Read My Knuckles

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Former Christian Coalition executive director Ralph Reed, a Bush strategist, used his firm to smother the 400,000 self-described Christian conservatives in the state with negative phone calls and mailings about McCain. ("He claims he's conservative, but he's pushed for higher taxes and waffled on protecting innocent human life.") In this blitz of mail and phone calling, Bush was portrayed as far more socially conservative than he describes himself at rallies. Asked why Bush almost never brought up his pro-life position in his appearances before South Carolina voters, a top Bush adviser said, "This is a message that needs to be narrowcasted." In other words, they didn't want moderates up North hearing what they were saying to conservatives down South.

To see how Bush's words went further to the right as he narrowcast them, consider the way he worked the issue of gay rights. In the debate last Tuesday, Bush said he had refused to meet with the Log Cabin Republicans, the G.O.P's largest gay organization, because "they had made a commitment to John McCain." When McCain said the group had not endorsed him, Bush replied, "It doesn't matter." To conservatives, though, it mattered a great deal. A few days later, a Baptist church in Kentucky began faxing a flyer to South Carolina radio stations, railing against "John McCain's fag army." (Both McCain and Bush support the "don't ask, don't tell" policy on gays in the military.) The Bush campaign said it had nothing to do with the flyer. But the Governor repeated his anti-gay message during an on-air interview with a Christian radio station in Charleston, implying that he wouldn't appoint openly gay people to spots in his administration. "An openly known homosexual is somebody who probably wouldn't share my philosophy," he said.

The most corrosive material of all came from groups and individuals independent of Bush's campaign. A Bob Jones professor named Richard Hand sent out an e-mail falsely alleging that McCain had sired two children out of wedlock. A flyer distributed at McCain rallies went after Cindy McCain for her addiction to pain killers a decade ago and her admission that she stole them from a clinic where she worked. Phone-call campaigns targeted McCain's broken first marriage. And a pro-Confederate flag group called Keep It Flying, founded just last week, sent out 250,000 pieces of misleading mail about the candidate's position on the flag flying above the state capitol. Both McCain and Bush ducked the issue, but the flyer said, "Of the major candidates, only George Bush has refused to call the Confederate flag a racist symbol." In a bit of payback last Saturday, McCain's camp decided to send copies of the flyer to African-Americans throughout Michigan. "We'll see if Bush can run as a Dixiecrat in Michigan and everywhere else," says McCain political director John Weaver.