Anatomy of a Pseudo Smear
BARNES, FRED
Anatomy of a Pseudo Smear McCain supporters point fingers. Bush backers say, Who, me? BY FRED BARNES SENATOR CHUCK HAGEL of Nebraska says he first got wind of the whisper campaign against John...
...X talking to reporter Y about McCain and Vietnam...
...So using McCain's Vietnam experience against him would indeed be a smear...
...So do other Republicans...
...What started as complaints about McCain's temper, Hagel said, turned into discussions of his temperament, then to suggestions of "instability...
...Mike Murphy, McCain's strategist, says the McCain campaign won the flap over his temper and Vietnam...
...He was a hero in Vietnam, who Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard...
...McCain has bucked the leadership on campaign finance reform and anti-tobacco legislation, and he prides himself on being a maverick...
...Nobody is going to stand up in front of the world," says Hagel, and assert that McCain is unfit to be president because of what happened in Vietnam...
...And presidential hopefuls Gary Bauer and senator Orrin Hatch quickly blamed the Bush campaign for smearing McCain...
...But denials aren't proof that what's being denied is true either...
...It is clear that a number of McCain's Senate colleagues don't say nice things about him...
...It goes, said Will, "to the question about whether or not you are going to deal with all the people in [Washington] who disagree with you, even when you are president...
...Drew named four Republican senators as participants in "a smear campaign of the ugliest sort...
...Neither Drew nor Dowd cited any, though Drew said on CNN she had the "most multiple and hardest confirmations" of smears...
...BY FRED BARNES SENATOR CHUCK HAGEL of Nebraska says he first got wind of the whisper campaign against John McCain while listening to columnist George Will on ABC's This Week on November 7. Will cited Republican senators as remarking on McCain's "personal pique" when opposed...
...Nickles, in a separate letter to the Post, called the charge he'd smeared McCain "absolutely false...
...The story also quoted Michigan governor John Engler questioning whether McCain is a team player...
...The flap over McCain's temper began with an October 25 story by Richard Berke of the New York Times in which Arizona governor Jane Hull told of McCain's "occasional eruptions at her...
...McCain himself said on Face the Nation on November 21 that he didn't know of any...
...But lack of certainty didn't stop Newsweek from giving Lott a down arrow for trashing McCain...
...I have the greatest respect for him and I would not undermine him or his campaign in any way whatsoever...
...And Dowd quoted Hagel as saying the anti-McCain talk is "an orchestrated effort, very subtle, very clever...
...There is no whisper campaign...
...But there's reason to believe the smear never occurred...
...And every senator whose name has come up in connection with the alleged smear has reacted indignantly...
...Of that, there's no doubt...
...Dowd wrote about "whispered insinuations" by Republicans, including Bush backers, that McCain had been driven "cuckoo" in Vietnamese dungeons...
...McCain suggested a memo must have gone out from Bush headquarters with orders to attack McCain's temper...
...It's possible that gripes about McCain's temper were interpreted as tacitly alluding to the after-effects of his hideous treatment as a POW...
...But Hagel doesn't know the names of the senators...
...Then, Hagel says he heard rumors that a few senators were privately suggesting McCain, the Arizona senator, was traumatized as a POW in North Vietnam and now is too unstable to be president...
...Drew wrote that denials should be expected...
...A McCain pal and supporter, Hagel went on the warpath...
...A week later, McCain's hometown paper in Phoenix, the Arizona Republic, said in an editorial that there's "reason to seriously question whether McCain has the temperament, and the political approach and skills, we want in the next president of the United States...
...Roll Call, the Capitol Hill newspaper, searched for instances and couldn't find any...
...Even Hagel described the smears as "phantoms...
...All that, however, didn't end what has become one of the oddest episodes in the GOP presidential struggle, and one that may wind up aiding McCain's White House bid...
...But Hagel did say he heard that two "money men" from New York had asked two senators if they should back the McCain campaign and were told they shouldn't because McCain is unstable...
...Through Coverdell, Bush denied spreading any stories about McCain's fitness...
...Hagel says he talked to Senate GOP whip Don Nickles, who was named by Drew as a smearer, and believes his denial...
...George Will, for instance, didn't mention Vietnam...
...Howard Opinsky, McCain's campaign press secretary, told me, "I don't have any evidence one way or the other, and we're not saying any exists...
...I suspect we'll never know for sure whether McCain was smeared...
...refused early release by his Hanoi jailers...
...Hagel also asked to meet with Karl Rove, Bush's chief strategist...
...Lott and senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, an influential Republican, "have a problem with McCain," Hagel says...
...If nothing else, McCain is a sympathetic victim...
...The Bush camp scoffed at this...
...There is not one iota of truth to it...
...He confronted senator Paul Coverdell of Georgia, the point man in the Senate for George W. Bush's presidential campaign...
...Later, a number of pro-Bush senators insisted they hadn't intimated that McCain is unstable...
...The smear story broke in the press on November 19 with a column by Elizabeth Drew in the Washington Post, followed two days later by one in the New York Times by Maureen Dowd...
...Hagel concluded McCain was being viciously smeared...
...Perhaps these denials should be taken with a grain of salt...
...Coverdell, in a letter to the Post, said the "accusations are reckless, without merit, and quite simply, poppycock...
...The McCain campaign—and McCain himself— took this as a shot across the bow from the Bush campaign...
...There's a problem, however, with the notion of a smear campaign against McCain: No actual instances of smears have been reported, no examples of Sen...
...Majority leader Trent Lott, also named by Drew, told reporters on November 19: "I don't know what is wrong with Elizabeth Drew...
...Rove declined to meet with Hagel, but he, too, denied the Bush campaign was smearing McCain...
Vol. 5 • December 1999 • No. 12
