McCain's Moment

• Share

(8 of 8)

The next morning an anti-McCain ad by a group called the National Smokers Alliance was on the air, and by week's end Bush had launched an ad in South Carolina of the kind he had refused to air in New Hampshire. It is the first by either candidate to mention the other by name. "John McCain's ad about Governor Bush's tax plan isn't true, and McCain knows it," the voice-over says. "On taxes, McCain echoes Washington Democrats, when we need a conservative leader to challenge them: Governor Bush. Proven. Tested. And ready to lead America." On the trail, Bush was even sharper, blasting McCain's "Washington double-talk" for casting himself as a reformer while flying on corporate jets and planning a Washington fund raiser this week to schmooze with the lobbyists he vilifies on the trail.

Bush is in a nest of tough boxes now, and everyone could see how they fit inside one another. He is trying to run a newly ideological campaign against a guy who's nonideological; he's complaining about being usurped by a fake who is riding a public wave of reform; he has gone negative against a candidate who seems to fear nothing but who owes his success so far to a happy willingness to confess everything. Finally, Bush is relying on the party's right wing to save him from a candidate from the radical center. If there is one state where this might work, it is South Carolina, where a third of the voters describe themselves as religious conservatives--compared with about 1 in 7 in New Hampshire.

But South Carolina also has an open primary: Democrats and independents can vote too, and Bush's newly starched message may not work well on the Myrtle Beach transplants and Charleston sophisticates. Hours after McCain held his political rave of bright-eyed college converts, Bush was appearing at Bob Jones University--a school famous for banning interracial dating--where he told the students, whose attendance was required, that he was a conservative. He said it six times in less than a minute. When he needed a heavyweight to testify to his readiness to be President, he turned to Dan Quayle. And as he groped around for an issue to bludgeon McCain with, he seized on what might be the strangest possible choice--the charge that McCain, the war hero who never fails to pay homage to the Greatest Generation in his speeches, was somehow weak on veterans' issues.

Sitting in his hotel room at the Courtyard Marriott in Myrtle Beach, McCain loosened his tie and propped his feet up on the coffee table. "Attacking me on veterans?" he said in wonder. "Don't worry about that," said Weaver, the political director. "He's going to try to trick you into responding." McCain nodded. "We'll handle him,'" said Murphy, the strategist. "Let him be flapping around. Focus on being presidential." That's still a huge assignment for John McCain. He began his race well over a year ago, but his transformation into a front runner is just beginning. South Carolina has two weeks to decide how long that journey will last.