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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mao II who wrote (81762)	11/19/2000 7:28:00 AM
From: Mao II	Respond to of 769667

DAY 12: America Held Hostage Straight talk, no smiles There's a sense of gloom in the McCain camp in the face of Bush's relentless attack strategy in South Carolina. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Jake Tapper Feb. 18, 2000 \| HILTON HEAD, S.C. -- A few yards away from Sen. John McCain's wife, Cindy, and their four children, (ages 8 to 15), a man handed out flyers slamming Cindy for having "stole(n) ... drugs from a charity she directed and used them while mothering four young children." The man gave his name as Phil Greazzo of New Hampshire, and he insisted he was in no way connected to the campaign of Texas Gov. George W. Bush, who has been trying to win ugly here in South Carolina. But McCain staffers didn't buy it. They've seen too much garbage hurled at their man. There was a brief verbal confrontation. "Are you proud of yourself?!" one McCain staffer angrily berated the sewage-trader. "Go crawl back under your rock!" yelled another. Greazzo insisted that he was there to preach the cause of drug law reform, and was not a partisan. As proof of his lack of affiliation with the Bush campaign, Greazzo claimed that he had similar leaflets about Bush in his car and that he was planning to distribute them at a Bush rally a few minutes later. But when a bunch of reporters went with him to his car to see the alleged anti-Bush pamphlets, there were none to be found. Later, though Greazzo had claimed he was on his way to a Bush event, a McCain staffer in fact spotted him at McCain's next event, an hour and a half drive away, in Charleston. So what's going on here? "There's so much stuff out there," says Michael Graham, a GOP consultant and morning talk show host on WSC-AM in Charleston. "Whether it's the organized phone calls targeting Cindy McCain for her drug addiction, or the organized phone calls about John McCain leaving his 'crippled' [first] wife." Graham says that a friend of his, a pro-Confederate flag legislator, was phoned by Bush South Carolina spokesman Tucker Eskew and asked to sign a piece of direct mail about the issue. The piece would have been "something very similar to what went out yesterday" from the spontaneously generated McCain-bashing "Keep It Flying" Political Action Committee. If the Eskew-solicited mail was paid for by anyone other than the Bush campaign, such a piece could have been construed as "coordination" with a third-party group, which is a felony. But no one has any proof, and Eskew told Salon that Graham's story is "absolutely not true." Graham is an unlikely Bush-basher. He doesn't support McCain because he has concerns about the former POW's temperament, and his conservative credentials include having worked on Pat Buchanan's 1992 campaign. Nevertheless, he says he is stunned by Bush's mean-spirited campaign. While driving upstate recently, he caught a little of the poison Bush-backers were spewing on Christian talk radio. "It was everything except 'Do you know John McCain has a pentagram in his back yard? Have you seen his goat head?'" Graham reports. "It was all-out negative. There were no positives on Bush. They're trying to nuke McCain." More significantly, Graham says that the divisive politics inherent to the GOP primary in the home state of legendary hatchet man Lee Atwater have turned Bush "into a fringe Republican candidate. What's he going to say when he gets to Ohio, Michigan or Illinois? This may be how you win South Carolina, but it's not how you win the presidency. My advice to Bush and McCain has always been, if you want to be president of the United States, lose South Carolina." Indeed. Bush may very well win here on Saturday -- and polls certainly indicate that such an outcome is a distinct possibility -- but many see him leaving the Palmetto State wrapped in the Confederate flag with Bob Jones as his running mate. Rep. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a McCain backer, says that Bush has run so hard to the right here he may be "unelectable" should he become the party nominee. Though Graham -- a former House impeachment manager whose conservative credentials are unquestioned -- says that he'll vote for Bush if he wins the nomination, he will clearly do so with little joy. For his part, McCain is trying to keep his campaign positive, even if trickles of doubt seep from his rhetoric. "If we win tomorrow, and we will win, [then] there's no way we can be stopped," he said at a juiced but underwhelmingly attended event at the College of Charleston early Friday afternoon. He told the audience that he has no regrets about running a positive campaign, unlike his opponent. "But that's OK," he told the young crowd. "They'll have to live with that. I can look you in the eye and say I wanted to be president of the United States not in the worst way, but in the best way." salon.com