Anatomy Of A Political Campaign (Lee Atwater Style)

The Trashing of John McCain

By Richard Gooding

November 2004—John McCain found himself simultaneously stumping for Bush and defending Kerry against attacks by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth,

McCain must be haunted by the vicious South Carolina smear campaign (he was crazy, a traitor, he fathered a black child) that helped Bush win the 2000 Republican nomination.

Has McCain joined the team that engineered his destruction?

One day he was being courted as John Kerry’s running mate; another day he was rumored to be replacing Dick Cheney on the Bush ticket.

On many days he was defending his Democratic friend against the attacks of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth; at the same time, he was campaigning side by side with his newer friend, the president, once even hugging him and getting a kiss on the forehead in return.

Both candidates have used his image to their advantage in their TV ads.

And with nearly every report about Senator John McCain and the unprecedented tightrope he’s navigated, there’s been a reference to the ugliness of four years ago―the South Carolina Republican primary of 2000, the do-or-die battle of George W. Bush’s political life to that point.

McCain says “it’s over,” he’s buried the hatchet, it’s no longer worth revisiting.

But the evidence of this political year says otherwise: the ghosts of South Carolina―the power of going negative and the quandary of how to respond to it; the role of consultants and of surrogate groups; the question of a candidate’s responsibility―just won’t go away.

What really happened and why?

Was it really as bad as accepted wisdom has it?

Who did the dirtiest work?

How did they get away with it?

And how does it relate to the walk in the political gutter that we’ve witnessed the last few months?

As you drive south, the first thing you notice is that the roads aren’t as well paved as farther north and that there are fewer state troopers.

Budget cuts have made the odds of getting caught speeding in South Carolina among the lowest in the nation

People there want government to stay out of their pockets, and their lives.

In Columbia, you see the Confederate battle flag flying smack in front of the State House and wonder: Wasn’t that problem resolved?―only to learn that the solution was to take it off the capitol dome and plant it where it was far more visible.

On Confederate Memorial Day, it is like the elephant in the room: not one word about it in the Columbia paper. Government offices were shut, streets emptied, a few overheated old-timers in gray wool did holiday duty around their flag.

South Carolina is overwhelmingly conservative, and even the taste in barbecue is party-weighted; a poll last year found local Republicans prefer mustard-based sauce by a two-to-one margin over the Democrats’ pick, made with ketchup.

But the real political taste is for blood.

South Carolina is where Republican strategist Lee Atwater, the Dark Prince of negative campaigning, spent his childhood and learned his craft, and where he is now buried.

There’s barely a political operative in the state who didn’t either work with him or go to school on his tactics.

Reviled in much of the nation, he is all but universally revered at home.

Here dirty politics was born in the South.

It provoked pride: “You’ve come to the right place!” Politics don’t get any bloodier than the kind Lee Atwater practiced.

On February 2, 2000, John McCain arrived in South Carolina red-hot, a 19-point-upset victor in New Hampshire over George Bush.

In the final days there, some of Bush’s aides had pressed him to turn aggressively negative.

Bush resisted.

His political guru, Karl Rove, overconfident for too long, had agreed.

Now, in South Carolina, Bush had lost close to a 50-point lead.

With just 17 days before the vote, his back was firmly against the wall.

“Desperate people do desperate things,” Warren Rudman, the 74-year-old former New Hampshire senator and one of McCain’s national chairmen, told me.

“When you look at a lot of campaigns, not just that one, when front-runners suddenly fall behind, their campaign consultants just go off the deep end.

People going down for the third time, they grab on for anything they can get hold of, and if it happens to be something nasty, rotten, and false, that doesn’t make much difference.”

At a meeting of Bush’s top staff that first day, the signal went out “to take the gloves off,” Time magazine reported at the time.

“I always knew that if Bush got in trouble he’d push the doomsday button,” a respected Washington figure with solid ties to the religious right told me, asking that his name not be used.

He said he’d been told the strategy called for an “underground campaign” by all the heavyweight groups of the Republican and Christian right, a campaign that would be modeled on Ralph Reed’s infamous, Atwater-like boast about his Christian Coalition work: “I paint my face and travel at night.

You don’t know it’s over until you’re in a body bag.

You don’t know until Election Night.”

Luckily for Bush, the source said, the showdown was in South Carolina, where the Christian Coalition had its greatest strength.

They’d work through word of mouth in the evangelical community, and it’d never be picked up by the media.

“Reed had pledged to Rove that he could deliver.

Ultimately, it was all about power.

They were all attaching their fates to Bush.”

If Bush had everything at stake, the religious right had nearly as much.

From a power high after the 1994 Gingrich revolution, it had been humbled in the ’98 elections for going overboard with the Clinton sex scandal.

In 2000 the key leaders passed over one of their own, Gary Bauer, and put their money, literally, on Bush.

Lee Bandy, of The State newspaper, who has seen it all in 43 years of covering South Carolina politics, told me, “I’ve never seen the Christian right so energized.”

History was on Bush’s side.

And, in a way, so was Lee Atwater, nine years after his death at 40 from a brain tumor.

Stopping an insurgent like McCain was just what the master strategist envisioned when, in 1979, he persuaded the South Carolina G.O.P. to abandon its presidential-preference convention for an early and open primary that would be the gateway to the South.

The next year, he directed Ronald Reagan’s landslide there over George H. W. Bush.

Later, the South Carolina primary became known as the “fire wall” for the party establishment.

In 1988, after Vice President Bush (with Atwater in his prime, steering his national campaign) lost in Iowa to Bob Dole and Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson, he managed to turn it around in New Hampshire.

But it was only after his romp in South Carolina that he was home free.

In 2000, George W. Bush was the clear choice of the state’s bosses―known as “the Campbell machine,” after Carroll Campbell, governor from 1987 to ’95 and still popular.

It could as easily have been “the Atwater mafia,” since Atwater and Campbell, as a team and starting virtually from scratch, had all but achieved one-party rule for the G.O.P. in South Carolina.

Besides Campbell himself, the Bush team was chockablock with Atwater debtors: Senator Strom Thurmond, who owed him his tough 1978 re-election; local strategist Warren Tompkins, who had been friends with him since the fourth grade; and communications czar Tucker Eskew, who’d apprenticed under him.

From the religious right there was Robertson, who’d gone to Atwater’s hospital bedside shortly before his death in 1991 to try to clear up any bitterness left by the ’88 race.

He believed Atwater had been behind the leak of the sex scandal involving fellow TV preacher Jimmy Swaggart; it broke days before the South Carolina vote and damaged Robertson by association.

And there was Coalition executive vice president Roberta Combs, an old South Carolina pal, and Reed, who used to say that all he ever really wanted to be was a “Christian Lee Atwater.”

In 1997, Reed left the Coalition for Enron.

It’s been alleged that Rove arranged it, to keep him loyal to Bush; both Reed and Rove deny this.

He then set up his own political-and-corporate-consulting firm in Atlanta, which in 2000 had a multi-million dollar contract to mobilize voters for the G.O.P.

Reed declined repeated requests to be interviewed.

Even Texans Karl Rove and George W. had their own quirky Atwater histories.

In 1973 a 22-year-old Atwater ran Rove’s campaign for chairman of the College Republican National Committee.

During Dad’s 1988 race Junior had been assigned to Atwater as a sort of family watchdog and sidekick.

“It turned out they were on the same wavelength,” said a mutual friend), giving him a front-row seat as the hatchet man engineered the destruction of Michael Dukakis with the notorious Willie Horton racial-scare campaign.