PHILADELPHIA — He's hiring campaign aides. He's hosting parties for political insiders and forming a political committee to aid fellow Republicans.
And this week, Dave McCormick will release a new book that weaves together his biography and roots in Pennsylvania, his experience campaigning for the 2022 Republican U.S. Senate nomination in the state, and his policy prescriptions for the country.
In other words, it's just the kind of thing someone might publish before an election year if they intend to be a candidate.
McCormick says "Superpower in Peril" was largely written before he ran for Senate last year and finished second to Mehmet Oz in the GOP primary. But the Army veteran and former hedge fund CEO is openly acknowledging the idea that he might run again next year, to seek the party's nod against Democratic Sen. Bob Casey.
"It's undecided is the short answer," McCormick said in a phone interview. "I started and wrote the book (with) the motivation that the country's headed in the wrong direction. I ran for the Senate in 2022 because I thought I could help."
He thinks he still could, but added, "We haven't decided whether it's to run for the Senate, or maybe there's other ways to serve."
McCormick, 57, plans to focus on the book rollout and think more about another campaign "later this year," but acknowledged, "I've had lots of encouragement."
(Many party insiders in Pennsylvania and Washington are openly hoping he runs, though he's unlikely to have the field to himself.)
McCormick, of Pittsburgh, says the book presents his vision for the country to avoid the stagnation that he says has afflicted other great powers.
"Decline is not inevitable, but neither is renewal," he said. "We needed a vision for the future."
The book revives many of the themes McCormick emphasized in his campaign, and attempts to change the narrative around some of the political soft spots his GOP opponents and Democratic critics exploited, including his past comments on China and trade.
Here are some of the key points in its pages, including a dramatic scene with former President Donald Trump:
McCormick on Trump, and election denial
Weeks before the May rally where McCormick endured a brutal verbal broadside from Trump, the two sat face-to-face at the former president's Mar-a-Lago home in Florida.
McCormick was seeking Trump's endorsement over Oz. In his telling, recounted in some of the book's first pages, Trump insisted that McCormick publicly say the 2020 election was stolen.
"I made it clear to him that I couldn't do that," McCormick writes. Three days later, he adds, Trump endorsed Oz.
McCormick didn't make such definitive statements in public last year as he vigorously sought the former president's endorsement and campaigned as an "America First" Republican. He didn't say the election was stolen, a lie adopted by some other GOP candidates, but when asked about the 2020 result, he typically evaded direct answers and complained about "irregularities," nodding toward unsupported theories about drop boxes or mail-in ballots.
He continued to criticize 2020 election procedures in his interview with The Inquirer last week.
No one has found any problems significant enough to change the election outcome in Pennsylvania or any other state, a fact acknowledged under oath by even Trump's top aides. Fewer than 10 cases of fraud were prosecuted in Pennsylvania.
"I never said the election was stolen during the campaign," McCormick said Friday. "I said, 'I understand the frustration.' There was lots of things that happened in 2020 that should sway our confidence: fraudulent activities at the ballots ... ballots that were lost that came up in Philadelphia. ... We've got an electoral process in Pennsylvania and, I suspect around the country, that is really, really problematic."
He called for new voter ID laws, and pointed out that he accepted his loss against Oz, even though it came down to fewer than 1,000 votes.
A reprise of his campaign themes ...
Many pieces of the book will be familiar to anyone who saw McCormick's campaign.
He writes about his roots "growing up in rural Pennsylvania" trimming Christmas trees on his family farm, wrestling and playing high school football, his time at West Point, and then serving in "an elite paratrooper unit." He fought in the first Iraq War and was a high-ranking official in the George W. Bush administration.
On the book's second page, he references the Ford F-150 that he mentioned religiously in television interviews.
And after being attacked by Republicans and Democrats as an ultra-wealthy member of the coastal elite, the words hedge fund appear nowhere in the text (aside from a footnote that cites a headline). Instead, he describes the firm he led, Bridgewater Associates, as "one of the largest but least-known active macroeconomic investors in the world."
... and an attempt to shore up his weaknesses on China and trade
McCormick faced sharp attacks during his campaign over his praise, in the 2000s, for China's economic growth, and for unfettered international trade.
But in keeping with both parties' shift away from those stances, McCormick campaigned on very different views last year. He elaborates on his more hawkish positions on China and trade in his book, potentially attempting to shore up old weaknesses.
"We need a whole of nation strategy for dealing with China that's driven by the reality of today vs. the reality of 10 or 15 years ago," McCormick said in the interview. "China has become a true threat."
His book lays out ideas for maintaining America's technological, military, and economic strengths. And he adopts some of the protectionist views popularized on the right by Trump.
"The Republican Party lost its way a little bit in terms of its capacity to serve blue-collar America. ... This is what I think President Trump tapped into in his 2016 campaign," McCormick said, pointing to the mills and factories that closed as he grew up in Pennsylvania. "Unbridled free trade, the unconstrained free trade, that orthodoxy is not appropriate."
Those stances are in contrast to some of the views he expressed in the past.
"We owe much of the strength and vitality of our economic relationship today to the remarkable success of China's economic development over the last three decades," McCormick said in 2007, when he was a top Treasury Department official.
The next year he called for "a new national consensus on globalization."
At that time, McCormick's views were in the mainstream of American political thought. But positions changed as China emerged as a rival and globalization sapped many communities.
He says his book lays out ways to confront both problems.
A middle ground in the culture wars
While McCormick often derides what he describes as "woke" ideology, his book cuts something of a middle ground on the burning culture wars.
"Woke ideologues on the far left would divide our country into groups based on race, ethnicity, sex or any other convenient identifier. They would reject perspectives they disagree with," he writes. "At the same time, extremists on the right argue 'real Americans' are of a certain race and ethnicity, and they look down on our diversity."
He concludes: "Neither understands America. They divide it and polarize it."
