Grand Rapids, Mich.
GEORGE W. BUSH can’t win. No, I don’t mean it that way — Bush could still win the Republican presidential nomination, of course, and maybe even go on to beat Al Gore in the fall. (Maybe.) What I mean is, Bush has reached one of those moments when nothing goes right, when the deck is so thoroughly stacked against him that he can’t get an even break.
As a case study, consider the final day of the Michigan primary, which Bush lost, unexpectedly and spectacularly. I refer in particular to what amounts, over the long course of a campaign, to a small event but a revealing one.
Bush arrived in Michigan just as a consensus was congealing among the political class about his victory in the South Carolina primary. He owed the win to negative campaigning, everyone who is anyone said. Most of this came in the form of “negative phone calls,” paid for by Bush sympathizers rather than the Bush campaign itself. By contrast John McCain, after a brief descent into negative campaigning of his own, had taken the high road (said the consensus). In his South Carolina concession speech, McCain himself had humbly confessed his devotion to “fighting fair.” “I will never dishonor the nation I love or myself,” he said, “by letting ambition overcome principle.” Shucks.
How remarkable, then — how incredible — that on the eve of the Michigan voting, the Bush campaign accused the McCainites of making “negative phone calls.” And not merely negative: The anti-Bush calls, which were pre-recorded, carried the insinuation that George Bush was anti-Catholic, which is a bad thing for anyone to be anywhere at any time but particularly bad for a politician in heavily Catholic Michigan during election season. The text of the call, we later learned, went like this:
This is a Catholic Voter Alert. Governor George Bush has campaigned against Senator John McCain by seeking the support of Southern fundamentalists who have expressed anti-Catholic views. Several weeks ago, Governor Bush spoke at Bob Jones University in South Carolina. Bob Jones has made strong anti-Catholic statements, including calling the pope the Antichrist and the Catholic Church a satanic cult! John McCain, a pro-life senator, has strongly criticized this anti-Catholic bigotry, while Governor Bush has stayed silent while seeking the support of Bob Jones University. . . .
Reporters from the Washington Post and the New York Times were put in touch with Bush supporters who had received the calls. The reporters did the interviews, and sure enough, the next day, just as Michiganders were going to the polls, both papers . . . buried the story. The Post neglected to mention it at all. The Times, however, did run a front-page piece about negative phone calls — calls made by Pat Robertson and the Christian Coalition against McCain. The headline was designed to scare the average Times reader half to death. “Evangelist Goes On The Attack To Help Bush,” read the headline. (Evangelical? Attack? Honey, call the door-man!) “Calls Go To Thousands All Across Michigan,” read the subhead. The anti-Bush “Catholic Voter Alert” calls were mentioned in the story’s twenty-fifth paragraph, followed by the deflating sentence: “The McCain campaign denied any knowledge of the calls.”
A tape of the Pat Robertson calls eventually surfaced as well. The script went like so:
This is Pat Robertson. Protect unborn babies and restore religious freedom once again in America. Tomorrow’s Republican primary may determine whether our dream becomes reality, or whether the Republican party will nominate a man who wants to take First Amendment freedoms from citizen groups while he gives unrestricted power to labor unions. A man who chose as his national campaign chairman a vicious bigot who wrote that conservative Christians in politics are anti-abortion zealots, homophobes, and would-be censors. John McCain refused to repudiate these words. You may hold the future of America in your hands.
The two scripts are worth dwelling on. They share certain similarities. Both are “negative” — an offense to the delicate flowers who monitor the national political debate these days. The rhetoric of both is breathless, as campaign rhetoric tends to be. And both are almost completely true.
Bush did speak at BJU (the school’s misleading acronym) as a way of “seeking the support of Southern fundamentalists.” One of the many Bob Joneses — Bob Jones II — published “strong anti-Catholic statements.” The statements were made in 1982; Bob Jones II died in 1997. And John McCain, a pro-life senator, has indeed criticized “this anti-Catholic bigotry.”
Robertson’s anti-McCain script is pretty much on the money, too, though the tone is hyperbolic. Sen. McCain’s campaign finance reform bill (most versions of it, anyway) would curtail certain forms of political expression heretofore considered protected by the First Amendment, which is why the ACLU opposes the reform. Most political activity by labor unions, meanwhile, would not be curtailed. The line about “anti-abortion zealots” etc. is lifted verbatim from a tirade against the Christian Coalition published in a book by Warren Rudman, one of McCain’s national campaign chairmen. And when asked about this quote, McCain declined to repudiate it.
So far, so normal. In fact, this much accuracy in competing pieces of political propaganda is impressive. There are, between the two scripts, only three blatant misstatements of fact. First, Robertson’s assertion that the recipients of his call “may hold the future of America in [their] hands” is really out of bounds. They don’t. They’re just a bunch of people who live in Michigan. Second, Warren Rudman is not a vicious bigot. He is a sanctimonious blowhard, but so are most politicians. And third, McCain’s assertion that “Governor Bush has stayed silent” about anti-Catholic bigotry is demonstrably untrue. Bush says he first heard of Jones’s statements when they were read to him by Tim Russert on Meet the Press. Like John McCain, Bush “strongly criticized this anti-Catholic bigotry.”
That third misstatement would seem to be more serious than the first two, of course, since it places Bush squarely in the camp of crazies who think the pope is the Antichrist. But this isn’t the only difference between the two scripts. The anti-Bush calls were written, paid for, and orchestrated by the McCain campaign. The anti-McCain calls, by contrast, were not made by or paid for or orchestrated by the Bush campaign, but by the Christian Coalition. Even more telling was the response of the campaigns when the calls came to light. The Bushies denied involvement in Robertson’s calls, and their denial was true — indeed, any collusion between the Coalition and the Bush campaign would have been a violation of federal law. The McCain campaign, on the other hand, denied any involvement in the anti-Bush calls, and this denial was false.
The denial was one reason the Times downplayed the anti-Bush calls. The McCainites issued their first denial Monday night, before the primary voting began, and maintained the denial throughout the next day, while voters flooded the polls. The myth of the “negative” Bush campaign and the “fighting-fair” McCain campaign held firm while the polls remained open. Then Rick Davis, McCain’s campaign manager, acknowledged that the calls were indeed the work of his organization. The initial denial, he said, had been in error. By then, of course, the polls were closed.
What kind of effect did McCain’s calls have on the primary’s outcome? Who knows? During this campaign season, the conventional wisdom about “negative campaigning” has been turned on its head. We are told it suppresses voter turnout; and we are told the campaign in general has been relentlessly negative. Yet voter turnouts are at record levels. Most likely, McCain’s calls did little to lift him to his Michigan victory.
But the episode was revealing nonetheless — revealing about his campaign, and about the skepticism the press applies, or fails to apply, to his campaign, and revealing also about the candidate himself. On Wednesday morning, after Davis had admitted the calls were from the McCain campaign, McCain appeared for an interview with David Gregory of the Today show. The candidate had apparently not yet been told that the “denial” was no longer operative.
Bush “had allies making calls criticizing you,” Gregory said. “You had allies making calls criticizing him.”
“No, that’s not so,” said McCain. “The calls that were made that I — that I had anything to do with — although I didn’t. I don’t know who paid for them — had to do with pointing out that Governor Bush did go to an institution that prohibits racial dating, that is anti-Catholic. It’s clear.”
It is? Never mind. With that, the senator returned to the Straight Talk Express, bound for Washington state, ready once again to do battle against the forces of dishonor.
Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
