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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
As the boys on the bus wept in John McCain's lap Saturday, George W. Bush used an old-fashioned media strategy to secure his South Carolina victory.
Feb 20, 2000 | Saturday afternoon, CNN's Christiane Amanpour, that doyen of the desert, reported that polling places in Iran were being kept open an extra two hours to accommodate the huge voter turnout. Early reports indicated that reformers were threatening to rout the conservatives in the assembly, and the religious right was in disarray.
In South Carolina, however, it was business as usual as the ruling mullahs of the GOP and the Christian right maintained the status quo with a clear victory for Gov. George W. Bush. And they used the media to do it.
Not the media that is supposedly so enamored of John McCain -- Washington and New York types who enjoy riding on the Straight Talk Express the same way kids like visiting the cockpit of an airplane. This was media of the old-fashioned sort: radio ads, fliers under windshields, probably even a sandwich board or two.
Rush Limbaugh choked the airwaves, tarring McCain as a liberal (a pro-gun, pro-military, pro-life liberal at that). Pat Robertson told voters that if McCain won the nomination, he would destroy the Republican Party. One rogue Bush supporter even used e-mail to spread a rumor that the senator had fathered children out of wedlock. (When asked to prove his assertion the supporter said, essentially: Prove that he didn't.)
A scandal in which 21 polling places -- some in heavily black neighborhoods -- in Greenville County did not open by order of local Republican party leader, an alleged Bush supporter, was accomplished without media interference. (Unless, of course, you count the Bush bumper stickers that covered up signs telling voters at the closed polls where they could go to vote.) If it was, in fact, a dirty trick, as McCain suggested, it was one of almost Democratic pedigree.
But according to the GOP, McCain was the one with the stain of the Democratic Party upon him. "John McCain is getting support in the Republican primary from some hard-core Democrats, not moderates or independents, but Clinton-style Democrats who oppose everything conservatives stand for," South Carolina's former Republican governor, Carroll Campbell, said in one radio spot.
He ended the ad by saying, "Send the Clinton-Gore Democrats a message Saturday. Vote for the man they are desperately trying to stop, George W. Bush."
It's probably the first time Republicans have tried to paint Gore as a Svengali, casting a spell over the electorate of another party. McCain may have played into their hands by casting himself as the outsider, but if they can make McCain a closet Democrat, anything goes. "It all comes down to turnout," McCain said at a rally in Hilton Head on Friday, declaring that "the establishment can't stop us." Suddenly war hero McCain, a man who believes we could and should have triumphed in Vietnam, was cast as a headband-wearing freak, giving the bird to the Carolina rednecks in their pickup as they passed.
That's when they got out the shotgun.
