SC’s Dawson Pushes RNC Ambitions at McCain’s Expense

The South Carolina State Republican Party’s new national McCain ad looks like a crass attempt by State Party Chairman Katon Dawson to boost his own RNC Chair campaign even if he damages John McCain in the process.  Dawson is considered one of the leading candidates to become the next RNC Chairman if McCain loses and has been openly running for the job since at least 2007.

Dawson just announced that he’s running the ad in Minnesota during the national convention next week, according to him as a way to help McCain by rebutting Obama’s “multiple houses” attack.  That’s pretty far fetched.  Sometimes state parties get involved in presidential buys in their own states, but never on a national level.  This is the McCain campaign and RNC’s job and by running ads in Minnesota Dawson is distracting the press from McCain’s biggest message opportunity of the race.

Even worse, his “defense” is helping Obama revive the seven houses attack.  McCain’s campaign aggressively rebutted Obama’s housing ad last week and it’s mostly dropped out of the news as a result.  All Dawson has done is dredge it up again.

The buy’s sole focus on Minnesota cable makes it obvious that this is about starting buzz at the convention among current and future RNC voting members – enough of whom will be watching cable news in their hotel rooms that this will become a major gossip point.  It’s effective because delegates are paying attention to things like the home spat but don’t understand political strategy enough to know why the spot isn’t helpful.  I’d bet that most of the delegates there think the spot is a “gutsy rebuttal” and when I talked to Dawson he told me a lot of delegates have been complementing him on the ad.

Dawson has raised a lot of money for a state party chairman and that’s admirable.  His claim is that he’s using that extra money outside of his state because he’s able to - which in and of itself is a positive thing - but there are dozens of more effective ways he could have spent that money to help McCain.

The SC GOP could have given a contribution to the get out the vote program in key states for example or maybe hired some extra staff to send outside of South Carolina to help McCain.  They could have made a contribution to the RNC directly or helped out a badly funded party in a key battleground state.  Dawson could even have run the ad this week during the Democratic convention.  That probably still wouldn’t have been all that helpful, but at least it would have taken coverage from the Democrat’s convention instead of cannibalizing his own party’s press efforts. 

Of course, those more effective options wouldn't have created nearly the same “Dawson for Chairman” buzz during the GOP convention itself.  None of the other leading candidates for RNC chair are openly campaigning and right now they're looking like much more responsible party leaders than Dawson.