But the fact was that all of these major things had been set out on the table. Eventually the things that were agreed to in Reykjavik became embedded in the system … Gorbachev came to Stanford after he had left office and I had left office. He and Raisa came to my house on the campus. We were sitting around with the interpreter, and I said, “When you entered office and when I entered office, the cold war was about as cold as it could get, and by the time we left it was all over. What do you think was the turning point?” He didn’t hesitate a second. He said, “Reykjavik.” And I said, “Why?” “Because,” Gorbachev said, “for the first time the two leaders talked directly over an extended period in a real conversation about key issues.”
title: “Back From The Brink” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-16” author: “Gary Rice”
“But I am.” In fact, he said, the recent New Hampshire unpleasantness had had a purpose. “This is a process of steeling me to become your president.”
Consider him steeled. South Carolina didn’t make him president, but it saved his campaign from oblivion, hardened him for the long haul and set him back on the road to the Republican presidential nomination. In a nasty game of hardball, Bush called on his Southern brethren and $8 million of cash to carpet-bomb Sen. John McCain into submission. The margin was 54 to 41 percent (Alan Keyes finished with 5 percent). The spread was impressive, more than enough to give Bush new momentum with GOP voters–and certainly with fat cats and insiders who’d begun to doubt his will. South Carolina, after all, was supposed to be Dixie’s New Hampshire. McCain had campaigned heavily there, had counted on veterans and Yankee transplants–and had said that winning the state was imperative.
Bush’s triumph in the cultural wheelhouse of the South at least temporarily restored him to front-runner status. But his victory came at a steep cost. He had been forced to run far to the right–and deep in mud. Across the country, Bush’s “favorable” ratings plummeted as he and his allies went about the grim business of savaging McCain. Democrats have already taken notice of Bush’s drift to the right in South Carolina–and have saved as much of it as they can on videotape. To secure the Bible belt–his first order of business in the state–Bush vowed to keep the strict pro-life plank in the GOP platform. He refused to meet with the Log Cabin Republicans, an association of gay party members. He launched his South Carolina campaign at Bob Jones University, where interracial dating is forbidden. And though he had no regrets about it, Bush and his allies used the kind of tactics–full of name-calling, distortions and subterfuge–that could turn off reform-minded voters.
If he locks up the nomination, he’ll have to defend those moves, and do so in a general-election race that promises to be unrivaled for sheer atavistic viciousness. Thus far, only one other candidate in 2000 has proved to be as effectively nasty as Bush was in South Carolina: Vice President Al Gore–another prep-schooled princeling and son of a famous politician. Gore has already shown he knows how to scare voters. Just ask Bill Bradley. Wait until he gets hold of Bush’s various rhetorical nods to the religious right. A Gore-Bush matchup would be a made-to-measure brawl, scripted by Machiavelli and choregraphed by the World Wrestling Federation.
The GOP race isn’t over, of course. McCain vowed to press on, at least through Super Tuesday on March 7. Conceding defeat last Saturday night, McCain was defiant and angry, and vowed to make Bush’s nasty tactics–and rightward tilt–the issue from here on. McCain had money, but not much time. He had no choice but to get personal as he desperately sought to stir a backlash in the next state to hold a primary, Michigan. “I will not take the low road to the highest office in this land,” said McCain, as his troops cheered him in Charleston. His vision was “optimistic and welcoming,” while Bush’s was a “negative message of fear.”
Bush didn’t bite. He was all smiles and grace on election night as he made the round of TV news shows. “I know he’s proud of his campaign,” said Bush of McCain. “He should be.” He didn’t say why. Later in a ballroom in Columbia, Bush basked in the adulation–and mentioned McCain only fleetingly. Instead, Bush focused on the fall. “This is the beginning of the end of the Clinton-Gore era,” he crowed, as the crowd chanted “No more Gore!”
But first, the rest of the GOP race. Bush and McCain will engage in hand-to-hand combat this week and next. The first battleground was Michigan. Bush had trailed there after New Hampshire–giving McCain one fleeting moment of thinking he was about to have a stunning, easy sweep. But Bush had been gaining back support even before the South Carolina vote. Private polls had the race even over the weekend. McCain, meanwhile, seemed certain to win his home state of Arizona, also this week. He hopes to do well next week in Washington state and Virginia, and then take on Bush in what could be the final big battle: the 13-state extravaganza called Super Tuesday, on March 7.
The McCainanites’ best hope was to argue that Bush had run too far to the right even for the GOP nomination, let alone the general election. “He ran as a Dixiecrat, and we’re going to make him pay elsewhere,” said McCain’s political director, John Weaver. If McCain can win one or two more primaries, he’ll have a chance on Super Tuesday to make that case in New England and New York state and in a nonbinding “beauty pageant” in California. But in both New York and California (unlike New Hampshire and South Carolina), only registered Republicans can vote for actual delegates. Suddenly, McCain was looking like the quirky long shot he used to be.
South Carolina, it turned out, was another New Hampshire–a pivotal event–but in the opposite direction from the one McCain had intended. It’s a state where tradition counts, and there is respect for authority figures in politics. Three times before, stumbling GOP front runners were righted by the Boys in South Carolina. In 1988 and 1992 it was Bush’s father who’d been rescued. W knew the people to call. He modified his manner and message, shedding his front-runner isolation and retailing his Texas record as a “reformer with results.”
More important, his campaign and its allies laid down a barrage of “negatives” as intense as any in recent history. Bush spent heavily, and “independent” groups matched it. In cascades of radio and TV ads, direct mail and phone calls, they portrayed McCain as a flip-flopping, abortion-tolerating, union-loving hypocrite who talked about reform while surrounded by evil Washington lobbyists. And that was the nicer stuff. “There were a thousand tomahawks in the air,” said Weaver.
Bush and his allies struck from every angle, and in every medium, from primitive to state of the art. The campaign itself deployed an ancient last-minute tactic: a flier mailed to arrive the day before the vote–too late to be countered by the other side. It touched a medley of hot buttons with inflammatory rhetoric, from casino gambling to labor to abortion: “He claims he’s conservative but he’s pushed for higher taxes and waffled on protecting innocent human life. He claims to be a campaign finance reformer, but his plan would silence pro-family groups while giving a blank check to Washington union bosses.”
The Bushies matched the low tech with high tech: hundreds of thousands of automated, prerecorded phone messages from local surrogates, accusing McCain of various apostasies on abortion, gambling and taxes. Independent groups and figures bombed away. Among them: The National Smokers Alliance, Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell. And there were new groups that no one had ever heard of. One of them was a group called Keep It Flying PAC, run by an old political ally of some of Bush’s advisers in the state. The group branded McCain a waffler on the issue of whether to keep the Confederate battle flag flying atop the state capitol in Columbia. The group’s letter was mailed to tens of thousands of voters. Even the state’s National Guard adjutant general volunteered for duty. He wrote a letter to his fellow guardsmen–in apparent disregard of guard policy–asking them to vote for Bush.
For pro-life forces, the medium of choice was radio. National Right to Life attacked McCain in ads that ran from Clemson to Charleston. They talked up McCain’s votes in favor of fetal-tissue research, and his friendship with former senator Warren Rudman, who is pro-choice. The circle of pro-life allies was indeed tight. The National Republican Congressional Committee, in fact, last October gave $250,000 to the pro-life group. And the head of the NRCC is Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia, a top Bush supporter.
Ironically, Bush’s most successful move was to complain about McCain’s only descent into negative advertising. Without consulting local advisers, McCain’s Washington team aired spots comparing Bush to Bill Clinton. “Do we really want another politician in the White House… America can’t trust?” asked one. In the other, McCain said Bush “twists the truth like Clinton.”
It was a blunder for a man running as a straight-talking reformer. Bush took credit for seeing the opening. “I couldn’t believe it,” he recalled. “I said, ‘Let’s seize the moment’.” His campaign went up with a spot denouncing its foe as a trash-talking hypocrite. McCain pulled the ads and announced (to the surprise and consternation of his aides) that he was forswearing attack ads not just in South Carolina, but “for the duration” of the GOP campaign.
Aboard his bus, Bush had no remorse and no regrets. The New Hampshire debacle had even had an unintended benefit. It had allowed him to study the loyalty of those around him. He had spotted the “nervous Nellies, trying to figure out whether they wanted to be in the foxhole with us,” he said. He had a list. “I’m watching real carefully,” he said, ominously.
He had known what he had to do, critics be damned. The media lionized McCain, but so what? Bush and his allies had taken him apart. Republican do-gooders didn’t like Bush, but so what? He was country, not country club–and he wasn’t going to get “people wearing those sweaters around their necks” anyway. Pundits saw a lack of hunger for the fight, and of gravitas for the job, but so what? When McCain had compared him to Clinton, it didn’t take a Phi Beta Kappa to know to strike back. “Don’t you ever question my integrity,” Bush said, teeth gritted.
It all came together for Bush on election day. Exit polls showed that he had won among Republicans by an overwhelming 68 to 26 percent. Bush got more than a third of the independent vote. Incredibly, voters in South Carolina said that it was McCain–not Bush–who had run the nastier campaign. It was true, in a way. At least in Republican circles in the South, there is no lower blow than to call someone another Clinton. McCain’s fatal mistake had been to do it himself, on camera. Reading the exit polls in his Charleston hotel suite, McCain was stoic–even when he came to one particular number. Bush’s allies had accused McCain of “abandoning” the needs of veterans, an accusation that had infuriated McCain, caused him real pain. He had demanded an apology from Bush, but hadn’t gotten one. Now the exit polls were showing that Bush actually had split the veterans’ vote down the middle. “How could they believe all that about you?” asked his disconsolate wife, Cindy, who was in tears. “It’s a tough business, honey,” he explained. McCain knew the score, and so, clearly did George Bush.
