said it recognizes that most questions cover familiar territory, so the candidate's answers aren't likely to make news that will upstage the message of the day.

Aides say the extended sessions with reporters will continue. The rolling campaign-bus conversations have been limited because Sen. McCain spends much less time on buses than he once did. The time available is usually given to local reporters, who better reach voters in battleground states. But the campaign's new charter airplane is outfitted with an area suitable for similar conversation in the air with traveling national reporters.

Sen. Obama rarely has such open-ended, informal meetings with the media, sticking instead to short news conferences or one-on-one interviews.

The McCain campaign will also rely more heavily on surrogates for the candidate, a technique they say they have used ineffectively in the past. To keep control on the message, aides will carefully brief surrogates on specific talking points and then deploy them to reinforce Sen. McCain's message. Mr. Black says they want "more surrogates, more appearances, more air time."

Pretty nifty, eh?  Let's hope they can teach the old dog some new communication and persuasion techniques quickly without, as they say, actually changing the brand that makes him appealing to everyone except right wing talk radio and the Republican conservative base.  Heh. 

Ironman, I love your bus tour strategy.  I was just thinking this morning about what great coverage McCain will get in Minnesota (with Pawlenty) from the likes of the Northern Alliance, Lileks, and Powerline bloggers which are going to be read and linked to by many other conservative blogs.  And I think that having him end up in Independence Hall is very strategic during the month that the final draft of the Constitution was signed at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia.  I'm sure you've already read that Obama's new strategy is to accept his party's nomination at Invesco Field at Mile High Stadium, which will hold 76,000 people on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech.