DAY 12: America Held Hostage
Getting ugly
Battling in Florida courts, Bush calls on the same Southern
strategists who launched a smear campaign against McCain in
South Carolina.
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By Jake Tapper
Nov. 14, 2000 | TALLAHASSEE, Fla. -- At least three of the
Southern strategists who helped Gov. George W. Bush score
his ugly South Carolina primary win against Arizona Sen. John
McCain have been dispatched to Florida to help Bush in his
legal and political wrangling for the Sunshine State's 25
electoral votes.
Bush's South Carolina chief strategist Warren Tompkins,
strategist Neal Rhodes and spokesman Tucker Eskew -- two
of whom were thanked by Bush in his South Carolina victory
speech -- are all on the ground in Florida, waging political war
on the Texas governor's behalf. None played a major role in
Bush's campaign outside South Carolina during the primaries.
But all are veterans of the hardscrabble ways of Southern
politics.
"When the going gets tough for Governor
Bush, he turns to the darker side of our
party," says one senior McCain advisor.
"We saw that in South Carolina, and we see
that today."
The Bush campaign did not return calls for
comment.
After Bush lost the Feb. 1 New Hampshire
primary to McCain, he and his team made
the tactical decision to get ugly in South
Carolina. In the weeks leading up to the South Carolina
primary on Feb. 19, McCain suffered one of the dirtiest
personal smear campaigns in modern American political
history.
"We play it different down here," one of Bush's top South
Carolina advisors told Time magazine in February. "We're not
dainty, if you get my drift. We're used to playin' rough."
Indeed. Push polls attacked McCain's personal life and
exaggerated his role in the Keating savings and loan scandal.
Leaflets slammed his wife, Cindy, for her past addiction to
painkillers. An e-mail from a Bob Jones University professor
accused McCain of fathering children out of wedlock. A
mysterious public action committee in favor of the Confederate
flag -- called "Keep it Flying" -- sprang up overnight and
slammed McCain in 250,000 leaflets.
Bush engaged in his own delightful activities, appearing at Bob
Jones and telling a Christian radio station, "An openly known
homosexual is somebody who probably wouldn't share my
philosophy."
The Bush team's charge into Florida is somewhat different, of
course, waged as it is in the courts -- as well as the court of
public opinion for the country as a whole and not just among
Republican South Carolinians.
But the McCain strategist sees two clear parallels where
Tompkins, Eskew and Rhodes are concerned.
One is that in Florida, as in South Carolina, Bush stalwarts
have an interest in devaluing traditional Democratic voters.
Jews and blacks in Palm Beach and Broward counties, for
instance, who have complained about various ballot and voting
irregularities, are dismissed by Bush surrogates and Bush's man
in Tallahassee, former Secretary of State James Baker, every
chance they get. Voters who misunderstood the "butterfly
ballot" are called confused, stupid or worse.
"I'm sure that those Dixiecrats in South Carolina can rest
assured that [Bush's South Carolina team] care deeply about
the Holocaust survivors who accidentally voted for Pat
Buchanan, or the black voters who were turned away at the
polls," the McCain advisor says. "They can rest assured that
they're being represented well."
Second, and perhaps more importantly, is the South Carolina
team's ruthlessness.
"They could care less how they get elected," says the advisor,
pointing to the team's legal efforts against the hand counts. "It
doesn't have anything to do with the democratic process -- that
part's similar."
salon.com |
