McCain also has a number of weaknesses as a candidate. He isn't particularly interested in domestic policy, and it shows. (The only domestic policy issues that McCain ever showed any real interest in were campaign finance reform and balanced budgets, neither of which are issues that fire up the voting public.) He is strong on defense and foreign policy issues, but 2000 was very much a domestic policy election. And as we saw during the 2008 campaign McCain's own political instincts are pretty poor. Witness him thinking that it would be a good idea to make Joe Lieberman his veep (something that would have produced a convention revolt) or his attempt to delay the presidential debate because of the economic crisis (a rather silly idea, that resulted in McCain look panicky, and Obama looking calm and statesmanlike.) He also had a pretty poor campaign organization. Witness its utter failure to properly vet Sarah Palin, and its dismal fund raising numbers. Now add in McCain's enthusiasm problem with conservative voters on top of all his other weaknesses as a candidate, and it is very easy to imagine him doing significantly worse than Bush did.
These are good points, and I would not dismiss them as irrelevant in a 2000 election versus 2008, but many of his shortcomings could well be less salient in 2000 than 2008.
His peak personal prestige ironically would have been as a candidate in 2004. Although the structure of the electoral system would not have supported his candidacy then of course.
By 2008, his foreign policy hawkishness was past its sell-by date. He had lost some of his uniqueness and maverick shine with media and the swing voting public having "come to J" with various conservative movement groups a couple years before the 2008 nominating process to make damn sure he wasn't denied the nomination. - So that reduced his aura of authenticity a little. Republicans were fatigued by Katrina, bad midterms, foreign policy failure, real estate crisis, and then Bush miscalculating on his support from the base with his Harriet Miers nomination. Bush throughout his term also failed to keep base GOP morale up by not being an early adopter of the anti-immigration message popular with party grassroots presaged by Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Arizona and Tom Tancredo. And McCain wasn't any better on that. And then the financial troubles were the coup de grace, while the Dems picked an interesting, "all things to all people" nominee in Obama, who gave off a good 'cool as a cucumber' vibe in the crisis that served him well.
In 2000, the press and broadcast cable media's love affair with John McCain was in its early, ascending phase, and its hate affair with Al Gore was culminating.
And McCain himself is likely to criticize any personal attacks on Gore. (Just as he did IOTL in 2008 when his supporters made personal attacks on Obama.)
Attacks will be voiced anyway, and what he repudiates will depend on how personal, how over-the-line, and how unbelievable and outlandish the claims/attacks are. GOP outlets aren't going to be saying Gore is actually a foreigner or a Muslim. McCain could find it unobjectionable for surrogates to suggest Gore would go overboard on environmental regulation to the detriment of jobs and energy production. And he could see a good contrast between his support for campaign finance report and especially keeping *foreign* money out of American elections, and the never dismissed talk of Chinese ties to fundraising for Al Gore in the 1990s as fair game.
Bush wasn't seen as particularly radical in 2000 though. He campaigned as a "reformer with results", stressed his bipartisan credentials on how he had been able to work effectively as governor with the Democrats who controlled the Texas state legislature, and his platform called for adding a prescription drug benefit to Medicare and massively increasing federal spending on education (not exactly hard right positions.)
This is a great point, and actually I think it *strengthens* my point that conservative Republican voters did not need fan service for their pet ideological projects to turn out to help their nominee win the electoral college and come reasonably close to winning the popular vote in the 2000 campaign.
In fact, here is an under-appreciated fact of the 2000 Presidential campaign. Although the Republican, more conservative candidate won the EC in the disputed election, and did end taking a right turn on many policy areas, the dynamics of the major Party nominating contests and leading third party contender of the year did *not* show that the political energy and winds blowing against the political status quo were from the right, which had been visibly ascending since Newt Gingrich led the 1994 Republican revolution in Congress, and Fox News began to bring talk radio style to Cable News around 1999.
Nope, the surprising political energy and winds blowing against the status quo were ones coming from the discontented left. Within the Republican nominating contest, the main challenger to the George W. Bush dynastic succession was not a right-winger like Pat Buchanan or a Bible Belt evangelical or a single-minded tac-cutter, it was a relatively eclectic and moderate "maverick", John McCain. In the Democratic-nominating contest, the main challenger to Al Gore was not a dour, Clinton-scandal condemning moralist like Joe Lieberman, but Bill Bradley, who offered a critique from the left, offering a focus on reducing child poverty, in addition to a break from Clinton sleaze. And the most substantial and highest vote-totaling 3rd Party challenger was Ralph Nader, who challenged both major parties from the left, criticizing the pro-corporate, neoliberal order. Certainly, Pat Buchanan was in the race as well, as a lower tier challenger than Nader, under the Reform Party, offering a more conservative alternative on cultural issues. And he did stick with his culturally conservative positions. But he wasn't emphasizing mainstream orthodox movement conservative ideas across the board. He demographically experimented with a black female running mate, and his policy pitch was super-focused on foreign policy isolationism and trade-protectionism. Ultimately, even with the Nader vote peeling off some of the left flank, Gore won the popular vote, while Bush and Gore got within knife's edge on the EC, and Bush won in court.
Bush governed more conservative than he campaigned, enough that he lost his initial Senate majority with the defection of "Singing Senator" Jim Jeffords to the Democratic Senate Caucus, but came back strong to be able to govern conservatively the rest of his term, being given wide deference after 9/11 and bucking history by gaining seats for his Party in the 2002 midterms. His very conservative impact though should not obscure how contingent was the path that led him to those opportunities however.
