Adventures in Correspondentland (13 page)

The South Carolina primary was by far the grubbiest campaign I have ever covered, a view shared by veterans of the trail who had followed Richard Nixon in his squalid pomp. The Republican high command had set up South Carolina as an asbestos firewall to block dangerously liberal-minded candidates from progressing any further. McCain, whose views on campaign finance and immigration reform were considered heretical, was precisely the kind of subversive candidate they had in mind.

Rather than rely on the trusty firewall, however, the Bush campaign and its surrogates went nuclear and sought to eviscerate the Arizonian as soon as he headed south from New Hampshire. Push-pollers, for whom leading questions were near-lethal weapons, rang up voters to ask whether they would countenance a candidate who had fathered an illegitimate black love child ever becoming president (the McCains had adopted a young
Bangladeshi girl). Cindy McCain was accused of being a drug addict (she admitted to once having a dependency on painkillers). The senator was called a ‘fag candidate', because of a meeting held with the gay ginger group the Log Cabin Republicans. During his five and a half years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, he was accused of having become psychologically unhinged, brainwashed even, which explained both his hair-trigger temper and blasphemous views. To hammer home the point, George W. Bush appeared at the shoulder of a disgruntled POW, who accused McCain of returning home and forgetting those he left behind, which was the most wounding falsehood of all.

The Texas governor, meanwhile, conducted a textbook South Carolina campaign. Closely adhering to the famed ‘Southern Strategy' pioneered by Nixon and perfected by Ronald Reagan, he came down on the side of the redneck traditionalists who demanded that the Confederate Flag still fly atop the State Capitol Building in Columbia. Tellingly, he also launched his campaign from the Great Hall of China-like stage of Bob Jones University, an establishment known for continuing to ban interracial dating on campus.

Meeting backstage ahead of a televised debate, McCain challenged Bush about the tawdriness of his campaign. ‘John, it's just politics,' the governor blithely replied. Then, as the Bush campaign intended, McCain fell for the trap of fuming retaliation and cut a television spot comparing Bush's slander to Bill Clinton's lies. By his South Carolinian accusers, McCain had been called mentally deranged, a closet homosexual, a sexual degenerate and a betrayer of his fellow POWs. In likening George W. Bush to Bill Clinton, however, he was judged to have gone completely beyond the pale.

In another cruel injustice, the exit polls confirmed that South Carolinians thought it was McCain rather than Bush who had fought the most negative campaign. I was at the McCain hotel when that poll came through, and the NBC correspondent David Bloom immediately grasped its significance. ‘Crushed,' he said as he walked into a deflated press room. It was the hinge point of the campaign, and one that paved the way for Bush's eventual victory. It also started a chain of events that ultimately led David Bloom into Iraq, where tragically he was among the journalists to lose his life.

South Carolina was the sorriest of spectacles, but I recall watching Bush on a day when the nobler instincts of his character came to the fore. Towards the end of a question-and-answer session before a crowd of a few hundred people, a teenage girl who clearly had seriously impaired vision asked what the Bush administration would do to help provide the specially designed glasses she needed to better see. Never a man for the small detail of policy, the governor could not give her an instant answer, but on hearing that she was having to make do with an inferior pair of glasses and was unable to afford new ones, he instantly came up with a solution.

With the irrepressibility of a charity auctioneer, he appealed to his wealthy donors seated in the room to stump up the cash. Sure enough, the girl left with the down payment on a new pair of spectacles. ‘Compassionate conservatism', I always thought, was more than a bumper-sticker slogan for George W. Bush. Real conviction lay behind those words.

However, what South Carolina also demonstrated and foreshadowed was the extent to which he lacked the intellectual self-confidence, independence of mind or strategic smarts to
counter more strongly conservative voices around him. During the campaign, it was Karl Rove. During the presidency, it was Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. A decent-minded man rarely prone to malevolence, Bush, I always suspected, would have preferred the higher road to the White House. Instead, he deferred to advisers when they demanded in South Carolina that it deviate through the gutter.

Three days after his defeat in the Palmetto state, McCain briefly mounted a mini-comeback by winning the Michigan primary. That night, I found myself pursuing Karl Rove around a packed hotel lobby in Detroit with a live microphone in my hand, trying to get some reaction. ‘What are you telling the governor?' I kept on asking. ‘What are you telling the governor?'

‘I'm telling him there's a guy from the BBC who won't leave me alone,' came his deadpan reply.

What Rove probably told Bush was that Michigan would be McCain's last hurrah. As in New Hampshire, registered Democrats and independents were allowed to vote in the Michigan primary, and they had provided his margin in victory. Thereafter, the political calendar was packed with closed primaries in conservative states where only Republicans could vote, which heavily favoured Bush.

The McCain camp, by contrast, was confronted by a demoralising paradox: the senator was successfully assembling precisely the kind of broad-based coalition needed to win the presidency but not the Republican presidential nomination.

Michigan did indeed end up producing the last full-throttled roar of the ‘Straight Talk Express', but even there McCain looked punch-drunk from South Carolina. Perhaps he never fully recovered, and when he ran for the presidency eight years later he
still looked out on his feet. There was a lightness and freeness of spirit about John McCain in 2000 that was almost entirely absent in 2008, and the only time that I found myself recognising the old John McCain – which is to say the younger John McCain – was when he delivered one of the most gracious ever concession speeches on the night of Barack Obama's victory.

History, I suspect, will be generous to McCain and record that he played a vital role in the election of America's first African-American president, not so much by fighting a flawed campaign but because he conducted a clean campaign. Even when confronting near-certain defeat, he never sought to make race an issue. It would be tempting to call his rejection of negative tactics another collateral effect of South Carolina, but it can be more simply explained: McCain was being McCain, a politician who preferred straight-talk to trash-talk.

To his credit, Bush also played his part in the rise of Obama, by reminding the GOP that it was the party of Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, and by giving African-Americans a higher profile in his administration than any of his predecessors, Republican or Democrat. Without Colin Powell or Condoleezza Rice, and the familiarity that came with seeing blacks occupying the highest offices of state, Barack Obama might not have risen so fast.

With the McCain insurgency over, there was a lull in the campaign, and a chance for its reporters to draw breath. Perhaps there was even an opportunity to assess our own performance after spending so many months analysing the utterances, stumbles, earth tones and misjudged pancake flips of others. Come election time, the central complaints levelled against news organisations are that we fail to explore issues, that the horse race is our myopic
focus, that we are preoccupied with style over substance, and that we always get distracted by eye-catching trivialities. On all of these counts, I fear we are guilty as charged. But just as a country often gets the democracy it deserves, I suspect the same is true of campaign journalism.

We cover the primary season as if it were a horse race because that is essentially what it is. We tend not to fully explore all the issues because the candidates themselves are usually so hesitant to do so. We spend more time on personalities rather than policies because the personalities are generally more intriguing and arguably more germane. Campaign promises are easily cast aside, after all.

However noble our intentions at the outset, we often allow style to trump substance, and assign far too much meaning to mindless trivialities, such as whether candidates wear boxers or briefs and who cracks the funniest gags on
Letterman
or
Leno
. Here, there is a tendency to judge candidates on their entertainment value rather than their ability to govern. All I would say is that if you, dear reader, had to listen to the same candidate stump-speech event after event, day after day – by the end of the first month, most reporters can perform the campaign party trick of mouthing along to a candidate's stump speech, silently reciting its every word, while some can even identify the lines at which the candidate's wife will nod approvingly – you might surrender to the temptations of trivialities as well.

Consider also the deadline factor, which is normally complicated by the logistics factor. Dashing from one flag-bedecked campaign event to another, from the next Best Western to the next Hampton Inn, from Denny's to the International House of Pancakes, with a sugar hit at Krispy Kreme doughnuts
on the way, all one can hope to deliver by the end is the most rudimentary wrap of the day. A splash of colour, a sprinkling of soundbites and a piece to camera delivered at maximum volume over the strains of Fleetwood Mac.

To flick through my diary from that year is to revisit the madcap ‘If it's Tuesday, it must be Peoria' whirl of the trail. Take the week leading up to Super Tuesday, when primaries were contested on the two great seaboards, in New York and California. It started with a pre-dawn, cross-country flight out of Washington that got us into Los Angeles in time for a lunchtime interview with the talkback-radio host Michael Reagan, Ronald's first, adopted son.

Then we drove up the freeway to Bakersfield, where McCain was about to address an open-air rally. Ideally, we would have made it back to Los Angeles in time for a speech by Bill Bradley on the campus of UCLA, but my producer could not for the life of her remember where she had parked our rental car, and we spent more than an hour trudging from one McMansion-lined cul-de-sac to the next trying to hunt it down. Too late, we headed back to the glass-sheafed rotundas of the Bonaventure Hotel in downtown LA, where I bumped into another journalist on the trail and indulged in a rare bout of hurried, unchivalrous passion known affectionately by its practitioners as ‘campaign sex'.

Early the next morning, we filmed at Santa Monica beach, partly so that I could write the feeble script-line, ‘This is California, where the road to the White House is lined with palm trees and rollerbladers.' (In South Carolina, it had been palmettos and barbecue joints.) Then we took in Beverly Hills to harvest some more footage, before descending upon a southern Californian mega-church to interview members of the Christian Coalition. That night, Gore and Bradley locked antlers in their umpteenth
televised debate, and then we headed to LAX to catch the red-eye to New York.

Around noon, Gore did something at a high school in New York – I cannot remember quite what – while Bradley's image-makers arranged for him to flip some hot dogs in the famed Gray's Papaya in Manhattan, something of a Big Apple electoral ritual. That evening, there was time for a quick supper in Midtown with my old friend the ‘complete pilchard' correspondent from Jerusalem, before Bush faced McCain in yet another debate.

The following morning, we interviewed former mayor of New York Ed Koch and former governor of New York Mario Cuomo, and then headed to what is billed in my diary as a ‘Brooklyn black event', which shows the extent to which candidates and reporters slice and dice the electorate into neat little blocs, or, in this instance, a very large significant one.

To nod to Bradley's sporting past, we filmed courtside at Madison Square Garden, the home of the New York Knicks, his old baseball outfit, and then headed to an open-air rally in a park in Greenwich Village, where the former senator was introduced by the actor Harvey Keitel, who had far more to say about himself than the candidate.

You get the idea. The week was not yet a hundred hours old, and we had already racked up more than 6000 frequent-flyer miles, filmed in half a dozen or so iconic venues, covered two debates, been welcomed into the presence of Democratic and Republican royalty, drunk gallons of dodgy coffee, endured the interminable ramblings of a Reservoir Dog, lost and found a rental car and enjoyed a fairly lively nightlife. So disorientating was the campaign that it felt like that party game where a hapless victim is blindfolded, spun around at high velocity and then set loose:
not very grown up and occasionally vomit-inducing but hugely entertaining all the same.

This hints at another factor to bear in mind in assessing the performance of the press: that many journalists were either drunk or hung-over. Covering a campaign was like embarking on a great Kerouacian adventure, a land-based booze-cruise that moved from one great battleground state to another, and from one dingy bar to the next. A few nights after the New Hampshire primary, a colleague and I somehow found ourselves at a sorority house at Dartmouth College playing ‘pong' with a group of sorority sisters – a drinking game where a ping-pong table was dotted with half-filled cups of beer and liquor that had to be chugged down in one mouthful if the ball landed inside. On the eve of the Democratic convention, a few of us were invited to the Playboy Mansion, where the Hef was hosting a fund-raiser. Citing tiredness from a week covering wildfires in Idaho, I decided to have a quiet dinner with friends, a lapse that demonstrates the extent to which chronic fatigue can impair one's judgement.

Here, of course, there is a glaring paradox, for it was this same group of travelling inebriates that passed judgement on the probity of the candidates under our professional gaze. Post-Clinton, virtue was especially important, and in 2000 the main candidates were keen to talk about character, values and their own personal narratives, if only to distance themselves from the incumbent.