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"Scam" ads the norm Trail Mix: Hillary haters spam cyberspace Gunning for the center Democrats make Hillary legit The blundering pundit Don Giuliani Campaign video: |
In McCain's corner, one long day
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March 8, 2000 | LOS ANGELES -- "Gotta soldier on," he said to me at the bar. He knew things weren't going his way. "That's one of the reasons why exit polls are so great," he said. "So you can prepare yourself."
All day, exit polls had been trickling in showing that McCain wasn't going to have a good night. New York wasn't going to go his way. Not the popular vote, not the delegate count. Ohio and Missouri, where he'd hoped for upsets, were in Gov. George W. Bush's pocket. He knew he wasn't going to win the GOP primary in California, but he thought he might get the popular "beauty contest" vote, proving he would be a stronger candidate against Gore. But it didn't look like that was going to happen. He even lost Maine. "That surprises me," he said, as he did win every other New England state. "Cindy," he said to his wife, "we should have sent you to Maine." "We won the two states I visited, Rhode Island and Vermont," she joked. "What were we thinking?" he returned. "Why didn't we send Cindy to Maine?" He used the line again later in his speech. CNN reported from the Bush campaign that a Bush-designated go-between, Sen. Phil Gramm -- reported to be a friend of both Bush and McCain -- was going to broker a peace between the two men. But McCain's respect for Gramm knows bounds. Gramm, whom McCain had supported in Gramm's 1996 run, hadn't even let McCain know before hitching himself to the Bush train and campaigning for Bush in South Carolina. The idea that the Bushies would send Gramm to smooth things over was a joke. The McCains watched the returns on television, where pundits blamed his loss on last week's speech in which he hammered Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell as "agents of intolerance." McCain didn't think that was an accurate assessment. "It was those ads," he said, referring to the anti-McCain TV ads two of Bush's biggest supporters put on the air in media markets from New York to the Bay Area in California. His campaign has complained to the Federal Election Commission that they violate campaign laws. McCain's pollster, Bill McInturff, said that whether it was the speech or the ads, McCain had four bad days last week, in which his poll numbers stalled. McInturff assessed that the "dirty ads" -- funded with an infusion of cash from Texas fat cats and organized by a bunch of Bush allies -- would come to haunt the Bush campaign. "Just like in South Carolina, they won the evening and lost the war," McInturff said. "When people find out more about the [ads' funders] the Wyly brothers, [the Bush campaign is] going to be surprised at how much effect they have" on the election. McCain had no regrets about the speech. "I'd give that speech again tomorrow," he said. The GOP will continue to lose presidential elections as long as it continues to cozy up to Robertson, Falwell and the crew at Bob Jones University, McCain said. Bush spokeswoman Karen Hughes came on the TV. The sound was turned off. The McCains went up to the hotel's eighth floor, where a small reception of supporters awaited, including Lee Iacocca, Connie Stevens, Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca and former Merrill Lynch CEO Herb Allison. After half an hour of mingling, the McCains went to the center of the room. Cindy McCain took the floor and, thanking everyone, talked about how much the campaign had changed her life. Not only was she much more comfortable speaking publicly, she said, but the time she spent with her husband on the Straight Talk Express bus made up for the weekends they spent apart in the previous 18 years of marriage. Well, she said, clarifying, they had been married for 20 years, but he was in Congress for the last 18. "We had one good year," McCain joked. On previous campaigns, Cindy said, she had given her husband special gifts toward the end of each election. After his successful first House race, in which they schlepped door to door, she bronzed the hole-shot shoes he wore. After his first successful Senate race, she gave him a miniature replica of the train they had traveled the state on. Now she was giving him a miniversion of the Straight Talk Express.
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