McCainiacs - John + the media = love - John McCain has had a good relationship with the media during his campaign, but his crowd turnout is noticeably small in South Carolina

National Review, March 20, 2000 by Ramesh Ponnuru

Two days before the South Carolina primary, John McCain held a rally outside his state campaign headquarters. The crowd was small, not even filling a 25-car parking lot. Where were McCain's supporters? About a third of the people there, I figured, were reporters. Then I remembered: Those are his biggest supporters.

As they proved the next day. You had to look between the lines of the coverage with a microscope to get a hint that McCain was faltering. Only the Washington Post mentioned (briefly) the small, unenthusiastic crowds he was drawing.

As it happened, McCain's loss in South Carolina was a turning point in the 2000 campaign. This is not, as the media would have it, because George W. Bush beat him by running a harsh, far-right campaign that will haunt him for the rest of the year. It's because the primary was the moment when the media themselves finally turned on Bush with full force-and their hostility may well be a problem all year.

Just six months ago, Bush was getting great press. This was partly because his principal challenger seemed to be Steve Forbes, a conservative. Also, since Bush looked likely to be the next president, the media wanted to portray him as less conservative than he is (and more praiseworthy by their standards). The media have invested deeply in the notion that Republicans win only by moving leftward. So when Bush was successful, it was obviously due to his moderation; and when he stumbles, it must be because he has moved rightward.

The most important reason reporters have turned on Bush, of course, is that he's now taking on their hero. They like McCain personally, appreciate his accessibility, and applaud his leftward lurches; they assume he's not serious about opposing abortion and gun control. Mike Murphy, a strategist for McCain, recently described the media as the campaign's "base," the equivalent of Bush's base among religious conservatives. Nor is the media's romance with McCain a secret affair; it is openly acknowledged by almost every reporter in Washington. The acknowledgment of bias just never induces repentance.

The media never call McCain on his misstatements of fact. His recent, otherworldly contention that he had won about two-thirds of the Republican vote in New Hampshire went unchallenged. When his campaign first denied making phone calls against Bush in Michigan and then admitted it after the contest was over, few reporters termed the denial a lie. Reporters ignore the evidence that McCain doesn't understand campaign-finance law. They don't ask how he can call himself a "Wilsonian" while trashing President Clinton for conducting "foreign policy as social work"; we have to accept on faith that McCain is a deep thinker on foreign policy.

Of course, not everyone in the establishment press is a sucker for McCain. Richard L. Berke has written some tough stories for the New York Times. Over at U.S. News & World Report, Gloria Borger has noted that McCain "is winging it in lots of domestic-policy areas" and uses the need for campaign-finance reform as a dodge in other areas. More often, though, reporters find these weaknesses charming. In the Washington Post, Dana Milbank wrote that McCain has no brain trust, that his campaign sometimes gets policy details wrong, and that the way his mind works can be inferred from an aide's remark that when McCain watches TV, "he flips from game to game, never getting the sense of how one game is going because he's watching fourteen." But not to worry: McCain's "informal" style allows for "creativity and flexibility."

The media-swoon for McCain is not confined to liberals. Even among conservatives, there is no pundit who is for Bush the way that William Kristol, his Weekly Standard colleague Tucker Carlson, Wall Street Journal writer Dorothy Rabinowitz, and columnist Arianna Huffington are for McCain. (Donald Lambro at the Washington Times and Russ Smith at New York Press are pro-Bush, but not as high-profile.) But it is mainly a liberal phenomenon, producing the spectacle of Al Hunt and E. J. Dionne Jr. emerging every few weeks to reassure conservatives that the senator really is a rock-ribbed right-winger, even if the people who say so are mostly, well, liberals.

But now that McCain's campaign has turned serious, the media's flirtation is no longer playful and innocent. During and after the South Carolina primary, the media pounded Bush relentlessly for the supposed viciousness of his campaign. "One of the dirtiest I've ever covered," Tim Russert said on Today. If Bush goes on to lose, either in the primaries or in the fall, the conventional wisdom will be that it was his tactics in South Carolina that doomed him. It's more or less the same thing the media said about the 1992 Republican convention in Houston, where Bush's father was portrayed as pandering to the Right.

Newsweek, as in 1992, has taken the lead. Back then, Joe Klein wrote that the convention rhetoric-mostly platform pablum, as at all modern conventions-was "double-ply, wall-to-wall ugly." After South Carolina, Howard Fineman wrote in Newsweek that Bush's "victory came at a steep cost. He had been forced to run far to the right-and deep in mud. Across the country, Bush's 'favorable' ratings plummeted as he and his allies went about the grim business of savaging McCain." (When not "savaging" McCain, Bush was "carpet-bombing" him.)McCain no doubt sincerely believes that Bush played dirty; many politicians believe their own press releases, especially when the papers reprint them. But the worst savagery that Fineman comes up with is a mailing including these lines about McCain-cover your ears, Gentle Readers: "He claims he's conservative but he's pushed for higher taxes and waffled on protecting innocent human life. He claims to be a campaign-finance reformer, but his plan would silence pro-family groups while giving a blank check to Washington union bosses." The first sentence is strictly true, the second merely hyperbolic. Toward the end of his article, Fineman mentions that a Bush supporter had questioned McCain's commitment to veterans. That was pretty bad-but Bush later declared that he did not agree with the attack.