McCain's Viagra moment

Viewpoint

Wednesday September 17th 2008

US Diarist Dan Glaister on how John McCain's 'gotcha' moment over Viagra forced him to surrender power to the same Republican strategists who brought the world George W Bush

Wednesday September 17th 2008

No more unscripted talk for McCain. Photograph: Stephan Savoia/AP

When historians come to write the story of the 2008 US presidential election, they may well point to a day in July and an innocuous question about the small blue lozenge as the turning point.

Back in July, the campaign of Republican nominee John McCain was dead in the water: he was polling poorly in the traditional battleground states, and even lagging in some states that had not gone Democrat since the days of fellow Arizona conservative Barry Goldwater. While the Democrats revelled in the noise surrounding their youthful candidate, the Republicans were stuck with a man who insisted on sitting at the back of the bus, holding court like it was, well, 1964.

And then came the Viagra moment. Sitting on the bus, shooting the breeze, welcoming all-comers, McCain was caught out by a reporter’s question about health insurance cover for Viagra. "Health insurance companies cover Viagra but not birth control," McCain was (erroneously) informed. What was the candidate’s opinion?

There followed one of those "Gotcha!" moments. The candidate grimaced, rubbed his hand across his mouth, and soundlessly opened and closed his mouth. Eventually McCain managed a faltering: "I don’t know enough about it to give you an informed answer."

While the candidate and his campaign staffers went into crisis – personal as well as political – one operative saw opportunity where others saw ruin. Steve Schmidt, jokingly dubbed "Sergeant" Schmidt by McCain, and "Bullet" by one of his previous employers, George W Bush, took the chance to park the bus and impose some stern discipline on what had hitherto been a freewheeling journey. "Thank God you [the media] asked him about birth control," Schmidt later told a reporter for Congressional Quarterly. "I finally got to kick you off the bus."

Schmidt kicked the candidate off the bus, too. There would be no more dispensing jokes and gibes with his trusted press corps. The old McCain was parked in a lay-by, to be replaced by a new, improved version, produced and packaged by the people who brought the electorate George W Bush.

This John McCain did what he was told: go along with the plan and do not stray from the script. Helping him learn his lines were a series of Bush veterans, from behind-the-scenes figures such as 2004 campaign manager Ken Mehlman to former South Carolina attorney general Charlie Condon.

Condon’s appointment to the McCain campaign as chair of the South Carolina effort deserves attention. He was instrumental in causing the breakdown of McCain’s 2000 campaign. Locked in a tight battle with Bush for the Republican nomination, McCain was the victim of a sleazy takedown engineered by Condon and others. Voters in the state were called with a phoney poll: "Would you be more or less likely to vote for John McCain... if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?" The mud stuck, Bush won in South Carolina and McCain was finished. Now Condon is the sort of man the newly minted McCain ticket happily accommodates.

After weeks of tiddly town hall rehearsals, the real McCain was wheeled out before a hungry audience at Pastor Rick Warren’s megachurch in southern California’s god fearin’ Orange County. Where his opponent was lofty, McCain seethed with conservative indignation, all the time keeping the rictus grin fixed to his face. In the words of one partisan member of the audience: "He blew Obama out of the ballpark."

Then, while Obama continued with his fine words at the Democratic convention in Denver, the Bushies were hatching their own surprise, springing Sarah Palin, an unlikely apostle of the new right, on the electorate and on the candidate.

Palin is no Joe Lieberman. For while the spirit of the old McCain wanted Lieberman on the ticket, the people running him and his campaign declared that he should select the less-than-single-term governor of Alaska. It was a masterstroke of venal politics. Sure, Palin had a history, but what hockey mom doesn’t?

The Democrats’ ambitious talk of redrawing the electoral map now appears pure fancy. Instead of broad swaths of the west and the south being up for grabs, the map now shows the race tightening around the same battlegrounds that dominated the last two elections: Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida.

With little more than six weeks to voting day, Schmidt and the rest of the gang have it all figured out. Thanks to President Bush’s order permitting US special forces to operate in Pakistan without that country’s permission, there may even be a little October surprise in store, just to make sure.

Print this article

Submit article to the following: | del.icio.us | Newsvine