exas Governor George W. Bush faces tomorrow's Michigan and Arizona primaries after an impressive South Carolina win delivered by an energized Republican base.
Several factors contributed to the victory: a significant spending advantage, the religious right, and a gaffe by Arizona Senator John McCain in comparing Bush's veracity to President Clinton's.
Reports that polling places were closed in a number of predominantly black areas should be investigated immediately. While this does not seem to have been widespread enough to change the outcome, any such targeted impediments to voting rights would be manipulative and unconscionable.
But the major factor was Bush's delicate but effective two-pronged strategy of locking in regular Republicans while voicing an appeal to a broader constituency. Coming out of New Hampshire, where McCain had won that state's conservative Republicans, Bush was clearly determined there would be no repeat. His early appearance at Bob Jones University was a clear signal to South Carolina's GOP, especially its many social conservatives.
At the same time, Bush began touting himself as a ''reformer with a record,'' capped by a campaign finance proposal that attempted to compete with McCain on an issue the senator owned. The Bush plan was rightly criticized as tepid, but even this served a purpose: by specifically excluding any limitations on independent expenditures by advocacy groups, it protected one of the major mechanisms of the religious right.
McCain says Bush is offering only ''an empty slogan of reform.'' This should be debated. In Texas, most of the education reforms were in place when Bush took office, though he has defended them well.
Bush's major reform effort has been a crusade to limit consumers' ability to sue corporations for defects in their products and other faults. This pro-business tort reform is the opposite of what McCain calls reform - an effort to limit the influence of moneyed special interests on government policy.
Bush's narrow targeting appeals to some Republicans, but McCain's broad appeal is healthier.
