It's More Than Just a Campaign
Carlson, Tucker
It's More Than Just a Campaign . . . There are a lot of ups and downs along McCain's high road. BY TUCKER CARLSON Phoenix,.Ariz. THERE ARE FEWER THAN 24 hours to go before the South Carolina...
...I don't expect it to last more than an hour or two...
...On election night, in a hotel ballroom in North Charleston, Graham takes the podium to introduce the candidate, the night's loser...
...McCain compounds it by making an explicit pitch to Democrats and independents...
...Yet in primaries, issues usually matter less than symbols, something the Bush campaign seems to have figured out early...
...Gauging the sensibilities of an audience is not one of them...
...McCain, who likes to needle him, calls him "Sunny John...
...As he leaves the stage, the music starts, loud as always...
...The race is called at 6:30 local time, and 90 minutes later, McCain is back on the bus on the way to his victory party...
...At a rally in Myrtle Beach he described McCain as "a short man who looks good in a leather jacket...
...He's not...
...he simply didn't feel like calling McCain...
...McCain looks at him and grins...
...McCain called Gov...
...Outside the room, several George W. Bush supporters are waving signs and waiting for McCain to emerge...
...One has tacked a full-color, poster-sized reproduction of the New Republic to a broom stick...
...It is, says Sanford, a lot like what happens in the movie The Hurricane...
...On stage, Graham is a compelling speaker, inspiring and cuttingly witty...
...Behind him on a wall is an enormous hand-painted banner with the campaign's informal slogan: "Burn It Down...
...Graham has traveled with the McCain campaign for weeks, and often acts as a calming influence...
...You're a better person...
...if you're supporting John McCain you're better for the experience...
...If McCain's feelings are hurt by Bush's rudeness, he isn't showing it on election night in Phoenix...
...Or, for that matter, that they were Canadians...
...Russ Feingold, a liberal Democrat from Wisconsin...
...According to Bush spokeswoman Karen Hughes, Bush's silence wasn't an act of pettiness or petulance or bad sportsmanship...
...The McCain campaign, he tells the crowd, is not simply a campaign...
...Less than a week before the primary, a PAC called Keep It Flying materialized out of nowhere and in its only recorded act sent a couple of hundred thousand letters to white voters pointing out that George W. Bush's wife, Laura, has publicly defended the right of South Carolina to fly the Confederate flag over the statehouse...
...He was on an airplane," she explains...
...The cover has McCain's picture on it...
...Voting for John McCain, Sanford tells the crowd, is more than an exercise in civic duty...
...By any measure, it's an exaggeration...
...McCain has spent most of the day in the living room of his house chatting with friends and watching television...
...Mark Sanford rises before a crowd in Litchfield Beach to introduce John McCain...
...The headline says, "This Man is Not a Republican...
...Even Sunny is smiling," he says, "and when that happens you know it's a cataclysmic event...
...Sanford, a 39-year-old member of the class of 1994, was one of the first members of Congress (and still Tucker Carlson is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...But Graham isn't ready to concede...
...Mark Sanford has a lot of talents...
...Actually, as Hughes admits moments later, Bush wasn't on an airplane at all, but at a rally in Kansas City when the news of his defeat appeared on television...
...It's not rap—the campaign saves that for the next event—but a song by Queen, the late-'70s supergroup whose flamboyantly gay lead singer died several years ago of AIDS...
...For about five different reasons, this is not the sort of thing Republican candidates normally tell South Carolina primary voters...
...A tall brooding Texan who has a five o'clock shadow by breakfast, Weaver usually looks like a man who has just received horrible news...
...In foot-high letters it reads: CONCESSION...
...Across the room, above an alcove where soft drinks and popcorn are sold, is a permanent sign...
...One afternoon in Hilton Head, a man who said he did not work for the Bush campaign was spotted at a rally passing out flyers savaging Cindy McCain...
...In television interviews, Graham can sometimes seem simple...
...That's what a vote for John McCain is like, San-ford says...
...McCain seems tired, and he delivers his stump speech in an uncharacteristically flat tone, as if he has finally grown weary of repeating the same words...
...McCain's wife Cindy, meanwhile, was repeatedly attacked on radio call-in shows—and in the northern part of the state, in push polls—as a drug addict unfit to be first lady...
...Tonight Weaver is obviously delighted...
...In the middle of his usual rap about inspiring the young to pursue causes "greater than their own self-interest," McCain mentions the trip he made last year to Boston, where he received the John F. Kennedy Profiles in Courage Award...
...Perhaps to add variety, he throws in a new line...
...One thing we've learned," he says, "is that As Hughes admits later, Bush wasn't on an airplane at all, but at a rally in Kansas City...
...In the film, a group of political activists decides that Ruben "Hurricane" Carter has been railroaded by a racist justice system and convicted of a murder he didn't commit...
...A McCain aide chased the man, caught him, and was moments away from making the newspaper when Rep...
...Accepting the award with him, McCain remembers, was his good friend Sen...
...Lindsey Graham stepped in to prevent violence...
...It turns out he simply didn't feel like calling...
...Bush was in a jovial, talkative mood...
...He simply couldn't get to a phone...
...The candidate himself doesn't do much to reassure them...
...Carter's supporters are so convinced of his innocence that they move to the town where he has been imprisoned and stage a kind of continuous vigil until he is released...
...But it's clear that some in the largely white, middle-aged crowd have seen the movie...
...In addition to his now-famous trip to Bob Jones University, Bush blanketed radio and television in the state with ads that depicted McCain as the creepiest sort of NPR liberal—a free-spending elitist who probably can't wait to raise taxes on the middle class in order to subsidize abortions and homosexual pornography...
...Smart, charming, and conservative, he is affluent, popular in his district, and has a terrific-looking family...
...Judging by the positions he takes on most issues, McCain is a conventional Republican, even a fairly conservative one...
...Next to him is John Weaver, the campaign's political director...
...I don't think Sen...
...It is a kind of spiritual process...
...A blow for justice...
...THERE ARE FEWER THAN 24 hours to go before the South Carolina primary when Rep...
...They look confused...
...Bush to commend him on Delaware, or on Iowa for that matter," says Hughes, referring to two states in which McCain never campaigned...
...Sanford doesn't mention that the people who agitated for Hurricane Carter's release were left-wing radicals who lived in a commune...
...McCain supporters, of course, believe that McCain is a better person, and if politeness is a measure of virtue, they may be right...
...It never came...
...Two days later, when the networks declared McCain the winner of the Michigan and Arizona primaries, McCain's staff kept a cell-phone line open for Bush's call...
...Minutes after CNN called the race in South Carolina, McCain called Bush from his hotel room to offer congratulations...
...It is not merely a political movement...
...one of the few) to support McCain's candidacy...
Vol. 5 • March 2000 • No. 24
