John McCain 2000 presidential campaign

McCain was mentioned as a possible candidate for the Republican nomination beginning in 1997, but he took few steps to pursue it, instead concentrating on his 1998 senate re-election. The decision of General Colin Powell not to run helped persuade McCain that there might be an opening for him. McCain later wrote that he had a "vague aspiration" of running for president for a long time. He would also be candid about his motivation: "I didn't decide to run for president to start a national crusade for the political reforms I believed in or to run a campaign as if it were some grand act of patriotism. In truth, I wanted to be president because it had become my ambition to become president. I was sixty-two years old when I made the decision, and I thought it was my one shot at the prize." The Federal Election Commission declared McCain eligible for primary matching funds on July 1, 1999, giving the effort an important financial foundation before the formal launch. ==Announcements and Kosovo==

McCain had initially planned on announcing his candidacy and beginning active campaigning on April 6, 1999. There was to be a four-day roadshow, whose first day would symbolically begin at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, then see early primary states New Hampshire and South Carolina, before concluding in home Phoenix, Arizona However, the Kosovo War intervened. On March 24, the NATO bombing campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia began. McCain had voted the day before in favor of approval for the Clinton administration's action, saying "Atrocities are the signature of the Serbian Army. They've been carrying out atrocities since 1992. We must not permit the genocide that Milosevic has in mind for Kosovo to continue. We are at a critical hour." He was critical of past inaction by the Clinton administration in the matter, McCain became a very frequent guest on television talk shows discussing the conflict, and his "We are in it, now we must win it" stance drew much attention. the next day, McCain canceled his planned roadshow, stating "this is not an appropriate time to launch a political campaign." He received media praise for his action and continued to be a highly visible spokesman for strong action regarding Kosovo; "While now is not the time for the celebratory tour I had planned, I am a candidate for president and I will formally kick off my campaign at a more appropriate time." The delay in the formal kickoff also gave McCain months of high visibility as one of the Republican Party's most forceful voices on foreign policy while avoiding the optics of a celebratory launch during a military crisis. family memoir, Faith of My Fathers, published in August 1999, helped promote the new start of his campaign. The book garnered largely positive reviews, The tour's success and the book's high sales led to the themes of the memoir, which included McCain talking more about his Vietnam prisoner-of-war experience than he had in the past, becoming a major part of McCain's campaign messaging. McCain finally formally announced his candidacy on September 27, 1999, before a thousand people in Greeley Park in Nashua, New Hampshire, saying "It is because I owe America more than she has ever owed me that I am a candidate for president to the United States." He further said he was staging "a fight to take our government back from the power brokers and special interests and return it to the people and the noble cause of freedom it was created to serve." As originally planned, he began his announcement day with a visit to the Naval Academy. ==Campaign staff and policy team==

McCain's campaign used many veteran Washington political insiders, including some who had an insurgency-oriented or contrarian mindset. Greg Stevens was the media adviser and Mark Salter was the chief speechwriter (and credited co-author of McCain's books). After a while, a rivalry formed between Davis, at campaign headquarters, and Weaver and Murphy, who traveled on the campaign bus. ==Campaign message and strategy==

McCain's campaign sought to turn his Senate image as a "maverick" into an outsider presidential candidacy. He cast himself as a reform Republican, emphasizing campaign finance reform, public service, military readiness, and a willingness to confront party orthodoxy. McCain's style of campaigning was inseparable from the Straight Talk Express, a rolling press cabin and town-hall circuit that allowed him to compensate for Bush's financial advantages with free media and direct voter contact. Later reminiscences from reporters and aides described the arrangement as unusually open and central to the campaign's identity. ==Campaign developments 1999==

There was a crowded field of Republican candidates, but the big leader in terms of establishment party support and fundraising was Texas Governor and presidential son George W. Bush. Indeed, by the time of McCain's formal announcement, top-echelon Republican contenders such as Lamar Alexander, John Kasich, and Dan Quayle were already withdrawing from the race due to Bush's strength. Four of McCain's fifty-five fellow Republican senators endorsed his candidacy. The day after McCain announced, Bush made a show of visiting Phoenix and displaying that he, not McCain, had the endorsement of Arizona Governor Jane Dee Hull and several other prominent local political figures. Hull would continue to attack McCain during the campaign, and was featured in high-profile Arizona Republic and New York Times stories about McCain's reputation for having a bad temper, with the latter featuring on-the-record criticism from Governor of Michigan John Engler. Some of McCain's opponents, including those in or close to the Senate Republican leadership, intimated that McCain's temper was a sign of mental instability. The notion that this was due to McCain's POW days caused Admiral James Stockdale, a fellow former POW and 1992 vice-presidential candidate for Ross Perot, to write an op-ed piece for The New York Times, "John McCain in the Crucible". In it, Stockdale said that the reverse was true: that the experience of resisting during the POW experience made former POWs more emotionally stable in later life, not less. In early December, McCain released some 1,500 pages of his medical and psychiatric records, which showed several psychiatric evaluations over a number of years following his POW release that indicated no signs of lingering mental or emotional difficulty from that period. Bush avoided most of the scheduled Republican Party debates during 1999, including one held on November 21 at Arizona State University in McCain's home state. There McCain's signature push for campaign finance reform led to one of the few lively exchanges in an otherwise placid event. McCain decided to skip the initial event of the nomination season, the Iowa caucus, where his long opposition to ethanol subsidies would be unpopular (He had earlier skipped the August 1999 Iowa Straw Poll, labeling it a sham. By late 1999, the campaign had also begun receiving federal matching funds; in December 1999 the FEC certified the first round of 2000 matching funds for McCain and other candidates. ==Caucuses and primaries 2000==

New Hampshire By skipping Iowa, McCain was able to focus instead on the New Hampshire primary, where his message held appeal to independents and where Bush's father had never been very popular. Bush said he realized McCain was a strong candidate there: "If I had to guess why Senator McCain is doing well, it's people respect him and so do I. He's a good man." speaking in every town in New Hampshire in an example of "retail politics" that overcame Bush's familiar name. His growing number of supporters became known as "McCainiacs". Retrospective coverage would return repeatedly to the scale of this effort, with CBS News noting in 2018 that McCain had held 114 town halls across the state and had made New Hampshire central to his political identity. Some McCain aides saw the senator as naturally preferring the company of reporters to other politicians. McCain preferred a smaller cut that would allocate more of the surplus towards the solvency of Social Security and Medicare. a degree of fear and panic crept into not only the Bush campaign The upset was widely interpreted as a shock to Bush's aura of inevitability and as proof that McCain's insurgent strategy had turned the nomination race into a genuine two-man contest. South Carolina The battle between Bush and McCain for South Carolina has entered U.S. political lore as one of the nastiest, dirtiest, and most brutal ever. On the other hand, a variety of business and interest groups that McCain had challenged in the past now pounded him with negative ads. The day that a new poll showed McCain five points ahead in the state, Bush allied himself on stage with a marginal and controversial veterans activist named J. Thomas Burch, who accused McCain of having "abandoned the veterans" on POW/MIA and Agent Orange issues: "He came home from Vietnam and forgot us." These claimed most famously that he had fathered a black child out of wedlock (the McCains' dark-skinned daughter Bridget was adopted from Bangladesh; this misrepresentation was thought to be an especially effective slur in a Deep South state where race was still central During a break in a debate, Bush put his hand on McCain's arm and reiterated that he had no involvement in the attacks; McCain replied, "Don't give me that shit. And take your hands off me." Polls swung in Bush's favor; by not accepting federal matching funds for his campaign, Bush was not limited in how much money he could spend on advertisements, while McCain was near his limit. allowing Bush to regain the momentum. On to Super Tuesday McCain's campaign never completely recovered from his defeat in South Carolina. mocking Governor Hull's opposition in the former. He also made an off-the-cuff, unserious remark on the Straight Talk Express that referred to Robertson and Falwell as "forces of evil", that came across as angry hostility to many Christian conservatives. His attack on Robertson and Falwell, combined with the fallout from South Carolina, deepened the sense among many social conservatives that McCain was openly hostile to the religious right, a perception that further undercut him in several Southern and border-state contests. McCain had stated in mid-February that "I hate the gooks", referring to his captors during the Vietnam War. This use gained some media attention in California, which had a large Asian American population. Reaction among Vietnamese Americans to McCain's use of this term was mixed although supportive of McCain himself, and exit polls in the primary in California showed that they strongly supported him. This was not the first or the last example of controversial remarks by McCain. A week later on March 7, 2000, he lost nine of the thirteen primaries on Super Tuesday to Bush, including large states such as California, New York, Ohio, and Georgia; McCain's wins were confined to the New England states of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut and Vermont. His overall loss on that day has been attributed to his going "off message", ineffectively accusing Bush of being anti-Catholic due to having visited Bob Jones University and getting into a verbal battle with leaders of the Religious Right. Withdrawal Throughout the campaign, McCain had achieved parity with Bush among self-identified Republicans only in the northeastern states; in most of the rest of the country, Bush ran way well ahead of McCain among Republicans, enough to overcome McCain's strength among independents and Democrats. In his remarks before a crowd of supporters and onlookers with the red rocks of Sedona, Arizona as a backdrop, Official Federal Election Commission primary returns later showed Bush finishing with 12,034,676 votes to McCain's 6,061,332, underscoring how quickly the race had consolidated after Super Tuesday. ==General election==

Following the end of his campaign, McCain returned to the Senate, where he was welcomed with respect for the effort he had made, his openness in the campaign, and the attacks he had undergone. Other Republicans sought out his endorsement in their general election races. The question of whether McCain would endorse Bush remained uncertain. and in another interview he called the rumor spreaders "the ugly underside of politics." McCain regretted some aspects of his own campaign there as well, in particular changing his stance on flying the Confederate flag at the state capitol from a "very offensive" "symbol of racism and slavery" to "a symbol of heritage". According to one report, the South Carolina experience overall left McCain in a "very dark place." The Guardian characterized the endorsement as "tepid" and said that McCain "betrayed little outward enthusiasm" during the appearance, McCain also made it clear that he was not interested in a vice-presidential nomination. Many of McCain's supporters were vocally unhappy with his words of support for Bush, and the Times wrote that, "Politics as usual with its compromises, cruelties and emotional costs—caught up with Senator John McCain this weekend." In it, McCain connected his family to Bush's, making reference to former President George H. W. Bush's combat service as a naval aviator in the Pacific Theater of World War II under Admiral John S. McCain, Sr., McCain's grandfather. The final pathology tests showed that the melanoma had not spread, and his prognosis was good, but McCain was left with cosmetic aftereffects including a puffy cheek and a scar down his neck. emphasizing, in the wake of the October 12 USS Cole bombing, his belief that Bush was a better choice than Democratic Party nominee Al Gore to deal with international security threats. McCain would state that he voted for Bush on November 7 (although years later several witnesses would relate that McCain and his wife Cindy had both said at a dinner party that they had not). When the November presidential election continued on in indecision during the Florida election dispute, McCain stayed generally quiet in an atmosphere of extreme partisanship, though he did appear on CBS' Face the Nation to say, "I think the nation is growing a little weary of this. We're not in a constitutional crisis, but the American people are growing weary, and whoever wins is having a rapidly diminishing mandate, to say the least." Once Bush was declared the winner and inaugurated in January 2001, McCain's battles with him would resume, ==Aftermath==

South Carolina investigated and revisited While South Carolina was known for legendary hard-knuckled political consultant Lee Atwater In subsequent years there would be persistent accounts trying to tie the anti-McCain smears to high levels of the Bush campaign: the 2003 book ''Bush's Brain would use it to build up their "evil genius" depiction of Bush chief strategist Karl Rove, while a 2008 NOW on PBS program showed a local political consultant stating that Warren Tompkins, a Lee Atwater protégé and then Bush chief strategist for the state, was responsible. In April 2004 National Review's Byron York would try to debunk many of the South Carolina smear reports as "unfounded legend." However, in November 2004, a 6,500-word investigative report by Richard Gooding for Vanity Fair'' provided evidence of the campaign's existence and scale based on 75 interviews and on-the-ground reporting. Gooding documented witnesses who reported receiving identical push-poll scripts that disrupted legitimate polling operations, and a local professor who located a physical call center used for the effort. Multiple witnesses described identical flyers distributed to church groups containing the smears with pictures of the McCain family. An email chain originating from Christian Fundamentalist Bob Jones University also spread the smears. Gooding concluded that while the Karl Rove-led campaign maintained plausible deniability, the tactics were openly acknowledged by local operatives and the campaign made no effort to stop them. McCain's campaign manager said in 2004 they never found out where the smear attacks came from, while McCain himself never doubted their existence. (although Rush Limbaugh and other talk radio figures were still lambasting him), and aggressively moved to thwart any smear campaign before it got started. McCain won the primary on January 19, 2008; in his victory remarks to supporters that evening, he said, "It took us awhile, but what's eight years among friends?" The New York Times described McCain's win as "exorcising the ghosts of the attack-filled primary here that derailed his presidential hopes eight years ago." ==Primary campaign results==

Total popular votes in Republican 2000 primaries: • George W. Bush – 12,034,676 (62.0%) • John McCain – 6,061,332 (31.2%) • Alan Keyes – 985,819 (5.1%) • Steve Forbes – 171,860 (0.9%) • Unpledged – 61,246 (0.3%) • Gary Bauer – 60,709 (0.3%) • Orrin Hatch – 15,958 (0.1%) Key states: • Feb 1 New Hampshire primary: McCain 115,606 (48.5%), Bush 72,330 (30.4%), Forbes 30,166 (12.7%), Keyes 15,179 (6.4%) • Feb 19 South Carolina primary: Bush 305,998 (53.4%), McCain 239,964 (41.9%), Keyes 25,996 (4.5%) • Feb 22 Arizona primary: McCain 193,708 (60.0%), Bush 115,115 (35.7%), Keyes 11,500 (3.6%) • Feb 22 Michigan primary: McCain 650,805 (51.0%), Bush 549,665 (43.1%), Keyes 59,032 (4.6%) • Feb 29 Virginia primary: Bush 350,588 (52.8%), McCain 291,488 (43.9%), Keyes 20,356 (3.1%) • Feb 29 Washington primary: Bush 284,053 (57.8%), McCain 191,101 (38.9%), Keyes 11,753 (2.4%) • Mar 7 California primary: Bush 1,725,162 (60.6%), McCain 988,706 (34.7%), Keyes 112,747 (4.0%) • Mar 7 New York primary: Bush 1,102,850 (51.0%), McCain 937,655 (43.4%), Keyes 71,196 (3.3%), Forbes 49,817 (2.3%) • Mar 7 Ohio primary: Bush 810,369 (58.0%), McCain 516,790 (37.0%), Keyes 55,266 (4.0%) • Mar 7 Georgia primary: Bush 430,480 (66.9%), McCain 179,046 (27.8%), Keyes 29,640 (4.6%) • Mar 7 Missouri primary: Bush 275,366 (57.9%), McCain 167,831 (35.3%), Keyes 27,282 (5.7%) • Mar 7 Maryland primary: Bush 211,439 (56.2%), McCain 135,981 (36.2%), Keyes 25,020 (6.7%) • Mar 7 Maine primary: Bush 49,308 (51.0%), McCain 42,510 (44.0%), Keyes 2,989 (3.1%), Uncommitted 1,038 (1.1%) • Mar 7 Massachusetts primary: McCain 325,297 (64.7%), Bush 159,826 (31.8%), Keyes 12,656 (2.5%) • Mar 7 Vermont primary: McCain 49,045 (60.3%), Bush 28,741 (35.3%), Keyes 2,164 (2.7%) • Mar 7 Rhode Island primary: McCain 21,754 (60.2%), Bush 13,170 (36.4%), Keyes 923 (2.6%) • Mar 7 Connecticut primary: McCain 87,176 (48.7%), Bush 82,881 (46.3%), Keyes 5,913 (3.3%) == References ==