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HOW DID BUSH "GET" MCCAIN? Remember last week when George W. Bush was overheard off camera telling a South Carolina supporter that he would "get" McCain, but not on TV? On tonight's PBS news Mark Shield gave Jim Leherer two examples of what Mac meant today when he accused Bush of character assasination. Shield said that in one radio spot Mac was called the "fag candidate." In another, it was pointed out that his adopted daughter is black. Is that what Bush meant by "get"? --Politex, www.bushwatch.com, 2/21/00 FROM COMPASSIONATE CONSERVATIVE TO CALAMITOUS COMMUNICATOR Bush is doing a Bob Jones on Mac, and observers are disgusted. "The Bush campaign denies it is conducting push polling, a technique designed to spread negative information about an opponent in the guise of voter research, and leveled a similar charge against McCain. But there is mounting evidence that, after Bush's 18-point defeat in New Hampshire, his campaign, or at least those who support it, are resorting to a scorched-earth policy in South Carolina," comments David Grann in the lastest New Republic. [Forbes complained about Bush doing push polling during the last days of the Iowa caucus race, so this isn't the first time Bush has been accused of such activities.] "In Greenville, near the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, several people told me that an endless stream of anonymous callers had phoned the local radio station asking about McCain's womanizing and questioning his war record. 'It's disgusting,' says Terry Haskins, the speaker pro tem of the South Carolina House and a McCain supporter. 'There were people on the radio saying, `How can Terry Haskins support a man who gave secrets to the enemy?' I've seen dirty politics, but I've never seen a rumor campaign like this. It's a vile attempt to destroy a man's reputation just to win an election, and I know it's organized because none of these rumors existed until the day after New Hampshire.' "When I visited Greenville's Bob Jones University, the ultra-fundamentalist college famous for banning interracial dating," writes Grann, "I encountered the campaign firsthand. As I sat in the administration office under the mounted head of a deer, Bob Taylor, the school's dean, who had helped coordinate Bush's recent visit to the school and had Bush bumper stickers stacked on his desk, told me he was worried about McCain's second wife's family values, among other things. What do you mean? I asked. He leaned forward, his voice dropping several notches. She owns, he confided, 'one of the biggest beer distributors' in the country, and he feared her family might have 'friendships among organized crime.' When I asked him for evidence, he leaned back in his chair and said, 'I don't have any firsthand knowledge, but that's just the kind of thing that's out there.' Such dirty politics comes out of the bag of tricks concocted by Lee Atwater, Poppy's political strategist and mentor of Karl Rove, who is Dubya's political strategist. "Atwater invented, for a whole generation of politicians and consultants, the art of modern political warfare. First as an aide to Senator Strom Thurmond and later as a consultant to Governor Carroll Campbell, he identified what he called "symbolic platforms"--the flag, family values, taxes--and painted his opponents, regardless of their ideology, as ultraliberals, as outsiders and transgressors of the Southern way of life. He helped label one congressional candidate a foreign-born Jew and said a Democrat who had suffered shock therapy as a 16-year-old had been 'hooked up to jumper cables.' 'I guarantee you I can get the negatives up on anyone,' Atwater boasted." This kind of ultra-negative politics is what Dubya has decided to practice in South Carloina. In yesterday's LAT, Doug Gamble, a former speech writer for both Reagan and Poppy Bush, has had it. "The person whose decisions led to the New Hampshire debacle, Bush guru Karl Rove, fancies himself another Lee Atwater, the now-deceased brilliant strategist behind the 1988 campaign of Bush the elder. The spinning Atwater is doing in his grave tops the campaign spin put out by Rove thus far....Bush is now on the attack in South Carolina, trying to persuade voters in the upcoming primary that McCain is actually the establishment [outsider], even though W has the endorsement of 44 senators and the party bosses....This outburst ends my 13-year association with the Bushes and will cost me friends. Yet more Republicans need to say out loud what they know inside: A nominee Bush would be crushed by Gore." 2/11/00 BUSH'S SWEETHEART IS THE DEAL, HIS LOVE IS MONEY The Governor's Sweetheart Deal, by Robert Bryce "The best way to allocate resources in our society is through the marketplace. Not through a governing elite," Bush said on the first day of his 1993 campaign to take the Texas governorship away from Democrat Ann Richards. Yet there is a "sharp contrast between Bush's public pronouncements in defense of property rights and his private profiteering. While running against Richards, Bush said, 'I understand full well the value of private property and its importance not only in our state but in capitalism in general, and I will do everything I can to defend the power of private property and private property rights when I am the governor of this state.' Yet Bush and his partners used Arlington's powers to condemn the land for the stadium, and relied on taxpayers to repay the bonds sold to build the Ballpark -- receiving what amounts to a direct $135-million subsidy." more Stealing Home, by Robert Bryce "Yet whether the public interest issue is taxes, size of government, property rights, or public subsidies of private sports ventures, Bush's personal ownership interest in the Texas Rangers baseball team has been wildly at odds with his publicly declared positions on those issues. And ongoing litigation over the Ballpark deal has revealed documents showing that beginning in 1990, the Rangers management--which included Bush as managing general partner--conspired to use the government's power of eminent domain to further its private business interests." more Bush Watch is a non-advocacy site paid for by Politex, a non-affiliated U.S. citizen. Editorial Policy: All entries are dated and documented as needed. Text (c) Politex. 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