A political death foretold

By the time John McCain joined Bill Bradley on the sidelines, his demise had already been predicted, inspected, and dissected

by Dan Kennedy

Shortly after 11 p.m. on Tuesday, MSNBC anchor Brian Williams interrupted a conversation he was having with Lisa Myers so that he could cut to Maria Shriver, who was standing outside John McCain's headquarters in Los Angeles. McCain, who had just suffered a devastating, coast-to-coast loss in his bid for the Republican presidential nomination, quickly made his way through a crowd of supporters. He and his wife, Cindy, had almost escaped when Shriver stuck a microphone in his face.

"Senator McCain, how are you feeling tonight?" Shriver asked. It was, of course, a breathtakingly stupid question, of the sort that fledgling reporters ask the victims of fires and automobile accidents. You'd think someone with Shriver's political pedigree could have done better, but apparently not. In no mood to suffer fools, McCain turned quickly and snapped, "Please get out of here!"

It was one of the evening's few unscripted moments, and MSNBC played it for all it was worth, then played it some more. After McCain's concession speech, Williams returned to Shriver, who launched into a manic goofball act, cackling, "I don't think he likes me." Then it was over to pollster Frank Luntz, he of the 1970s-vintage razor cut and sideburns, who intoned gravely that McCain's flash of temper was a symptom of the intensity that focus groups say they don't like about him. Indeed, as McCain winds down his campaign in preparation for a likely withdrawal, his brief encounter with Shriver is destined to be played over and over, to become a symbol of the barely controlled anger that did in his once-promising candidacy.

With the exception of McCain's outburst, Super Tuesday was a media bust. Gone was the entertaining weirdness of the Iowa caucuses, when Alan Keyes popped up on the CNN set to chat with Larry King, and the sheer exuberance of the New Hampshire primary, when McCain and, for a moment, Bill Bradley looked as though they were ready to topple their establishment rivals. Instead, Tuesday night marked the end of the road for one campaign that had been over for weeks (Bradley's) and for another that had been brought to a sudden halt by its proprietor's self-aggrandizing, self-destructive tendencies (McCain's). If Al Gore's evisceration of Bradley was no surprise, neither, really, was George W. Bush's overwhelming victory over McCain, whose fall from populist reformer to whining martyr had been well documented during the week before.

McCAIN WON none of the big prizes on Tuesday. He failed to sweep New England; he lost New York and Ohio; and he couldn't even manage to pull off the trick -- thought to be within his grasp -- of winning the popular vote in California while losing the race for delegates, a much-hoped-for outcome among those (i.e., the media) who were hankering for a credentials fight at the Republican National Convention this summer. If anything was remarkable, it was that none of this was remarkable. After McCain's completely unexpected win in Michigan, on February 15, it had looked as though Bush's $65 million campaign might actually collapse. Then came McCain's attack on religious-right figures Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, an attack he later escalated by calling them "evil." By the end of last week, it was evident that his bold move had backfired, and not just because the Death Star had Luke Skywalker in its sights. Rather, McCain seemed to lack the capacity to expand his admirable crusade for reform beyond anything larger than himself, to put an ironic twist on one of the themes of his stump speech.

Bill Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard and perhaps McCain's most prominent conservative supporter, saw it coming. Before the final debate -- the one where McCain appeared on a television set propped up on a podium next to Bush -- Kristol said McCain had to stop complaining about Bush's (and Robertson's) negative attacks and get back to the themes that had propelled him in New Hampshire: reform and patriotism. (That McCain got as far as he did on two such vague notions says something about the level of public discontent with the status quo.) McCain did not heed that advice, and Kristol, in the post-debate analysis on CNN, all but predicted the end of McCain's candidacy. Then again, Kristol is not the only McCain supporter to lament the candidate's lack of focus. On Monday, Salon's Jake Tapper reported that Cindy McCain, when asked how her solo forays into Rhode Island and Vermont had gone, replied, "Fine. Unlike my husband, I can stay on message."

The most devastating analysis of what went wrong, though, was an editorial-page piece in the March 2 Wall Street Journal by morality scold William Bennett, an ultraconservative who claims to like and admire McCain. Bennett underlined the disingenuousness of McCain's criticizing Robertson and Falwell, who are well known but long past the peak of their influence, while going out of his way to praise James Dobson, a religious-right figure who is not often mentioned in the mainstream media but whose organization, Focus on the Family, is large and powerful. Just two weeks previously, Bennett noted, Dobson had written a letter whacking McCain for cheating on his first wife, for his involvement in the Keating Five savings-and-loan scandal, and for being "extremely confrontational and profane when angry." Yet rather than tangle with Dobson, Bennett noted, McCain chose to go after Robertson and Falwell, even though Falwell had never singled out McCain for abuse. (Journal columnist Paul Gigot reported the next day that the favorable Dobson reference was added to McCain's speech by temporary McCain supporter Gary Bauer.)

"The blast against Messrs. Robertson and Falwell is the worst manifestation of an emerging pattern with McCain," Bennett wrote. "He often portrays those with whom he disagrees as not just wrong but wicked. Those who oppose his campaign-finance reforms are `corrupt'; the leaders of the pro-life movement are `turning a cause into a business'; and now, two visible Christian conservative leaders are `evil.' He is attempting, quite literally in the most recent case, to demonize his opponents. That has no place in American political discourse."

Bennett's critique was the most telling because it came from an ostensible ally. By the end of last week, though, analyses were starting to pile up explaining where it had all gone wrong, even while McCain himself was proclaiming that nothing had gone wrong. In the New Republic, David Grann argued that McCain -- while not exactly trying to lose -- nevertheless seems oddly more at ease when he can play the underdog: "at critical moments he has opted for glorious failure rather than dishonorable success." On MSNBC.com, Newsweek's Howard Fineman wrote that "the campaign has revealed a McCain who seems to throw one more punch than he has to -- for no better reason, it seems, than he wants to. It's a character trait that makes him popular with liberal Democrats and some independents, but it turns off Republican voters from coast to coast." In the New Yorker, Joe Klein wrote of McCain's attack on the religious right: "Over all, the performance provided an invaluable if somewhat unintentional demonstration of just what the nation might expect from a McCain Presidency: great courage and high-wire imprudence. And a distressing solipsism." In a similar vein, Boston Globe columnist Tom Oliphant reported on Tuesday that McCain had blown an opportunity to hook up with Republican reform advocates in California. "His campaign should have been about them; instead it was about him," Oliphant wrote.

In Wednesday's New York Times, columnist Maureen Dowd displayed her aggravating talent for regurgitating the conventional wisdom, yet doing it with considerable panache. "Mr. McCain confused virtue with substance," she wrote. "He got so absorbed in his performance as Luke Skywalker that he forgot about the issues. In a weird way, he became as contentless as Mr. Bush."

AH, YES, W. The drama involving McCain's crusade has made it easy to ignore Bush. And Gore. And -- most tellingly -- Bradley. Indeed, when the media conduct their postmortems on Campaign 2000, they would do well to examine why they ignored a candidate who, in New Hampshire, came within four points of beating a sitting vice-president, a rather impressive feat. Bradley was a terrible candidate -- haughty, self-absorbed, seemingly incapable of responding to Gore's sometimes untruthful attacks. Yet Bradley surely tapped into something in New Hampshire, and perhaps he could have built on that if he hadn't been victimized by a media blackout, as reporters (including, I will admit, me) ignored the Democratic race and hitched a ride on the Straight Talk Express. In Wednesday's Times, Katharine Seelye quotes Gore officials as speculating that Bradley's reform summit with McCain, in December, spelled the beginning of the end for Bradley, since it sent a subliminal signal to liberals that they could safely support the considerably more energetic and engaging McCain. The truth, though, is that the media's inability to tell two political stories at once was far more damaging to Bradley than a photo op in the New Hampshire snow.

With McCain and Bradley gone, we are now stuck with exactly what party officials had hoped for: Al Gore and George W., two nasty infighters whose unfavorable ratings, according to exit polls, are already around 50 percent. In interviews on Tuesday night, Gore called on Bush to refuse soft money, refrain from television advertising, and debate twice a week, all of which play to Gore's strengths as the Stone Cold Steve Austin of political theater. Bush, in an interview with Ted Koppel on ABC's Nightline, made it clear that this wasn't going to happen, joking that the public would soon suffer "debate fatigue."

In his acceptance speech, Bush made a clumsy attempt at pandering without seeming to pander. "The polls say tax relief is not popular," he said. "I'm not proposing tax relief because it's the popular thing to do. I'm proposing tax relief because it's the right thing to do." Of course. It's courageous to tell voters you're going to give them money.

Which is why we're going to miss McCain -- and even Bradley -- and what they represented. In a sphere dominated by the sort of false courage Bush displays, McCain and Bradley were the real thing. Sure, not all the time: McCain wimped out on the Confederate flag in South Carolina; Bradley flip-flopped on ethanol subsidies for Iowa farmers. Both, though, were willing to take on the big money and special interests that have poisoned the political culture. It was that willingness to be unconventional that brought them as far as they came. In the end, it proved to be their undoing as well.

Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com.