P.O.W.-Right in the Kisser
BARNES, FRED
P.O.W—Right in the Kisser! Up against a surging war hero, the Bush campaign suffers self-inflicted wounds. BY FRED BARNES A TALKING POINT dispatched to allies of George W. Bush after his defeat in...
...Don Sipple, Bush's media consultant against Richards, says Bush was the most disciplined candidate he's ever worked for...
...McCain has run a brilliant campaign, especially in captivating reporters...
...With McCain, it's not just his Vietnam POW record that's important...
...No, I'm not kidding...
...And it tied Bush to Washington and the Beltway status quo, which is the connection he most needs to shed...
...Does he listen...
...Then they perceived a difference...
...They did, but only in late January once Bradley himself made the vice president's statements the focus of his campaign...
...but also himself...
...As Texas governor, he is an outsider...
...They don't want another Bill Clinton...
...BY FRED BARNES A TALKING POINT dispatched to allies of George W. Bush after his defeat in the New Hampshire primary touches directly on what's ailing the Bush campaign...
...Indeed, he should have, and with every reporter in sight...
...Why not...
...Up to the first post-New Hampshire weekend, little had changed...
...Now, if Bush is going to recover, he must turn to the Walter Mondale model...
...He joked about his campaign...
...At Bush events, the candidate stands behind a podium, with an array of GOP bigwigs behind him, and gives a canned speech...
...Aides were still dwelling on Bush's fund-raising advantage over McCain...
...It's one legacy Bill Clinton has left that's actually positive...
...Maybe there are just too many control freaks in the Bush entourage...
...We talked about taxes, John Rocker, the economics of professional baseball, foreign trips he might take if he wins the nomination, and a few other subjects...
...Is he honest...
...He then created a new, no longer arrogant, and far more appealing Mondale and wound up winning the nomination before losing the general election to the incumbent, Ronald Reagan...
...The character of the candidate does matter...
...What Bush has to do is undermine McCain's claim to being a crusading outsider bent on transforming Washington...
...It's not that voters are suddenly anti-Bush, says Frank Luntz, the pollster and focus group specialist...
...Bush may help himself marginally in the South Carolina primary on February 19 by challenging McCain's conservative credentials...
...Luntz's focus groups during GOP presidential debates found Bush too issue-focused...
...It's pro-McCain," Luntz says...
...He accepted the endorsement of former vice president Dan Quayle...
...Bush himself, among others, actually said this...
...The 1994 model initially worked for Bush, as he built up a huge lead in the polls last year, but public sentiment has shifted...
...Bush is fine on substance, too, and probably closer to the thinking of average Republicans than McCain is...
...True, he's bucked GOP leaders, but he's rarely gone against public sentiment...
...Nor does Bush spend hours schmoozing (and flattering) reporters, as McCain does...
...He was self-effacing...
...After losing the New Hampshire primary to Gary Hart in 1984, Mondale recognized that he must redefine not only Hart ("Where's the beef...
...But he's perfectly capable of conversing amiably for hours with reporters, as McCain has...
...On substance, he remained an unswerving liberal...
...Perhaps Bush is one of them...
...But he's allowed himself to become, in the words of a disgruntled Bush adviser, "the moneyed, establishment, endorsement-driven candidate...
...Personal traits, chiefly character, and how a candidate presents himself to voters have trumped substance...
...The advice was a double-barreled mistake...
...Mon-dale was appropriately humble, conceding he'd made mistakes and hadn't approached the campaign the right way...
...But ideology doesn't matter as much in this race...
...Bush may be too finicky to attack McCain as a hypocrite or a phony...
...Not to take anything away from the McCain campaign and its extraordinary surge, but a good part of Bush's problem is self-inflicted...
...And what was Bush's first act after being trounced in New Hampshire...
...Rather than point up tiny ideological differences, Bradley took on Gore's fundamental flaw, his untrustworthi-ness...
...They supposedly know who's best qualified to step into the presidency...
...He declared himself no longer the front-runner, said the Democratic presidential nomination was up for grabs, and vowed to fight furiously, state by state, to win...
...This made his campaign sound like a remote corporation instead of a scrappy startup like McCain's...
...They want to know, is the person straightforward...
...The night before the New Hampshire primary, I chatted with Bush for 15 minutes as he waited to be interviewed by Brit Hume on the Fox News Channel...
...In 17 years in Congress, McCain has been a conventional politician, an influential Senate committee chairman, and a Washington insider—anything but a committed maverick...
...He appears alone on an austere stage with a handheld mike, portraying himself as a reformer out to thwart special interests in Washington...
...He was always on message, robotically listing the four things he wanted to do as governor...
...It drove reporters crazy...
...Bush continued to stress that, unlike McCain, he's running in all 50 states...
...He produces an air of spontaneity and truth-telling by responding to any and all questions...
...Rather, they've gotten a glimpse of McCain, and that's changed the political mood...
...Yes, it worked marvelously in 1994 when he ousted Democratic governor Ann Richards...
...There is a lesson to be learned from New Hampshire...
...Nobody cares [about issues]," Luntz says...
...Bush hasn't...
...If Bush waits for the media to pummel McCain with questions about whether his pose as an outsider is legitimate, he'll still be waiting when McCain accepts the GOP nomination in Philadelphia in August...
...What Mondale changed was the style of his campaign...
...Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...Bush prided himself on never going harshly negative on Richards...
...Bradley expected reporters, on their own, to play up Gore's distortions, exaggerations, and untruths...
...For the press, access is everything, and McCain has provided plenty of it...
...Which shouldn't be too hard to do...
...At the least, though, Bush will have to recognize, as Bradley did, that the press will not do his job for him...
...He didn't stammer...
...For Bush, it's simply that the model he's adopted for his presidential run is the wrong one for 2000...
...To counter John McCain's suggestion that he alone is ready to be commander in chief, Bush backers were urged to cite the endorsement of their man by 35 senators...
...It awarded McCain the mantle of out-siderdom—exactly what he's been claiming anyway and what's been spurring his campaign...
...Then, his campaign was tightly controlled...
...He was still yapping when he went into the studio for the interview, and I suspect he could have chatted for hours...
...It took weeks of cajoling to get Bush to put a single sentence zinging McCain on taxes in a 30-second TV ad...
...But my guess is that Republican voters won't reassess McCain until Bush does to McCain what Bill Bradley has done to Al Gore in the Democratic race...
...Voters were fine with Bush until they saw McCain...
Vol. 5 • February 2000 • No. 21
