DAVID NYHAN

GOP needs McCain's positive example

By David Nyhan, Globe Staff, March 5, 1999

There is a road less traveled in politics, and it is the high road. The individuals who thrust themselves forward for public service are not stupid. They know how to pitch their candidacies to your prejudices. That's how you get elected in a democracy, folks. Figuring out the lowest common denominator of a particular electorate's predilections is, more often than not, the path to victory.

Running down the other candidates is the road most traveled in elections that are close at the end. But the most successful vote-getters convey the impression that they are a slight cut above the other fang-and-claw politicians who would stop at nothing to win office. Appearing to be less vicious than the other guy is helpful.

Revulsion is not infrequently the next-to-last emotional state of the average voter, before the voter's sense of civic duty overcomes the guilt, anger, and remorse over having been even a passive receptor of negative advertising. The sad fact is that negative campaigning and the substantial outlays on television spots that requires depresses turnout, discourages the less motivated electors, and plays into the hands of the cynical manipulators who craft slogans, push hot buttons, and sharpen wedge issues to drive you to or from the polling booth.

All but the most obtuse politicos understand this. They'd just rather not talk about it in any but the most unctuous generalities. The average voter, if he heard the innermost thoughts of a victorious candidate, would feel like a restaurant patron who had witnessed the chef dismembering the chicken with a cleaver prior to wheeling in the coq au vin.

We know that certain unpleasantries must occur before we carve into a crispy breast or steaming thigh. But not thinking about the preliminaries sustains our appetite for the chewing that lies ahead.

Which brings us to Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican, the man with the most interesting resume and most admirable record of anyone running for president. Almost all Republicans are familiar with his reputation as a gutsy, occasionally raffish POW who thumbed his nose at his North Vietnamese captors for 6 1/2 years in the Hanoi Hilton after his Navy fighter was shot down and he wound up a prisoner who refused repatriation on less-than-honorable terms.

Fewer voters are probably aware that he is just as independent-minded now. That he stood in front of the GOP fund-raising juggernaut and dared his party elders to run over him. That he bucked his party's pusillanimous allegiance to big tobacco. That he called a spade a rotten spade when the telecommunications interests bagged Congress with a hollow promise of communications law reform.

Now the kamikaze pilot of the GOP is at it again as he runs for president on the boldest of platforms: clean campaigning. Talk about baring your chest to the enemy spears. "Don't let us go down the road of mindlessly destroying each other," he pleaded with fellow Republican candidates last week in California. "Scorched earth Republican primaries will lead directly to an Al Gore presidency."

McCain is no Goody-two-shoes when it comes to torching Democrats: He abhors Clinton and expresses contempt for Gore's fund-raising practices, which were generally spared as the GOP plunged into Monica Madness. But when it comes to his GOP rivals, vows McCain, "I will not engage in personal attacks and the politics of division. I will not stoop to negative campaigning against my fellow Republicans. I will not run negative advertising. I give you my word on it."

This plea for what amounts to unilateral disarmament was not, naturally, completely foolhardy. McCain coupled it with this caveat: "I call on the other candidates to join me in that pledge." That is an essential qualification. Only a fool rides unarmed into Iowa or New Hampshire without packing some negative ad artillery.

Elizabeth Dole's husband, Bob, came unhinged in New Hampshire by George Bush's last-minute negative barrage in '88. Lamar Alexander has not forgotten how Dole pulled the same kind of last-minute low blow on him in '96. In both cases, negative ad blitzes over the final weekend rejiggled the order of finish and finished Dole and Alexander, for all practical purposes, in those election cycles.

The savvy candidate will take counsel in the old Reagan slogan for the Cold War: "Trust, but verify." Right now Gore's path to the Democratic nomination looks smooth: Only Bill Bradley, the former New Jersey senator, offers himself as a speed-bump in front of Al's supercharged dragster. But the GOP faces a demolition derby, which could wind up as just as much a voter turnoff as the impeachment debacle.

McCain may be acting the Boy Scout, but he deserves praise for daring to disarm: "I hope the day never comes when for the sake of personal ambition I try to destroy people I admire and with whom I agree on most issues," he said. I wish him well.

It's just that I've seen more of the destroying than the disarming in national politics of late. The politics of personal destruction has been riding tall in the Washington saddle. And the party of impeachment does not exactly come to this election with clean hands.