The Gentlemanly McCain Campaign
Carlson, Tucker
The Gentlemanly McCain Campaign To win the nomination, won't John McCain need to go after Bush? BY TUCKER CARLSON For an organization with a reputation for exclusivity and intolerance, the...
...BY TUCKER CARLSON For an organization with a reputation for exclusivity and intolerance, the Republican party is surprisingly reluctant to kick anyone out...
...You're on the covers of Time and Newsweek...
...And he has so far been loath to attack his main rival for the Republican nomination, George W. Bush...
...By the end of last week, there was only one Republican presidential candidate willing to bid Buchanan good riddance: John McCain...
...For McCain, continuing to disavow Pat Buchanan would have amounted to political teeball—easy, and fun, and fundamentally very safe...
...The coming Bush Meltdown is at the heart of every challenger's strategy, though the McCain people are weirdly unwilling to admit it...
...Bush is almost irrelevant to the McCain campaign," says one strategist with no hint of sarcasm...
...You're on with Katie...
...You'd think Republicans would be relieved to finally cough up the Buchanan hairball...
...How to explain McCain's potentially fatal lack of nastiness...
...Then Buchanan let it be Tucker Carlson is a staff writer for THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...Or it may be that McCain simply wishes to remain a gentleman...
...Bush must begin to fail...
...A vice president, McCain says, has only two duties: to check daily on the health of the president, and to go to the funerals of Third World dictators...
...There's something almost gentlemanly about McCain's reluctance to go bare-knuckled—in stump speeches he almost never criticizes anyone by name— but it doesn't make much political sense...
...There are two problems with this scenario...
...Once McCain is well known, it will become obvious to voters that he is more qualified than George W. Bush to be commander in chief...
...At that point, the idea is, McCain will have captured the undivided attention of the media, which will in turn introduce him—heroic biography and all—to every Republican primary voter in America...
...The McCain strategy for victory is straightforward and well known: beat or finish close to Bush in New Hampshire, win South Carolina with the help of the state's large veterans' vote, and head into the New York and California primaries in early March riding the crest of an imminent upset...
...Dan Quayle released a statement casting Buchanan's defection as a moral defeat for the GOP George W. Bush, a man who claims Winston Churchill as a hero, refused to criticize Buchanan's views about the Second World War and last Friday called on Buchanan to stay in the party...
...The candidate who once did eight television interviews in a single day during the Kosovo crisis refused every offer to appear on a Sunday show to talk about Buchanan...
...Instead, many seemed reluctant to let him go...
...Dramatically...
...Perhaps...
...Every swipe at Buchanan would have provided him a mini-Sister-Souljah moment, establishing McCain's bona fides as a sober man of principle in contrast to Buchanan the crackpot...
...His lead is so big, his fund-raising advantage so profound, Bush is likely to win the nomination on inertia alone, with or without New Hampshire and South Carolina...
...On the stump, McCain snorts when asked if he would consider becoming Bush's running mate, and goes on to make the job sound like something only a moron would accept...
...Second and more significant, Bush's support may be shallow, but it's very, very broad...
...Thanks largely to rave reviews in newspapers and magazines, McCain's latest book has already sold close to 250,000 copies...
...First, it's probably not possible for the media to like or promote McCain more than they already do...
...Then he fell silent...
...It would have kept McCain, still struggling to get above 5 percent in the polls, squarely in the news...
...Buchanan, meanwhile, would have gotten more of what he deserves...
...It's not enough, in other words, for McCain to begin to succeed in the early primaries...
...At first, there was virtually no reaction...
...At that stage you're on the wave," says Marshall Wittmann, an informal adviser to McCain...
...McCain issued no more statements attacking Buchanan, and turned down opportunities to debate him on the war...
...In which case he'll probably remain a senator...
...Buchanan reacted violently to McCain's criticism, denouncing the senator from Arizona as a liar, and implying that McCain—a former prisoner of war who refused early release from captivity in North Vietnam—lacked the courage to appear with him on the Today show...
...Partly because of this attitude, there has been speculation that McCain is angling for a spot on the Bush ticket...
...McCain was lauded, correctly, by his many friends in the press as a gutsy truth-teller, and otherwise treated to terrific news coverage...
...Earlier this month, after years of embarrassing fellow Republicans with his sniping at Jews, Pat Buchanan released a book suggesting the United States should have been more reluctant to go to war with Nazi Germany...
...Some McCain advisers suggest that their candidate is just lying low for now, waiting until "people are listening" to unsheathe his hard edge...
...And it's unlikely to get him far in the presidential race...
...Absolutely not," replies McCain spokesman Howard Opinsky, and he's probably right...
...The whole dynamic has changed...
...It's much more about selling McCain than about tearing down Bush...
...You would have expected cheers...
...McCain wouldn't do it...
...McCain will win...
...known he was thinking of jumping to the Reform party...
...Support for Bush will evaporate...
...Editorial writers loved it...
Vol. 5 • October 1999 • No. 3
