FIRST, he takes the low road with character assassination in South Carolina
<< What was said that was so low? You should specify when making such a charge.>>
You asked.:
<<
TIME
CAMPAIGN 2000
FEBRUARY 28, 2000 VOL. 155 NO. 8
Read My Knuckles
BY ERIC POOLEY
...Bush had unleashed
the dogs of war against his rival--saturation TV
and radio attacks, hundreds of thousands of
telephone and direct-mail blasts, everything short
of leaflets dropping from the skies above South
Carolina. The dogs were tearing into McCain,
raising questions about his character and
dedication to the conservative cause. Bush told
the crowd, in his new fire-in-the-belly style, "If
you're sick and tired of the politics of cynicism, of
polls and principles, come and join this
campaign." His slip of the tongue about being
tired of principles hinted at what happened in
South Carolina: Bush believed he would be
finished if he lost the state, so he did what it took
to win. A country tune that played at the Hilton
Head rally neatly summed up Bush's approach.
Its refrain: "I'm really good at gettin' by."
Want a reformer? Bush asked his party in South
Carolina. I'll be your reformer--but a safer and
more predictable one than McCain. Want a
fighter who can take it to Al Gore? I can play
rough--look what I did to my Republican rival. I
can court the radical right and come out shining
brightly. I'm really good at gettin' by....
Exit polls show that a
majority of voters saw Bush as the "real
reformer"--an astonishing coup for the Texas
Governor, who adopted McCain's mantle of
reform just two weeks ago....
Bush's slashing tactics--ferocious even by South
Carolina's down-and-dirty standards--don't fully
account for the size of his victory. ...What helped Bush
most of all was his hard charge to the right on
social issues: he boosted conservative Christian
turnout to record levels and collected two-thirds
of their votes. But the things he said and did to
win them could cost him down the road.
The compassionate, big-tent Republicanism on
which Bush campaigned for months became
threatening to him when the tent started filling up
with pro-McCain independents. So he called on
the right wing of his party to guard the doors of
the tent, warning that Democrats were conspiring
to hijack the primary. The man who prides
himself on being "a uniter, not a divider" won by
pitting social conservatives against moderates.
He kicked off his South Carolina assault at Bob
Jones University, a place where interracial dating
is officially prohibited. He all but told listeners on
Christian radio that openly gay people would not
find spots in his administration. He said he
wasn't going to "tear down" his opponent, but his
campaign literature told voters that "McCain says
one thing but does another," and it distorted
many of McCain's positions--charging, for
example, that McCain wants to remove the
pro-life plank from the G.O.P platform. That isn't
true, and among religious conservatives, it was a
napalm blast at McCain.
Those tactics helped Bush win South Carolina,
but they could alienate the voters he needs in the
fall if he secures the nomination. ...
McCain was warning that in the
eyes of many Americans, Bush has become the
candidate of Bob Jones, the Confederacy, the
National Rifle Association and the National Right
to Life Committee. And though Bush proved in
South Carolina that he can change his spots as
nimbly as Bill Clinton does, he must now show
that he can change them back--something that is
a good deal harder to do.
Three weeks ago, when McCain began
comparing himself to a Star Wars hero--"I'm Luke
Skywalker trying to get out of the Death
Star"--the analogy seemed overblown. But by
primary day in South Carolina, it seemed more
than apt.
Bush's Death Star strategy was hatched on Feb.
2, the day after he lost New Hampshire to
McCain by 18 points. His top advisers met in a
panic at a hotel in Greenville, S.C. Not only was
Bush's air of inevitability shattered--McCain was
galloping from 40 points behind in South Carolina
to a dead heat--but all their presumptions about
the race had proved wrong. .... At that
meeting, Bush's team realized he had to forget
his promises to run a "hopeful and optimistic and
very positive" campaign--promises that had been
easy to make last fall, when he seemed to be
waltzing unopposed to the nomination. Bush
agreed to do whatever it would take to win. And
in South Carolina, "whatever it takes" has a
colorful lineage.
... Though Bush had always
prided himself on being a positive candidate--even
in 1994 when Governor Ann Richards of Texas
was calling him "Shrub" and goading him to
fight--this time he let his team go to work. "We
play it different down here," one of Bush's top
South Carolina advisers told Time last week.
"We're not dainty, if you get my drift. We're used
to playin' rough."
Bush's team devised a two-pronged strategy
aimed at shoring up his image and conservative
credentials while carpet-bombing McCain with
attacks that portrayed the Arizonan as a
hypocrite and a closet liberal. The first part of the
plan would be carried out by Bush himself, who
had a "wimp factor" to contend with....
Each of Bush's points was meant to show
McCain as a hypocrite: on public financing of
campaigns; on allowing incumbents to "roll over"
their campaign war chests (and never mind that
Bush had done the same thing); on whether he
favored tax hikes in the past. On each occasion,
Bush aides would pass out, fax and e-mail
memos documenting McCain's alleged
hypocrisies. And surrogates--Ralph Reed, Pat
Robertson, Strom Thurmond, Lieutenant
Governor Bob Peeler, Attorney General Charlie
Condon and former Governors Campbell and
David Beasley--were dispatched to deliver the
message in harsher terms on TV and radio.
Outside groups--the National Right to Life
Committee, Americans for Tax Reform, the
National Smokers Alliance--were counted upon to
hammer McCain with incendiary radio and TV
spots of their own.
The strategy carried risks--notably that Bush
would start to seem not just tough but Visigothic.
That problem was solved when McCain made his
one colossal blunder of the campaign--a move
Bush aides call "a gift."
The gift was a TV commercial in which the
Arizona Senator looked into the camera and
charged that Bush "twists the truth like Clinton."
The spot went too far--in South Carolina's
Republican circles, being compared to Clinton is
worse than being compared to Satan himself.
Putting it on the air undermined McCain's claim
that he was above politics as usual and freed
Bush to amplify his attack strategies while
muddying the waters on the question of which
candidate was hitting below the belt. ...
For the rest of the campaign, Bush used the ad
as a smoke screen to obscure his assaults on
McCain. ... For
instance, when reporters challenged him on his
failure to speak out against the racist policies of
Bob Jones University, he jutted his jaw and said,
"Don't you judge my heart." The Bush camp kept
the spot on the air through primary day--long after
McCain had taken his attack ad off the
air--because it implied that McCain was still
playing dirty even after he had committed himself
to sending only positive messages.
Behind the smoke screen, Bush's allies on the
right stepped up their assault. The National
Smokers Alliance warned that "if straight talk is
the issue, John McCain isn't the answer."
Christian-right leader Pat Robertson threatened
that "a large portion of the Republican base
would walk away" if McCain was the nominee.
Representative Henry Hyde of Illinois, chairman
of the House impeachment proceedings, taped a
phone message for 100,000 voters, implicitly
criticizing McCain for wanting to change the
G.O.P's abortion plank to include exceptions for
rape and incest--exceptions Bush also supports,
though Hyde didn't mention that. The National
Right to Life Committee issued a mass mailing
warning that McCain "voted repeatedly to use tax
dollars for experiments that use body parts from
aborted babies." On the front of the leaflet was a
photograph of a baby with the words, "This little
guy wants you to vote for George W. Bush."
Phone calls from Bush polling operations appear
to have been attacks masquerading as opinion
surveys--so-called push polls. These calls
distorted McCain's record--exaggerating his role
in the Keating Five savings and loan scandal, for
example--in an attempt to push voters away from
him. Though the Bush campaign claims only 300
of the calls were made in South Carolina, Bush's
Michigan pollster, Fred Steeper, told Time last
week that his firm had placed several thousand
such calls in his state. Steeper says he has
stopped making the calls.
Former Christian Coalition executive director
Ralph Reed, a Bush strategist, used his firm to
smother the 400,000 self-described Christian
conservatives in the state with negative phone
calls and mailings about McCain. ("He claims
he's conservative, but he's pushed for higher
taxes and waffled on protecting innocent human
life.") In this blitz of mail and phone calling, Bush
was portrayed as far more socially conservative
than he describes himself at rallies. Asked why
Bush almost never brought up his pro-life position
in his appearances before South Carolina voters,
a top Bush adviser said, "This is a message that
needs to be narrowcasted." In other words, they
didn't want moderates up North hearing what they
were saying to conservatives down South.
To see how Bush's words went further to the right
as he narrowcast them, consider the way he
worked the issue of gay rights. In the debate last
Tuesday, Bush said he had refused to meet with
the Log Cabin Republicans, the G.O.P's largest
gay organization, because "they had made a
commitment to John McCain." When McCain
said the group had not endorsed him, Bush
replied, "It doesn't matter." To conservatives,
though, it mattered a great deal. A few days
later, a Baptist church in Kentucky began faxing
a flyer to South Carolina radio stations, railing
against "John McCain's fag army." (Both McCain
and Bush support the "don't ask, don't tell" policy
on gays in the military.) The Bush campaign said
it had nothing to do with the flyer. But the
Governor repeated his anti-gay message during
an on-air interview with a Christian radio station in
Charleston, implying that he wouldn't appoint
openly gay people to spots in his administration.
"An openly known homosexual is somebody who
probably wouldn't share my philosophy," he said.
The most corrosive material of all came from
groups and individuals independent of Bush's
campaign. A Bob Jones professor named
Richard Hand sent out an e-mail falsely alleging
that McCain had sired two children out of
wedlock. A flyer distributed at McCain rallies
went after Cindy McCain for her addiction to pain
killers a decade ago and her admission that she
stole them from a clinic where she worked.
Phone-call campaigns targeted McCain's broken
first marriage. And a pro-Confederate flag group
called Keep It Flying, founded just last week,
sent out 250,000 pieces of misleading mail about
the candidate's position on the flag flying above
the state capitol. Both McCain and Bush ducked
the issue, but the flyer said, "Of the major
candidates, only George Bush has refused to call
the Confederate flag a racist symbol." In a bit of
payback last Saturday, McCain's camp decided
to send copies of the flyer to African-Americans
throughout Michigan. "We'll see if Bush can run
as a Dixiecrat in Michigan and everywhere else,"
says McCain political director John Weaver.
Against this deluge, McCain fought back with a
positive TV ad comparing himself to Ronald
Reagan. But McCain's morning-in-America spot
was airing once for every six Bush commercials.
McCain got some help from Gary Bauer, the
Christian conservative candidate who folded his
campaign after New Hampshire and endorsed
McCain last week. Bauer is fighting Reed for
supremacy among Christian conservatives, but
last week he lost the battle. He wasn't popular
enough to sway many votes. McCain's network of
veterans tried to counter Bush's carpet bombing
with a grass-roots ground campaign, but by
Saturday morning, McCain knew in his bones
that it was over.
In the hallway outside his hotel room that
morning, McCain turned to his closest aide, Mark
Salter. "We're going to lose this, aren't we?"
McCain asked. Salter didn't have to answer.
Inside the room, people started eating cold pizza
from the night before, shaking their heads over
reports that the state G.O.P had failed to open
21 polling places in black areas of Greenville.
Later the team sat down and went over the exit
polling. The candidate wanted to know about the
attacks, so his ally, South Carolina
Representative Lindsey Graham, ran through the
list of the body blows McCain had absorbed.
Cindy McCain broke into tears. "It's all right,
Cindy," said McCain. "We can take it." By the
time he had digested the results, McCain was
smiling broadly--the mirror image of primary night
in New Hampshire, when he had won so big yet
couldn't manage a smile.
McCain still sees the battle that raged in South
Carolina--and that this week spreads to Michigan
and beyond--as a chance for an epochal party
realignment, a ritual of G.O.P purification. But his
party may not be ready for the purity he has in
mind. ....
Not if McCain can help it. Despite the stinging
loss, he went roaring out of South Carolina
vowing that "our crusade grows stronger" and
pitting "my optimistic and welcoming
conservatism" against Bush's "negative message
of fear." He added, "I want the presidency in the
best way, not the worst way." Bush, stripped
now of all his laid-back affectation, wants it any
way he can get it. He's very good at gettin' by.
--REPORTED BY JAMES CARNEY WITH BUSH, JOHN F.
DICKERSON WITH MCCAIN AND MAGGIE
SIEGER/DETROIT >> |
