George began with a speech at Bob Jones University in Greenville. BJU was an institution that, over the years, had opposed integration, banned interracial dating, and condemned homosexuality and whose founders were vociferously anti-Catholic. In 2000 the university president, Bob Jones III, still referred to Mormonism and Catholicism as “cults which call themselves Christian.” The school threatened to arrest any out-of-the-closet gay alumni who dared to return to the school. One political placard on campus read: “Vote Bush Because Gay People Have Too Many Rights.” Student-body attendance was compulsory for the governor’s speech, and the six thousand Christian-right students turned out to cheer loudly every time George said the word “conservative.”
Newsweek
counted twelve cheers in two minutes. George, who had kept a Confederate flag on his wall during his years at Andover, aligned himself with neo-Confederates and questioned McCain’s commitment to states’ rights—coded rhetoric for the right to be racist.
Not all conservatives applauded George for lending his presence to a citadel of prejudice. “It’s one thing to lurch to the right,” said Bill Kristol, editor and publisher of
The Weekly Standard
. “It’s another thing to lurch back 60 years. You could make the case that ‘compassionate conservatism’ died February 2 when Bush appeared at Bob Jones U.”
The next day George piled on McCain by sponsoring an event with J. Thomas Burch Jr., the head of a little-known veterans group, who charged that after he came home from Vietnam, McCain “forgot us.” After Burch spoke, Bush embraced him.
McCain, who still limped and could not raise his arms as a result of his imprisonment by the North Vietnamese, was livid. He ran an ad comparing George Bush to Bill Clinton, and asked: “Isn’t it time we had a president who told the truth?”
Being equated with the man he regarded as reptilian was more than Bush could bear. He retaliated as if McCain had impugned his mother: “Politics is tough, but when John McCain compared me to Bill Clinton and said I was untrustworthy, that’s over the line. Disagree with me, fine, but do not challenge my integrity.”
“That commercial . . . was the Godzilla judo flip for us,” recalled Trey Walker, McCain’s national field director. “McCain’s momentum had already started to evaporate, and that just stopped him dead.”
The two candidates heaped charges upon countercharges as they clawed their bloody way to the conservative high ground on outlawing abortion, gambling, pornography, and homosexuality while supporting guns and God and the Confederate flag.
The Bush team retained the services of Ralph Reed, former director of the Christian Coalition, to run grass roots in the state, and they immediately started attacking with push polls, telephone banks, e-mails, anonymous mailings, automatic dialings of untraceable hate messages, phony front groups, and radio talk-show call-ins to pillory McCain with lies that he was a liberal reprobate who abandoned a crippled wife to father black children by black prostitutes. Preposterous charges of extramarital affairs, abortions, wife beatings, mob ties, venereal diseases, and illegitimate children were flung at him, while his wife, Cindy, was tarred as a wayward woman and drug addict who had stolen to support her habit, his children were vilified as bastards, and his friend and supporter from New Hampshire former U.S. Senator Warren Rudman was subjected to vile anti-Semitism. The poison drip saturated South Carolina for eighteen days and nights of slaughterhouse politics.
“I’ve seen dirty politics, but I’ve never seen a rumor campaign like this,” said Terry Haskins, the speaker pro tem of the South Carolina House of Representatives and a McCain supporter. “It’s a vile attempt to destroy a man’s reputation just to win an election, and I know it’s organized because none of these rumors existed until the day after New Hampshire.”
On February 12, a week before the election, Bush was caught by a C-SPAN camera talking to a state senator. Neither man realized he was being watched.
“You haven’t even hit his soft spots,” said the senator.
“I know,” said Bush. “I’m going to.”
“Well, they need to be—somebody does, anyway.”
“I agree,” said Bush. “I’m not going to do it on TV.”
By the time he finished mauling McCain in South Carolina with his anonymous smear campaign, George had almost surpassed his father’s vile race-baiting.
“We suspected that Ralph Reed was behind it all,” said Mark Salter, McCain’s administrative assistant, “but we couldn’t prove it, because there was no paper trail . . . They operated under the radar system . . . used political action committees no one ever heard of . . . which gave Bush complete deniability.”
Federal Election Commission campaign records would show that Ralph Reed was paid more than half a million dollars by Enron “for ongoing advice and counsel.” Karl Rove had recommended the conservative political activist to Enron in 1997, feeding suspicions that Rove wanted to keep Reed’s favor for Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign.
One aspect of Reed’s fiendish operation in South Carolina targeted 140,000 Republicans throughout the state with flyers from the Christian Coalition titled “10 Disturbing Facts About John McCain.” A southern female, who identified herself as being with a religious group, followed up with a phone call to these same voters. In a honey-sweet accent, she related horrendous stories about McCain and expressed concern about such a man becoming President. Before hanging up, she said, “You all be sure to listen to the Reverend Robertson this Sunday.” When Pat Robertson appeared on one of the morning talk shows, he made a veiled reference to “some of those other things that are in John McCain’s background.”
Presenting himself as a “reformer with results,” George criticized McCain’s credentials for espousing campaign-finance reform. “He’s the big committee chairman all the lobbyists give their money to . . . He’s the Washington insider.” Winding up to clobber McCain as a self-righteous hypocrite, George said, “He can’t have it both ways. He can’t take the high horse and then claim the low road.”
These linguistic gaffes plagued him throughout the campaign, causing great hilarity among the media, which detailed every mental malfunction:
“What’s not fine is, rarely is the question asked, are, is our children learning?” (January 14, 2000)
“You’re working hard to put food on your family.” (January 27, 2000)
“This is Preservation Month. I appreciate preservation. It’s what you do when you run for President. You gotta preserve.” (January 28, 2000)
“The most important job is not to be governor, or first lady in my case.” (January 30, 2000)
“How do you know if you don’t measure if you have a system that simply suckles kids through?” (February 16, 2000)
“I understand small business growth. I was one.” (February 19, 2000)
“I don’t care what the polls say. I don’t. I’m doing what I think what’s wrong.” (March 15, 2000)
“Laura and I don’t realize how bright our children is sometimes until we get an objective analysis.” (April 15, 2000)
“Well, I think if you’re going to do something and don’t do it, that’s trustworthiness.” (August 30, 2000)
“We cannot let terrorists and rogue nations hold this nation hostile or hold our allies hostile.” (September 4, 2000)
Four days before the South Carolina primary, the two GOP candidates met for a nationally televised debate. They were standing awkwardly next to each other in the studio, and McCain turned to his rival.
“George,” he said, slowly shaking his head with disgust.
The governor played by
Godfather
rules. “John,” he said, “it’s politics.”
“George, everything isn’t politics.”
During the debate McCain did not hold back. “You should be ashamed,” he said, castigating George for campaigning with a man who had maligned McCain’s commitment to veterans.
Bush shot back with outrage over the ad that had accused him of Clinton-style truth twisting. “Whatever you do, don’t equate my integrity and trustworthiness to Bill Clinton,” George said. “That’s about as low a blow as you can go in the Republican primary . . . Morally, any of us at this table can outperform Bill Clinton.”
After the debate the candidates assembled for a group picture. George walked over and grasped both of McCain’s hands in his own.
“John,” he said. “We’ve got to start running a better campaign.”
McCain was incensed by the hypocrisy. “Don’t give me that shit,” he snarled, “and take your hands off of me.”
By the time voters went to the polls, the two candidates had come to loathe each other. Trouncing McCain 54 to 41 percent, George won South Carolina and reestablished himself as the Republican front-runner over an opponent he described as “self-righteous.”
“The reason why I think a few of those people are still angry at me is because we interfered with the coronation,” said McCain. “Look, Bush and his people will have to live with the legacy of South Carolina; I don’t.” In his concession speech, the senator said, “I want the presidency in the best way, not the worst way.”
He then charged into Michigan and turned Bush’s tactics against him by running a telephone bank that reminded Catholic voters of George’s appearance at the virulently anti-Catholic Bob Jones University. George hid behind the skirts of his Mexican sister-in-law.
“Do I support the policy against interracial dating? Of course not. My own brother Jeb, the great governor of Florida, married a girl from Mexico, Columba, a fabulous person . . . plus she’s a Catholic.” Not even the miscegenation laws in Texas had considered Mexicans a separate race.
McCain questioned how that response excused George’s failure to speak out against bigotry. He blasted Bush as “a low-road campaigner” who would stoop to anything, including “character assassination” to win. McCain beat George 50.8 percent to 43 percent in Michigan.
Heading into the New York primary on March 7, 2000, George scrambled to make amends to the state’s 7.3 million Catholics for his Bob Jones appearance. With Catholics constituting about 45 percent of the GOP primary turnout, George wrote a letter to New York’s John Cardinal O’Connor saying he regretted not condemning the anti-Catholic policies of the fundamentalist school. He did not apologize, nor did he acknowledge that by accepting the invitation from Bob Jones University he had legitimized the school’s bigotry. In an editorial called “Boy George’s Bogus Confession,” the
New York Daily News
criticized him for pandering. “Bush . . . showed he was willing to sacrifice principles for votes.”
The Democratic National Committee printed up T-shirts for reporters covering the Bush campaign that said, “Bob Jones Redemption Tour.” Still, George won the New York primary, and by Super Tuesday he and Al Gore had secured their parties’ nominations. Their campaigns began in earnest after the political conventions.
George’s scorched-earth tactics in South Carolina had enraged his critics, especially Larry Flynt, the publisher of
Hustler
magazine, who felt that Bush’s stand on sexual abstinence before marriage was the height of hypocrisy. Bush’s pledge to put federal funds into abstinence programs further outraged Flynt, who argued that such programs did not reduce teen sex. Pronouncing Bush a menace to society, the pornographer hired two investigative reporters to explore every aspect of the governor’s sexual past. In October 2000, he claimed to have hit pay dirt.
Appearing on CNN’s
Crossfire
, Flynt alleged that George W. Bush had impregnated a woman in the 1970s when he was living at the Chateau Dijon in Houston. According to Flynt, George arranged an abortion through a physician, who purportedly performed the procedure at Houston’s Twelve Oaks Medical Center.
“When I said that we had the proof, I am referring to knowing who the girl was, knowing who the doctor was that performed the abortion, evidence from girlfriends of hers at the time, who knew about the romance and the subsequent abortion. The young lady does not want to go public, and without her willingness, we don’t feel that we’re on solid enough legal ground to go with the story . . . One of the things that interested us was that this abortion took place before
Roe
v.
Wade
. . . which made it a crime at the time.”
Without confirmation from the woman, who Flynt said had married an FBI agent, the mainstream press would not touch the story. “Walter Isaacson [former editor of
Time
] would not go with it because Larry Flynt was involved,” said Brian Doyle, an assistant
Time
editor. “Even though he had four affidavits from the woman’s friends.” Michael Isikoff of
Newsweek
said, “Certainly, there was a great deal of circumstantial evidence to support it, but without the woman herself coming forward to admit that Bush arranged her abortion, we could not do anything with it.” Richard Gooding of
The National Enquirer
said that when he interviewed the woman, she denied having had an abortion. “She admitted they dated exclusively for six months, but said they never had the kind of sex that would get her pregnant.”
The story was pursued because of Bush’s stand against abortion and his threat to support a “human life amendment” to the Constitution, which would overturn
Roe
v.
Wade
. As governor, he signed eighteen anti-abortion laws, and as a presidential candidate he promised to appoint only pro-life judges.
Following the “our boy” fiasco in New Hampshire, George sidelined his father, who made no further public appearances, lest the public see the patriarch as the puppeteer pulling the wooden puppet’s strings. Behind the scenes, however, the elder Bush continued supervising his son’s campaign. He was in daily contact with the Austin office. “Sometimes there were four—five—six calls a day,” said an aide, “and every night Joe Allbaugh called him with the latest polls, no matter where he was.” In Japan the former President announced over dinner that “our boy” was going to sweep Super Tuesday. “He was consumed,” admitted his wife. “Absolutely consumed.” He had sixteen T1 lines installed in his Kennebunkport estate to accommodate the telephones and computers of campaign aides and advisers flying back and forth from Texas.