McCain Can Throw the Truth a Curve
Associated Press Online - February 27, 2000 17:10
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By RON FOURNIER
AP Political Writer
WASHINGTON (AP) - Sen. John McCain decries "the negative message of fear," yet airs one of the Republican presidential campaign's harshest ads. He denies ownership of a political flier that turns out to be his. Issues like abortion and the Confederate flag tie him into rhetorical knots.
Even the man behind the wheel of the "Straight Talk Express" can throw the truth a curve.
McCain is known for endless news conferences, freewheeling town meetings and a willingness to tell audiences what they don't want to hear. Yet in the heat of battle, particularly when his emotions get the best of him, the Arizonan can fall short of his hard-earned reputation as a straight-talker.
"Nobody is above reproach in this business," said GOP strategist Eddie Mahe. "And when you're running the kind of race he has run, based on character, your operating space is tighter than it is for most politicians."
As voters streamed to the polls Tuesday in Michigan, Texas Gov. George W. Bush alleged that McCain forces were targeting Catholics with anti-Bush telephone calls. The Associated Press reported two days earlier that McCain phone banks were being established to tell Catholics about Bush's visit to a South Carolina university perceived by some as being anti-Catholic.
Yet McCain spokesman Howard Opinsky was told to deny that the calls were being made. Though at least one senior adviser, Mike Murphy, knew Opinsky was wrong, the campaign waited several hours - until polls were nearly closed - to set the record straight.
McCain himself chose to deny one specific Bush allegation - that callers were labeling the Texan an anti-Catholic bigot. But McCain did not acknowledge until the weekend that his phone banks were telling Michigan Catholics about Bush's visit to Bob Jones University.
In South Carolina's primary, McCain ran two hard-hitting TV ads comparing Bush to President Clinton but yanked them for reasons he never fully explained. He said the decision was a matter of principle, not politics - but advisers privately acknowledged the ads were pulled because they were backfiring against him.
McCain said he made up his mind when a woman stood up at a town hall meeting and accused the Bush campaign of smearing McCain in a telephone call to her teen-age son.
The story ended there. McCain never revealed that he and his advisers met hours after the town hall meeting to review a third negative ad harsher than the first two. McCain liked the spot, aides said, but was talked out of using it.
He was still seething over a week-old transgression: Bush had shared the stage with a veterans' advocate who questioned McCain's commitment to veterans' causes.
McCain, a former Vietnam prisoner of war, had watched news coverage of the veterans' event aboard his campaign bus. As the images flashed across the TV, his eyes narrowed and his back stiffened - "It was a scary look," one aide said.
When the report ended, McCain blurted, "I gave him a pass on the Guard, and now this?"
To anyone aboard the "Straight Talk Express" bus, the comment was an unmistakable reference to the fact that McCain never questioned why Bush served in the Texas Air National Guard - and not Vietnam - during the war. Aides said the veterans' event convinced McCain to go on the attack.
Abortion also has been a tough issue for the blunt-speaking McCain.
Last August, he told the San Francisco Chronicle he didn't think the Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion should be repealed. Under fire from conservatives, he backed off the remark.
In January, he answered a hypothetical question by saying his 15-year-old daughter would make the "final decision" on ending a pregnancy if she were contemplating an abortion. Knowing conservatives would be up in arms again, McCain pulled reporters aside on his bus and polished his reply: It would be a "family decision," he said.
In his trademark town halls, where McCain tirelessly answers dozens of questions from voters, he is not above the occasional pander. One man stood up in a meeting outside Concord, N.H., and asked, "Why don't you support a flat tax, senator."
"I do," McCain replied, quickly segueing into an explanation of his tax-cut plan that adjusts - but does not flatten - the tax code.
Asked about the exchange on his campaign bus later, McCain said he supports a flat tax "in concept" but doesn't think it is viable. Why didn't he give the man that answer?
"Because," McCain said with an impish grin, "that wasn't the answer he was looking for."
In South Carolina, he couldn't give everybody the answers they wanted on the issue of the Confederate flag flying above the Capitol building. So his staff typed up a script - what one aide called "a non-position paper" - designed to prevent backlash in the simmering dispute.
Bush also refused to take sides on the matter, but it was unusual to see McCain pulling a piece of paper from his pocket and reading his advisers' words.
In their South Carolina debate, Bush brandished a piece of paper and said it was an example of negative McCain literature and proof that McCain had broken his pledge to run a clean campaign.
"That's not by my campaign!" McCain said.
Afterward, he acknowledged the flier was produced by the campaign, but insisted they were no longer being distributed. The flier showed up on windshields in Columbia for days afterward.
Mahe said McCain's POW days inoculate him against the occasional twist in the road aboard the "Straight Talk Express."
"That whole time in Vietnam, the way he did what he did, that's what his character argument is based on with people," Mahe said. "And you can't change that biography."
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McCain S.C. Campaign Leader Resigns
Associated Press Online - February 28, 2000 20:49
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By JENNIFER HOLLAND
Associated Press Writer
COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) - The co-chairman of Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign in South Carolina has resigned, saying he wants no part of the attacks over Bob Jones University.
"They're growing into a national media vendetta that I cannot associate my name to," state House Speaker Pro Tem Terry Haskins, a Bob Jones alumnus, said Monday.
McCain has criticized Bush's Feb. 2 speech at the Christian school and has tried to portray the Texas governor as a captive of religious conservatives and as anti-Catholic for appearing there. The school's leaders have criticized the Pope and have called the Catholic church a "Satanic cult."
Bush apologized for the visit in a letter to Catholic leaders on Friday.
Haskins said the attacks were vicious and unjustified.
"People at Bob Jones are not racist and they don't hate Catholics," he said. "No doubt Bob Jones University holds religious beliefs that are outside the mainstream and unpopular. But the public lynching of this college has created an environment which threatens the freedom for any individual or group in America to hold unpopular religious beliefs."
University spokesman Jonathan Pait said officials would no longer comment on the issue.
Meanwhile, former Gov. Carroll Campbell, Bush's top backer in the state, suggested he holds no grudges against McCain.
"While we all say things in the heat of battle that upon further reflection we may regret, once it's over I know that we are among friends and we all want a president of whom we can be proud," Campbell said in a letter to McCain.
McCain aides said the comments amounted to the second apology from the Bush camp in as many days for the campaign in South Carolina. Bush won the state's Republican presidential primary this month with strong help from Christian conservatives.
McCain's comment: "It's entertaining."
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Last Friday's WP featured a front-pager on John McCain's circle of policy advisors, which stated that the candidate "talks regularly" with such journalists as William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer and R.W. Apple. And lo and behold, that same Post contains an op-ed by Krauthammer, slugged "Profile in Courage," that tongue-bathes the candidate from head to toe, even saying at one point that in Vietnam, McCain "suffered for our sins." Even though Krauthammer isn't (as far as the public record indicates) being paid in money by McCain, readers are entitled to know that K's adulation might stem not just from merit but also from the psychic rewards he's getting from being given the Washington treasure of access to power, and perhaps from the promise of real power should the election come out a certain way. Indeed, readers should be forewarned that Krauthammer's columns might be part of an orchestrated campaign strategy. Therefore his credit line should always brand him as a McCain advisor. Ditto for other journalists who are in kitchen cabinets.
Today's Papers doesn't know if David Brooks is also on the McCain team, but that Post piece says that Brooks' boss, William Kristol, is. That might explain the utter cerebral breakdown involved in Brooks' comment in Sunday's LAT that McCain has a "coherent approach to governing...even if he is himself unable to explain what it is."
First two posts from marketwatch.newsalert.com; third from slate.com |
