Bridging the ‘moat’ with mass audiences

John McCain was in his element: a crowded town-hall meeting in an open-air Fort Myers, Fla., seafood restaurant. He strolled from one side of the room to the other with a microphone in one hand, jabbing his finger in the air as he called for honorable victory in Iraq and better veterans healthcare.

When a heckler shouted “4,000 American dead!” and “Bring them home!” McCain paused and asked him to wait his turn. “We all know America is divided by this war, as this gentleman is here, and we’re frustrated and saddened by it,” he said calmly. When it came time for questions, McCain handed his heckler the microphone to ask the first one.

The moment wasn’t just vintage McCain. The exchange convinced Charles Matthews of North Fort Myers to vote for the Arizona senator instead of Mitt Romney.

McCain believes town-hall meetings are a major reason he is the leading Republican candidate for president. “Let’s face it,” he told reporters recently. “That’s why I succeeded in New Hampshire and South Carolina.”

But even the candidate admits that the format is best suited to the single-state campaigns he has run up until now. On McCain’s campaign bus last week, advisor Steve Schmidt framed the reality: “You can’t appear one-on-one in front of 100 million people,” he told McCain and a clutch of reporters.

As he covered nearly 1,500 miles Saturday, touching down for rallies in three states where he spoke for about 15 minutes each, McCain confessed nostalgia for his old style of campaigning.

“I miss the town-hall meeting, and we’ll try to have more of them as we go through this campaign,” he told reporters in Nashville. “People deserve to have an opportunity to not only see my message but ask [me] questions and have the dialogue that I think is important.”

Looking ahead to Tuesday, when voters in 21 Republican state primaries and caucuses will cast ballots, the campaign is devoting far more of McCain’s time to one-on-one interviews, abbreviated rallies and television-friendly events. McCain insists on keeping the town halls, but he and his aides appear to have negotiated a middle ground: fewer of them, mixed with round-table events and speeches in which he succinctly hones his message.

“He’s going to do it the way he wants, and the campaign is going to have to accommodate him,” said longtime advisor Mark Salter.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, professor of communication at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, said that one of McCain’s great challenges will be translating the authenticity he conveys in those exchanges into sound bites for the evening news.

“The immediate audience sees that he engages people of a different point of view, he doesn’t patronize them, he tries to persuade them and listens to what they have to say. That’s very impressive,” Jamieson said. “The national audience rarely gets to see that.”

She added that for McCain, who is 71, the town-hall format also negates questions about his age because he moves briskly from topic to topic. In rallies and speeches, she said, he sometimes seems bored. “He is less effective when speaking to a mass audience,” Jamieson said.

As they tried to make an impact across Florida, McCain’s strategists began retooling, in small steps, his schedule. He still did a handful of town halls but often ditched his “Straight Talk Express” bus to fly on a small jet to his next event -- maximizing time for local radio and television interviews.

“You just have to boil your message down,” said McCain’s frequent traveling companion, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. “Instead of having a 45-minute opportunity to take that undecided voter and win them over, now you’ve got a 30-second sound bite.”

McCain’s most “on-message” events were three staged round tables in Florida -- two focused on national security, one on the economy -- that were in stark contrast to his freewheeling town halls. Despite his insistence to reporters that his events should include a real dialogue, the national security round tables, in Tampa and Jacksonville, amounted to hourlong endorsements from top military brass and national security experts who fawned over McCain’s credentials.

The backdrop of blue velvet curtains and a 15-by-20-foot American flag created a presidential backdrop for the television cameras. There were few voters in the audience, and McCain sat stiffly at a U-shaped table, looking uncomfortable at times.

Dan Schnur, a political consultant who was McCain’s 2000 communications director but is unaffiliated this year, said that one of the McCain campaign’s major missteps in the earlier race was moving away from intimate events with voters. “When he stands up in front of a large audience, it’s almost like there’s a moat in between him and them. There’s an emotional divide that doesn’t exist in a town-hall setting,” Schnur said. “It disconnected him from the voters.”

The campaign won’t make that mistake this time. Advisors realize that the town hall is now essentially McCain’s brand.

For his part, McCain seems superstitious about having as much personal contact with voters as he can. Salter said that is rooted in McCain’s experience in his first competitive primary in his 1982 House race. The candidate also believes he won the 2000 New Hampshire primary by hosting 114 town halls.

Then when McCain was in a “deep hole this summer,” Salter said, he climbed out by meeting as many voters as possible at 101 New Hampshire town halls.

In South Carolina, McCain tangled with his staff over the lighting requirements for his town halls -- insisting that the bright television lights that illuminated the stage made it impossible for him to see faces in the audience and make eye contact with the voters asking questions.

Recalling the quarrel, Salter said he told McCain: “This wonderful experience you’re having with these voters here is not being conveyed to anybody else. You’re going to be on . . . national television -- not just cable -- and we’ve got to make sure the cameras can see you.”

“I don’t care. I want to see the people I’m talking to,” McCain snapped.

Schnur said one factor in McCain’s favor is that the compressed primary schedule means the candidates will get intensive media coverage -- no matter what forum they choose.

“He’s not going to be able to meet every voter in California in a town-hall meeting, as he did in New Hampshire, but the level of media coverage is going to make it seem like he did,” Schnur said.

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maeve.reston@latimes.com