Analysis: McCain needs new thinking

WASHINGTON, June 10 (UPI) -- Message from Edward de Bono to John McCain: If you want to win the presidency of the United States in November, think outside the box.

Republican front-runner Sen. McCain of Arizona and his opponent, Democratic front-runner and standard-bearer Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, have both capitalized on American voters' aversion to old, polarized, partisan and divisive candidates like former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and just-defeated Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y. But if you look at the teams advising both McCain and Obama, it's all the old familiar faces in both cases.

Yet the unprecedented energy crisis and the balance of payments crisis the United States now faces, along with the ailing dollar, show that to offer any policy prescriptions that might actually work, both candidates need to abandon the old orthodoxies of left and right alike and do what de Bono is famous for advocating: think outside the box.

First, McCain should do what no one has yet suggested he should do and get his supposed foreign policy whiz kids to study the security problems of the Niger Delta that are currently preventing a quarter of Nigeria's entire oil supply from even being produced.

Second, he should suspend his well-known environmentalist concerns and push consistently and strongly for unlimited offshore drilling off the coast of Florida and elsewhere in the Gulf of Mexico. It won't solve the entire oil supply problem, but it will help a lot.

Third, since the Democrats have a theologically driven aversion to using the immense coal reserves of the United States to run electrical energy-generating power plants cheaply and vastly more safely than nuclear power can offer, he should jump on the coal bandwagon straight away. This will outrage the environmental lobby, but none of them will vote for him anyway. And it will give him the heaven-sent opportunity to portray Obama and all the Democrats as energy illiterates.

McCain won't want to do that: He has a long reputation as an environmentalist romantic himself. But he can make the case for sequestering the carbon emissions from coal-fired energy plants. And he simply has to go coal and address the energy cheapness and availability issue, because the reeling U.S. domestic economy and the out-of-control sky-rocketing oil prices are the fundamental issue of this election. And if McCain doesn't attack them head on, he is going to lose -- and lose big.

McCain is as delusional as the hard-core conservative True Believers he has clashed with for so long if he actually believes that simply preaching about cutting back "big" government, further cutting taxes and promising not to spend any money will win him a majority of American voters

In terms of his political tactics, McCain needs to go on the offensive and stay there, week after week, by relentlessly pressing Obama to spell out in clear detail what his own solutions to the energy and economic crises are, and then target the holes in them.

Better yet, if Obama refuses to address these issues, McCain needs to focus on them, keep focusing and hammer hard and long for months and months. No one ever won a long U.S. election campaign marathon if they suffered from the political equivalent of Attention Deficit Disorder.

If McCain does all, or even most, of these things, he will still be in with a fighting chance and could even win in what is otherwise shaping up to be a historic Democratic liberal-left landslide year comparable to 1936 and 1964. If he doesn't, he'd better make plans to sit in the sun with all the spare time he's going to have back in Arizona.