by Nick Bryant
On the Republican side, there were the usual publicity hounds and delusional no-hopers. Alan Keyes, a black radio talk-show host, right-wing ideologue and former diplomat, evidently thought it was possible to go from mid-ranking US ambassador to commander-in-chief in one Herculean leap.
Only marginally more plausible as a candidate was Steve Forbes, a nerdy businessman with Harry Potter glasses, vast riches, a celebrated name and the sense of entitlement that went with it. Given the strength of the Bible-belt right, Gary Bauer, a pocket-sized evangelical, hoped his candidacy would be blessed by providence, if not charisma. Yet his main contribution to the primary season was to produce its viral video sensation: the slapstick footage that showed him tumbling backwards off a stage and disappearing through the curtained backdrop, as he lost control of his frying pan in a candidates’ pancake-flipping competition.
The press corps’ favourite was the Arizona senator John McCain, a Vietnam veteran who came with a story of marvellous heroism and a campaign bus, the ‘Straight Talk Express’, that felt more like a frat-house on wheels. On board, McCain provided an endless supply of coffee and doughnuts, an even richer stream of pithy quotes, and something reporters valued even more, which was virtually round-the-clock access.
After the dissembling, obfuscation and perpetual spin of the Clinton years, here was the human rejoinder: an authentic candidate, comfortable in his own skin, seemingly untroubled by demons from his past and revelling in his insurgent candidacy against the Republican establishment and religious right.
Eight years later, after cosying up to his one-time foes in a second bid for Republican nomination that was both less unorthodox and more successful, McCain appeared before the American electorate in a dreadfully amputated form. Yet in 2000, he was so vital and unpredictable that virtually the entire press corps succumbed to a collective crush. When the Arizonian stood before town meetings in New Hampshire and exhorted his audience to become part of something much larger than themselves, one sensed that reporters were itching to shut their laptops, cast aside their notepads and sign up to his campaign as volunteers. Instead, they did something that was far more useful to McCain’s hopes of pulling off an unexpected victory, which was to produce a narrative of the campaign that talked up his chances. There was no question, the Wayfarer bar was McCain country.
His great rival, George W. Bush, came with an absorbing storyline and an even more stellar bloodline: a grandfather, Prescott Bush, who was a senator and a father, George Herbert Walker, who had been president. Eyeing up a possible Bush restoration, reporters naturally seized upon the Oedipal overtones of his candidacy. The works of Shakespeare were also mined for parallels, with George W. cast as Prince Hal, a son known for the discretions of his past, determined to redeem his father’s reign.
As an aside, perhaps we should pause briefly to reflect on how campaign reportage relies on these kinds of tropes, and how Homer and the Bard are topped in the analogy league table only by American sport. Adopting the popular baseball argot, candidates invariably step up to the plate, swing for the fences, produce policies or strategies out of left field, get to first base if they survive beyond New Hampshire or Iowa, strike out if they do not, and demonstrate whether they are ready for the major leagues thereafter. They might even find themselves in the bottom of the ninth with the bases loaded. If successful, they would have gone the whole nine yards, produced various knockout punches, full-court presses and be on the verge of a slam dunk or home run. If not, they would be on the ropes and about to throw a ‘Hail Mary’ pass. My advice to anyone covering a US campaign would be to gain a rudimentary knowledge of Shakespeare, starting with the tragedies, and then invest in a glossary of American sporting terms. But I digress.
More than a decade on, and volumes of ‘Bushisms’ later, it is easy to forget that in the early days of his candidacy Bush appeared to have the superlative presidential résumé, and be capable of home runs, slam dunks and of maturing from Prince Hal to King Henry without even breaking a sweat. A Harvard MBA and a graduate of Yale, he was regarded as highly intelligent. His enormously profitable stewardship of the Texas Rangers baseball franchise gave him credibility as a corporate chief executive. As governor of Texas, he was regarded as an innovative policymaker, especially in the field of education. By becoming the first Texas governor to win two consecutive four-year terms, he had also demonstrated his vote-winning capabilities. His victories were thought to stem from a winning personality and his credo of compassionate conservatism, which allowed him to appeal to the centre while at the same time shoring up his base – twin attributes easily transferable to the national stage.
Helpfully for the profile writers, he could also identify a crucible moment in his life: the dehydrated haze of the morning after his 40th birthday, when he woke up with such a clawing hangover that he promised never to touch liquor again.
Admittedly, Bush did not seem to have much interest in foreign affairs. Nor had he travelled widely. However, at a time when American hegemony appeared settled and unrivalled, it did not seem to matter. No candidate in the field had greater name recognition or fund-raising prowess, which in turn gave him another high-value political commodity, the air of inevitability.
As his key strategist, image-maker and intellectual blood bank, Bush could also call on one of the smartest political consultants in the land: Karl Rove, a modern-day Lee Atwater, whom he christened ‘Turd Blossom’. In the early months of the campaign, it was Rove who came up with a reworking of William McKinley’s front-porch campaign in 1896, whereby Bush rarely left the safety of the governor’s mansion in Austin, and key supporters, donors and journalists paid visits to him.
Fearing closer scrutiny, Rove had come up with a candidate-protection program, but at the start of the campaign it only enhanced the governor’s aura of invincibility, to use another overworked expression from the campaign phrasebook. Here again, it is worth reflecting upon the respect that Bush once commanded. Even liberal-minded Europeans, who later dubbed him the Toxic Texan and worse, succumbed to his charm. Back in early 1999, I remember watching the swooning response of a London-based BBC producer at the sight of George W. greeting the then British Conservative leader William Hague during a trip to the State Capitol Building in Austin. ‘Wow, look at that charisma,’ the producer gushed, when all Bush had done was walk into the room, thrust out his hand and said, ‘Hi, how are you?’ Though hard now to picture, it was typical of the flattering mood among journalists at the time.
George W. Bush’s stumbling journey towards caricature only began later in 1999, when he started to venture further from his porch. First, he started confusing his Greeks with his ‘Grecians’, and his Kosovars with his ‘Kosovarians’. Then, in December 1999, just a month before the New Hampshire primary, he flunked that infamous pop quiz in which he was asked to name the leaders of Chechnya (tough), Taiwan (less so), India (should have been straightforward) and Pakistan (Foreign Policy 101).
‘Wait, wait, is this fifty questions?’ the governor floundered.
‘No, it’s four questions of four leaders in four hotspots,’ countered the schoolmarmish reporter, Andy Hiller, who worked for WHDH-TV in Boston but looked more like a plant from Saturday Night Live. Afterwards, Bush’s press woman, Karen Hughes, tried to contain the fallout by arguing that the governor was running for the leadership of the free world rather than auditioning for a contestant’s spot on Jeopardy, but the damage had been inflicted and has since been impossible to repair.
From reporters assigned to cover Bush on a daily basis came bizarre tales, not many of which ended up in print but that started to alter the conventional wisdom nonetheless. Frank Bruni of The New York Times told the story of the governor’s attendance at a memorial service at Texas Christian University in September 1999 for the victims of a multiple shooting in Fort Worth in which seven were killed and a further seven injured. Throughout the service, as prayers, songs, bible readings and eulogies were offered up, Bush kept on sneaking glances at th
e press corps and pulling silly faces. ‘Bush turned around from time to time to shoot us little smiles,’ Bruni later reflected. ‘He scrunched up his forehead, as if to ask us what we were up to back there. He wiggled his eyebrows, a wacky and wordless hello.’ Given that Bush had signed a law allowing Texans to carry concealed weapons and enjoyed strong backing from the gun lobby, his presence in the outdoor stadium was bound to attract close scrutiny. Yet that did not stop him acting like a mischievous pageboy at a society wedding, a reprise of his role in his father’s White House.
Certainly, the voters of New Hampshire thought they had spotted a joker, and, in any case, they had fallen for McCain. So, on election night, we all pitched up at the Arizonian’s hotel, where we saw him celebrate a lopsided victory of 49 per cent to 30 per cent. Unable to raise his arms above his shoulders, because of the injuries he had sustained during his stay at the Hanoi Hilton, McCain did a victory jig with his shuddering hands stretched out in front, like some smiling zombie in a low-budget science-fiction flick looking for a victim to strangle. Weeks later, as the campaign circus moved to South Carolina, he almost had to be restrained from performing the same manoeuvre on George W. Bush.
The South Carolina primary was by far the grubbiest campaign I have ever covered, a view shared by veterans of the trail who had followed Richard Nixon in his squalid pomp. The Republican high command had set up South Carolina as an asbestos firewall to block dangerously liberal-minded candidates from progressing any further. McCain, whose views on campaign finance and immigration reform were considered heretical, was precisely the kind of subversive candidate they had in mind.
Rather than rely on the trusty firewall, however, the Bush campaign and its surrogates went nuclear and sought to eviscerate the Arizonian as soon as he headed south from New Hampshire. Push-pollers, for whom leading questions were near-lethal weapons, rang up voters to ask whether they would countenance a candidate who had fathered an illegitimate black love child ever becoming president (the McCains had adopted a young Bangladeshi girl). Cindy McCain was accused of being a drug addict (she admitted to once having a dependency on painkillers). The senator was called a ‘fag candidate’, because of a meeting held with the gay ginger group the Log Cabin Republicans. During his five and a half years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, he was accused of having become psychologically unhinged, brainwashed even, which explained both his hair-trigger temper and blasphemous views. To hammer home the point, George W. Bush appeared at the shoulder of a disgruntled POW, who accused McCain of returning home and forgetting those he left behind, which was the most wounding falsehood of all.
The Texas governor, meanwhile, conducted a textbook South Carolina campaign. Closely adhering to the famed ‘Southern Strategy’ pioneered by Nixon and perfected by Ronald Reagan, he came down on the side of the redneck traditionalists who demanded that the Confederate Flag still fly atop the State Capitol Building in Columbia. Tellingly, he also launched his campaign from the Great Hall of China-like stage of Bob Jones University, an establishment known for continuing to ban interracial dating on campus.
Meeting backstage ahead of a televised debate, McCain challenged Bush about the tawdriness of his campaign. ‘John, it’s just politics,’ the governor blithely replied. Then, as the Bush campaign intended, McCain fell for the trap of fuming retaliation and cut a television spot comparing Bush’s slander to Bill Clinton’s lies. By his South Carolinian accusers, McCain had been called mentally deranged, a closet homosexual, a sexual degenerate and a betrayer of his fellow POWs. In likening George W. Bush to Bill Clinton, however, he was judged to have gone completely beyond the pale.
In another cruel injustice, the exit polls confirmed that South Carolinians thought it was McCain rather than Bush who had fought the most negative campaign. I was at the McCain hotel when that poll came through, and the NBC correspondent David Bloom immediately grasped its significance. ‘Crushed,’ he said as he walked into a deflated press room. It was the hinge point of the campaign, and one that paved the way for Bush’s eventual victory. It also started a chain of events that ultimately led David Bloom into Iraq, where tragically he was among the journalists to lose his life.
South Carolina was the sorriest of spectacles, but I recall watching Bush on a day when the nobler instincts of his character came to the fore. Towards the end of a question-and-answer session before a crowd of a few hundred people, a teenage girl who clearly had seriously impaired vision asked what the Bush administration would do to help provide the specially designed glasses she needed to better see. Never a man for the small detail of policy, the governor could not give her an instant answer, but on hearing that she was having to make do with an inferior pair of glasses and was unable to afford new ones, he instantly came up with a solution.
With the irrepressibility of a charity auctioneer, he appealed to his wealthy donors seated in the room to stump up the cash. Sure enough, the girl left with the down payment on a new pair of spectacles. ‘Compassionate conservatism’, I always thought, was more than a bumper-sticker slogan for George W. Bush. Real conviction lay behind those words.
However, what South Carolina also demonstrated and foreshadowed was the extent to which he lacked the intellectual self-confidence, independence of mind or strategic smarts to counter more strongly conservative voices around him. During the campaign, it was Karl Rove. During the presidency, it was Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. A decent-minded man rarely prone to malevolence, Bush, I always suspected, would have preferred the higher road to the White House. Instead, he deferred to advisers when they demanded in South Carolina that it deviate through the gutter.
Three days after his defeat in the Palmetto state, McCain briefly mounted a mini-comeback by winning the Michigan primary. That night, I found myself pursuing Karl Rove around a packed hotel lobby in Detroit with a live microphone in my hand, trying to get some reaction. ‘What are you telling the governor?’ I kept on asking. ‘What are you telling the governor?’
‘I’m telling him there’s a guy from the BBC who won’t leave me alone,’ came his deadpan reply.
What Rove probably told Bush was that Michigan would be McCain’s last hurrah. As in New Hampshire, registered Democrats and independents were allowed to vote in the Michigan primary, and they had provided his margin in victory. Thereafter, the political calendar was packed with closed primaries in conservative states where only Republicans could vote, which heavily favoured Bush.
The McCain camp, by contrast, was confronted by a demoralising paradox: the senator was successfully assembling precisely the kind of broad-based coalition needed to win the presidency but not the Republican presidential nomination.
Michigan did indeed end up producing the last full-throttled roar of the ‘Straight Talk Express’, but even there McCain looked punch-drunk from South Carolina. Perhaps he never fully recovered, and when he ran for the presidency eight years later he still looked out on his feet. There was a lightness and freeness of spirit about John McCain in 2000 that was almost entirely absent in 2008, and the only time that I found myself recognising the old John McCain – which is to say the younger John McCain – was when he delivered one of the most gracious ever concession speeches on the night of Barack Obama’s victory.
History, I suspect, will be generous to McCain and record that he played a vital role in the election of America’s first African-American president, not so much by fighting a flawed campaign but because he conducted a clean campaign. Even when confronting near-certain defeat, he never sought to make race an issue. It would be tempting to call his rejection of negative tactics another collateral effect of South Carolina, but it can be more simply explained: McCain was being McCain, a politician who preferred straight-talk to trash-talk.
To his credit, Bush also played his part in the rise of Obama, by reminding the GOP that it was the party of Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, and by giving African-Americans a higher profile in his administration than any of his predecessors, Republican or Dem
ocrat. Without Colin Powell or Condoleezza Rice, and the familiarity that came with seeing blacks occupying the highest offices of state, Barack Obama might not have risen so fast.
With the McCain insurgency over, there was a lull in the campaign, and a chance for its reporters to draw breath. Perhaps there was even an opportunity to assess our own performance after spending so many months analysing the utterances, stumbles, earth tones and misjudged pancake flips of others. Come election time, the central complaints levelled against news organisations are that we fail to explore issues, that the horse race is our myopic focus, that we are preoccupied with style over substance, and that we always get distracted by eye-catching trivialities. On all of these counts, I fear we are guilty as charged. But just as a country often gets the democracy it deserves, I suspect the same is true of campaign journalism.
We cover the primary season as if it were a horse race because that is essentially what it is. We tend not to fully explore all the issues because the candidates themselves are usually so hesitant to do so. We spend more time on personalities rather than policies because the personalities are generally more intriguing and arguably more germane. Campaign promises are easily cast aside, after all.
However noble our intentions at the outset, we often allow style to trump substance, and assign far too much meaning to mindless trivialities, such as whether candidates wear boxers or briefs and who cracks the funniest gags on Letterman or Leno. Here, there is a tendency to judge candidates on their entertainment value rather than their ability to govern. All I would say is that if you, dear reader, had to listen to the same candidate stump-speech event after event, day after day – by the end of the first month, most reporters can perform the campaign party trick of mouthing along to a candidate’s stump speech, silently reciting its every word, while some can even identify the lines at which the candidate’s wife will nod approvingly – you might surrender to the temptations of trivialities as well.
