DAVID NYHAN

McCain's ace in the hole

By David Nyhan, Globe Staff, July 2, 1999

PORTSMOUTH, N.H. - Let's face the most important fact about the Republicans running for president: It is about the money.

George W. Bush tried to hide that fact behind his born-a-preppy-tryin'-to-be-a-cowboy Skull & Bones aw-shucks patter when modestly heh-heh-ing about the $36 million he raised in just six months. Every single day, weekends and holidays included, the Texas governor siphoned $200,000 and change out of the wallets of GOP contributors. That is phenomenal. It is also obscene. That bankroll could choke a horse -- or a president's ethical constraints.

The 11 other GOP contenders are on notice. Bush will spend them into the ground, carpetbombing the early states with cash and TV myths. It'll all be over if Bush wins New Hampshire's opening primary. And increasingly, it looks as if Senator John McCain, a distant No. 2 in fund-raising with $4 million to his credit over six months, may have to be the man to stop Bush.

The Arizonan threw down the gauntlet Wednesday with a brave speech denouncing the corrupting influence of big money in our politics. Republicans love to dwell on Bill Clinton's sins, now also ascribed to Vice President Gore. But you get merely throat-clearing and gaze-averting when it comes to GOP excesses -- except when the gutsy McCain is front-and-center. He spearheads reform in Congress where his own party's leaders submarine him.

"We are all corrupted," McCain told a Bedford, N.H., crowd. "We are the defenders of an elaborate influence-peddling scheme in which both parties conspire to stay in office by selling the country to the highest bidder."

He ticked off the customary GOP bogeymen -- shadowy Chinese arms dealers, Buddhist nuns, Lincoln Bedroom renters linked to the Clinton-Gore regime -- but included his own party on the villain list, for doling out pork-barrel spending to benefit contributors of soft money. Spending will remain out of control so long as politicians treat "the Federal treasury as a duty-free shop for soft-money donors."

While the other Republican candidates play 10 little Indians behind Bush, McCain is the only one carving out audacious positions. He was out front on Kosovo and for deploying US ground troops if needed to win that war. He and Senator Russ Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, carried the water for campaign finance reform. McCain took on Big Tobacco and the telecommunications lobby. But his fate may hinge on whether he can rally enough Americans who still care about duty, honor, country. So he's starting with the veterans. There's an Army out there for McCain; he needs the Navy and Air Force, too.

If the veterans want a straight-shooting, high-flying, damn-the-torpedoes military hero, McCain's their man, and the vets are part of his plan. His strategy: survive the early skirmishes in Iowa and New Hampshire, which is much more important to him than Iowa, and pray that Bush implodes.

The Granite State's twin reputations for rock-ribbed patriotism and humbling frontrunners are McCain's hole cards. Of the 14 politicians running for president, I find McCain's speeches to be consistently the most interesting. He rises above the pack in admitting it's not all the other party's fault. He's eloquent, as only a prisoner of war can be, in decrying "the pervasive public cynicism that is debilitating our democracy . . . cynicism bordering on alienation." It's not just Clinton, he says.

"We who are currently privileged to hold public office have ourselves to blame for this sickness in American public life. It is we who have squandered the public trust. We, who have time and again in full public view, placed our personal or partisan interests before the national interest, earning the public's contempt with our poll-driven policies, our phony posturing, the lies we call spin, and the damage control we substitute for progress." Wow!

Go, John!If you read no other speech this year, go to www.mccain2000.com and dig up his May 27 commencement speech at Johns Hopkins. It'll make even liberal Democrats think about sending a check to the most truth-telling candidate in either party. I guess once you've been a POW for a sixth of your adult life, you might as well tell it like it is.

The Beltway scandal culture raises the premium on McCain's years in a Hanoi prison. McCain's post-New Hampshire scheme is to use South Carolina's primary two weeks later to jack him into contention in California. If Bush wins both Iowa and New Hampshire, the Texan will be nigh unstoppable. McCain seems to be lowballing Iowa, where his stand against ethanol (corn-into-fuel) subsidies irks corn-growing, subsidy-fed farmers. So New Hampshire looks make-or-break for McCain, 62, taking his last, best shot.

"The system has become corrupted by the influence of soft money," he told a Nashua audience last Sunday. But polls show voters preferring Bush's vague winnability to McCain's hair shirt. The Des Moines Register poll pegs Bush at 40 percent in Iowa, with McCain way back under 5 percent. McCain has to sneak up on Bush in New Hampshire, solidify that showing in flag-waving South Carolina, then gallop into California on the white stallion of reform, a warrior back from the wars vowing to clean out the stable in DC.