The Week - presidenital campaign; other current events

National Review, March 20, 2000

So Salman Rushdie is moving to New York. What, does he want to run for Senate too?

The media often make too much of the alleged unpopularity of negative campaigning. But John McCain just may be their case in point. In the days prior to the Virginia and Washington primaries, his campaign continued to place telephone calls not so subtly alleging that George W. Bush is anti-Catholic. So too, McCain harshly attacked Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell in Virginia Beach. In another Virginia whistle stop, McCain vowed to tear down the "machine" of Gov. Jim Gilmore and Sen. John Warner, a Draconian political operation that Virginians had no idea existed until McCain showed up to bid it adieu. All this, from the candidate solemnly pledged to run a positive campaign. While the press gloried in McCain's act, Republican primary voters couldn't be faulted for concluding that it was all soundbites and fury, signifying nothing. In Virginia, as in South Carolina and Michigan, McCain again failed to break the 30 percent threshold among Republican voters. He fared slightly better in Washington state, but still lost to Bush among Republicans by a 20-point margin. McCain is a compelling campaigner, but it is becoming clear that, for GOP voters, there is no substitute for real positions that they find philosophically congenial. In an otherwise classic and shrewd campaign, that is the one thing the McCain operation may have overlooked.

John McCain branches, from attacking evangelists, to being one himself: "To stand up and take on the forces of evil, that's my job."

McCain has also become a historian. "Theodore Roosevelt fought the forces of evil in the Republican party." Theodore Roosevelt, in 1912, fought William Howard Taft. That sober 300-pounder, who loved dancing and golf, and served as chief justice of the Supreme Court, was the force of evil? Evil-in the 20th century? Grown-ups don't talk like that, Senator.

For the most part, McCain's presidential campaign has not been nearly as conservative as his Senate record. Bilingual education may be a case where he happily reverses that pattern. While McCain, like George W. Bush, has heretofore supported bilingual programs, he has recently said, "There's a whole lot of bilingual education programs that don't work, and they should be eliminated." Total immersion in English, he says, is the best way to teach English to immigrant children. He's right, and he'd be even more right if he recognized that none of the bilingual programs work well. Ron Unz, who got bilingual ed banned in California, supports McCain and hopes he leads the charge against the programs. If he does, he will remind conservatives what they like about him-and prove that his campaign's patriotism is more than a personal sentiment.

After weeks of criticism for speaking at Bob Jones University, George W. Bush wrote a note to John Cardinal O'Connor expressing his regret for not having repudiated the school's anti-Catholicism. The controversy was trumped up in that none of Bush's accusers ever really believed that Bush harbors a trace of anti-Catholicism. But combined with the equally trumped-up controversy over the appointment of a new House chaplain-Democrats are pretending to believe that Republicans passed over a priest because of bigotry-the Bob Jones affair is creating a serious problem for Republicans in the fall. Churchgoing Catholics are a swing vote, and they are disproportionately concentrated in swing states such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New Jersey. These voters helped Clinton in 1992, the Republicans in 1994, and then Clinton again. Catholics historically distrusted the GOP as the party of the WASP elite, and that distrust lingers because of distrust of southern fundamentalists. By adding to that distrust, Democrats (with the assistance of John McCain's cynical use of the Bob Jones "issue") hope to hold on to Hispanic voters and northeasterners. Republicans might respond by pointing out that the Democrats' pro- abortion litmus test for the federal judiciary amounts to a religious test excluding Catholics who follow Church teaching. But the stakes are sufficiently high that the GOP will also need to make a special effort to appeal to Catholic sensibilities-quite possibly including the nomination of a pro-life Catholic for the vice presidency.

McCain, the press points out, appeals to Democrats. Well, that's nice. But what's wrong with appealing to Republicans? They are not, after all, some tiny party or weirdo sect. They control two houses of Congress, a majority of the nation's governorships, a majority of the state legislatures. The Democrats not only feel no obligation to appeal to Republicans-they feel none to appeal to anyone in center field. Al Gore and Bill Bradley have engaged in a bitter dispute over how many years each one has favored abortion in all cases, including last-minute infanticides (a.k.a. partial-birth abortions). At the Apollo Theatre in New York City, they squabbled over reparations for slavery and discrimination (Bradley wants them across the board, Gore wants them in specific cases) and kissed the pinkie of the Rev. Al Sharpton, slanderer and verbal arsonist. This is the right platform for running for president of a Greenwich Village Democratic Club, not for President of the United States.