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THE OBSERVATORY Resistance is Futile February 20, 2000 |
| The Borg wing of the GOP has assimilated the McCain threat. Resistance is futile. But their victory comes at a cost -- now they are stuck with George W. Bush. |
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The Rick Report ® watches the Old
Politics win one in the South. The Stars and Bars have risen again in South Carolina. John McCain, who rode such a momentum wave out of New Hampshire, was last seen tumbling in the foam as his surfboard was upended. And the big winner is ... Al Gore. Let us deal first with McCain's fate, and then with its consequences this fall. Many noble trees have been felled, and many megabytes of storage space filled, by punditry about How McCain Went Wrong; there is little need to add much to it. His comparing-Bush-to-Clinton ad backfired. (One Fox News pundit observed -- with intended irony and unintended truth -- that to Democrats this gave Bush an undeserved complement. It did.) To Republicans it would have been kinder to compare Bush to Beelzebub. Bush whipped up the Religious Right, and they delivered. Republicans were panicked by McCain's call for the barbarian hordes to invade their verandah party. And so on. The details matter little, and hindsight about what McCain should have done matters even less. What matters is that McCain had to win -- and didn't. His whole strategy depended on creating a mo wave that would swamp Bush. Coming out of New Hampshire he nearly did, but the wave wasn't quite high enough for the South Carolina breakwater. Just before SC, the polls in the next key state, Michigan, showed the race even. But conventional wisdom is that Bush has the momentum, and will probably win. McCain has far too little time to regroup and retool. And his promise to run no further negative ads was noble but foolish. Even if he had time, he's ruled out hitting Bush over Bob Jones University's anti-Catholic hysteria, or anything else Bush said or did in SC that might not play so well in Michigan. (Gore, this fall, need have no such compunctions.) For all that, McCain could still win in Michigan. Both contested Republican primaries have yielded surprise results, five or ten points different from what the late polls predicted. Michigan might well do the same. Yet even if McCain wins Michigan, the mo magic is gone and he won't get it back. The GOP establishment, on the verge of panic after New Hampshire, can now breathe a sigh of relief. The GOP base, taught to regard McCain as though he were Alaric the Visigoth, will rally around Poppy's boy. McCain now stands to win few if any states with closed GOP primaries, and -- as the excitement wears off -- may have trouble even in states where indies can vote. At best, McCain can battle fiercely through the remaining primaries and pick up a few states, but the final outcome is all but foregone. The GOP has chosen their anointed boy ... and now they are stuck with him. In the short run, to be sure, Bush's big win in SC works to Gore's disadvantage. It makes a really long and bloody GOP primary fight less likely. The pundits will pundificate about the new, tough, scrappy Bush. As the excitement leaches out of the GOP race, the media will rediscover Bill Bradley, giving some emergency oxygen to his suffocated campaign. Bush's slide in national polls may be halted or even reversed. But all of these are short-term effects only; the long-term consequence is simply that Bush -- not McCain -- will be the GOP nominee. For Gore strategists, this is a tiding of great joy. It is not that Bush will be an easy knockoff in the fall: It will be a brutal, bruising campaign. The old Lee Atwater dark magic, so lacking in the '92 and '96 GOP presidential campaigns, is back. George Bush the elder regarded gutter fighting as a distasteful necessity, best left to the servants; GW seems to genuinely relish it. Nor will GW's shacking up with the Religious Right in SC be enough by itself to sink him in the fall. But Team Gore now has GW's measure, and can and will respond as necessary. That would have been less certain were McCain the GOP nominee. McCain didn't look unbeatable, but he was an X factor: unpredictable. He might have collapsed as the charm wore off (indeed, there's now some evidence of this). On the other hand, he might have had that Reaganesque magic that made people vote for him even when they disagreed with almost everything he stood for. The most telling thing about the McCain phenomenon is the odd mixed feelings that I -- and many other partisan Democrats -- have about the South Carolina results. As a strategist I'm delighted; at the end of the day I'm confident that we can take Bush, and I wasn't quite sure with McCain. Yet what a grand battle it could have been, like going up against Rommel ... or Robert E. Lee. Hard and brutal, to be sure (this was the candidate who said he'd "beat Al Gore like a drum"). But also perhaps an electrifying, high-turnout election, and a campaign for the ages. Victory in that fight would have been truly sweet. Instead it will be G W Bush as Republican nominee ... and into the gutter we go. Ave atque vale, John McCain. -- Rick Robinson
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