For those who were following the 2000 presidential race, the efforts to smear John McCain in South Carolina’s Republican presidential primary is the stuff of legend. McCain, fresh off his big win in New Hampshire, ran into some scurrilous and nasty attacks in the Palmetto State, where Bush supporters accused McCain of having gone crazy during his imprisonment in Vietnam, McCain’s wife of being a drug addict, and McCain’s adopted daughter from Bangladesh of being a black child McCain had fathered out of wedlock.
It was all terribly ugly, but it was also largely successful. McCain lost in South Carolina, and his campaign never quite found its footing again.
Now, of course, we’re approaching this year’s Republican presidential primary in the state, and if media reports in today’s dailies are any indication, a valiant John McCain is heroically standing up against a new round of outrageous attacks. The NYT reports, “McCain Parries a Reprise of ’00 Smear Tactics.” The WaPo notes, “McCain Takes the Fight To Negative Opponents.” The LAT reports, “McCain camp goes on offense in S.C.”
There are, however, a couple of problems with all of this. Most notably, Paul Kiel explains, “[S]o far, the campaign’s response to the attacks has been far more notable than the attacks themselves.”
[T]here’s Vietnam Veterans against John McCain. Recently, the group sent a mailer to approximately 80 newspaper editors in South Carolina accusing McCain of selling out his fellow POWs in Vietnam. On Tuesday, the McCain campaign (which is working hard to appeal to vet voters) made one of McCain’s former POWs available to the media to respond to the smear. The story, picked up by the AP and Wall Street Journal among others, got national play — undoubtedly more play than the group would have been able to get on its own.
I spoke to the founder of Vietnam Veterans against John McCain, Jerry Kiley, yesterday. He told me that the group hasn’t “actively sought donations at this point,” and that the next step for the group will be mailings “going out to our network,” with the intention that the mailing would then be forwarded on to local media there. The group just doesn’t have the funds to send mailings directly to voters — nor, as they declared they would in their statement of purpose, to run radio and TV ads. Things “could change,” he told me, “if we received a sizable donation,” but he wasn’t holding out much hope.
To be sure, the materials Vietnam Veterans against John McCain came up with are undoubtedly offensive, but by all indications, the McCain campaign has done far more to get the group’s message out than the group itself. As Josh Marshall put it, “[A]s near as we can tell the flyer or mailer actually isn’t a flyer or mailer because it was never fly’d or mailed to anyone.”
The NYT adds that this isn’t the only line of attack against McCain.
Volunteers making telephone calls for Senator John McCain in South Carolina last weekend noticed something odd: Four people contacted said in remarkably similar language that they opposed Mr. McCain for president because of his 1980 divorce from his first wife, Carol, who raised the couple’s three children while Mr. McCain was a prisoner of war in Vietnam. […]
[O]n Saturday night, within hours after Mr. McCain’s advisers learned of the people who objected to Mr. McCain’s divorce, his campaign sent out an e-mail alert to thousands of South Carolina supporters warning them of a potential dirty tricks campaign and advising them to call a McCain Truth Hot Line if they learned anything more.
Now, I don’t like ugly smear-jobs against any candidate, regardless of party or ideology, but this one stood out for me — because it’s not really a smear-job at all. The NYT article included this among a litany of attacks, the rest of which were false.
But here’s the key point the NYT article didn’t mention: the charge about McCain’s personal life happens to be accurate. Indeed, he’s admitted it publicly.
McCain was still married and living with his wife in 1979 while, according to The New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof, “aggressively courting a 25-year-old woman who was as beautiful as she was rich.” McCain divorced his wife, who had raised their three children while he was imprisoned in Vietnam, then launched his political career with his new wife’s family money. In 2000, McCain managed to deflect media questioning about his first marriage with a deft admission of responsibility for its failure.
I hate to break it to the McCain campaign, but pointing out the truth about the senator’s messy private life — he is the first admitted adulterer to ever seek the Republican presidential nomination — is not a “dirty trick.”