Bush -- or McCain -- country?

Tacking right in the heart of the Confederacy

by Dan Kennedy

NORTH CHARLESTON, South Carolina -- We're not in New Hampshire anymore, Toto. This is Strom Thurmond country, where the Confederate flag still flies and racism remains, at least in some quarters, a family value. Which is why the front-running Republican presidential candidates, George W. Bush and John McCain, are treading so carefully here.

Consider the lead story in Wednesday's Charleston Post and Courier. A legislative committee, at long last, approved a bill making Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a state holiday. But wait: it created another state holiday as well. That would be Confederate Memorial Day, May 10. Apparently it's not possible to do the right thing in South Carolina without throwing a bone to the racists. Yet even that wasn't good enough for state representative John Graham Altman, a Charleston Republican, who, according to the Post and Courier, "railed against King's alleged extramarital affairs and plagiarism over his doctoral thesis."

Of course, New Hampshire took its sweet time in honoring King as well. But the vestiges of racism that remain in South Carolina -- exemplified by that fluttering symbol of slavery -- as well as a host of other popular right-wing causes, among them homophobia, contempt for abortion rights, and union-bashing, make this about as different a place from the state where McCain won his big breakthrough as can be imagined.

It's no surprise that Bush is pandering to the natives. This, after all, is supposed to be his "firewall," and most of the state's Republican establishment, joined by the religious right, has come to his assistance. Bush has a particularly over-the-top radio ad running here in which the state's attorney general links McCain and his campaign-finance-reform proposal to "Bradley, Clinton, Gore, Kennedy, and the liberal media." The M.O. is characteristic of Bush: crude but with no fingerprints, save for a tagline at the end.

The real stunner in South Carolina, though, is the way that McCain, Mr. Straight Talk himself, has been willing to tailor his message and cast himself as a born-again right-winger.

Part of it is mere staging. At the Carolina Ice Palace, in North Charleston, and at other events as well, McCain has been introduced by Representative Lindsey Graham, one of the House impeachment managers, which certainly tends to negate the Bush camp's accusation that McCain is somehow another Clinton. Graham likes to remind the audiences that McCain was a big supporter of Newt Gingrich's Contract with America, which, for some reason, is seen as a positive in these parts. (Even in South Carolina, apparently, there are limits: Graham does not actually mention Gingrich's name.)

But part of it -- and this is what's problematic -- is what issues McCain himself chooses to emphasize. It's not that he's actually changed his position on anything. But in New Hampshire, he cast himself primarily as the crusading reformer, campaigning against the "iron triangle" of money, lobbyists, and legislation, with his heroism as a POW serving as the ultimate guarantor of his integrity. In South Carolina, there is an additional overlay of eager support for issues the Republican right has long held dear -- consistent with his Senate voting record, to be sure, but not at all consistent with his New Hampshire image.

Take, for instance, a speech on education reform that McCain gave on Thursday morning at the University of South Carolina at Spartanburg. (The speech was overshadowed by a furor that erupted when a woman in the audience claimed her 13-year-old son had been contacted by a push-poller, apparently affiliated with Bush, though she wouldn't say. "Mom, someone told me that Senator McCain is a cheat, a liar, and a fraud," she quoted her son as telling her, and that became the story out of Spartanburg.) But McCain's prepared remarks were even more remarkable. He repeated his support for vouchers (better than Bush's voucher plan, which would take away money from public schools) and blasted teachers' unions, "whose agenda is greased with millions of dollars they dole out in soft-money campaign contributions." And there was this: "I will appoint judges . . . who don't divine from our Constitution non-existent prohibitions on basic rights such as voluntary school prayer, posting the Ten Commandments, or reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. That's what giving you back your government is all about." This is the guy liberals are flocking to?

The South Carolina version of McCain was most clearly on display, though, on Wednesday night, at Clemson University, where he appeared live on MSNBC's Hardball. Under uncharacteristically smart questioning by host Chris Matthews, McCain painted himself into an awkward rhetorical corner. He said he would not take a position on the Confederate flag, even though he's taken a position on what states should do about gay marriage ("it's crazy") and abortion rights (outlaw them). The difference, McCain explained -- carefully splitting hairs -- is that the Confederate flag controversy affects only one state. Well, yeah. South Carolina. The state he's running in, and that could use a show of leadership from the men who would be president.

McCain seems to get away with this crap when other politicians would not, and surely a large part of that is his listeners' desire to hear whatever they want. A particularly fine example of how he can mesmerize his listeners is how he affected Nicole Molinari, a first-year graduate student at Clemson who, it turns out, is from Scituate and graduated from UMass/Amherst. During Hardball, Molinari told McCain she was frankly worried that a woman's right to choose would be lost if he became president. McCain replied -- quite specifically -- that he believes Roe v. Wade really should be overturned, and that if that ever happens, he would support state laws banning abortion. But he added his standard boilerplate language that it's unlikely Roe will be thrown out anytime soon, and that pro- and anti-choice activists should work together on issues such as adoption and foster care.

"I was pretty satisfied," Molinari told me as she was walking out of the auditorium. "My only concern is that Roe v. Wade may be overturned in my lifetime." I pointed out that McCain, as president, may get to name a majority of the Supreme Court, but that didn't seem to faze her. "There are so many things I like about him, and I think he'd make a great president," she said. "He's not going to poll to see how he should vote. He's going to do the right thing."

Unfortunately, McCain seems to think that the right thing in South Carolina is not exactly the same as the right thing in New Hampshire. There's a name for that: politics-as-usual. Nothing particularly rare or loathsome about it, perhaps, but also not something McCain's acolytes would expect to see aboard the Straight Talk Express.

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* Nyhan watch I: On Wednesday, Boston Globe columnist David Nyhan wrote a piece criticizing Bush for "luring 2,000 shivering New Hampshire Republicans to an outdoor rally in Milford." Trouble is, the January 29 event was indoors -- and heated. "I was there at Milford," reports a colleague. "It was not outdoors. It was in a large, private health/tennis club." If Nyhan wishes to pick nits, there apparently was an overflow, and the fire marshal had to intervene. But as yet another source, this one an anonymous dime-dropper, puts it, "it shows that not only was Nyhan not there, he doesn't know what he's talking about, either."

* Nyhan watch II: This week's issue of the Economist singles out Nyhan for its "Overworked Metaphor of the Week." Here's the winning prose, from his February 2 column: "John McCain gave Texas Governor George W. Bush a shellacking so thorough that he left town a whittled-down and sorely whipped front-runner, propped up by handlers and endorsers worrying big-time about their man's stomach, chin, and heart."

Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy@phx.com. His full report from South Carolina will appear in next week's issue of the Phoenix.