n all the tens of millions of dollars spent by the George W. Bush campaign, could no one afford a history book? Among the 174 paid staff members working in 34 Bush headquarters offices, had no one ever heard of ''rum, Romanism, and rebellion?''
The parallel is eerily exact. In 1884, the consensus choice of Republicans, James G. Blaine of Maine, was plagued by ''mugwumps,'' Republicans attracted to his Democratic opponent, Grover Cleveland, a reformer. On Oct. 29, a delegation of clergy visited the candidate at the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York. The Rev. Samuel Dickinson Burchard, a Presbyterian minister, spoke to Blaine and to a crowd of his supporters: ''We are Republicans and don't propose to leave our party and identify ourselves with the party whose antecedents have been rum, Romanism, and rebellion.''
A stenographer paid by the Democratic National Committee later showed his report to Arthur P. Gorman, a Democratic senator from Maryland. ''Surely, Blaine met this remark?'' the senator asked. Told that he was silent, Gorman said, ''This sentence must be in every daily newspaper in the country tomorrow, no matter what it costs.''
With no Internet and no television, the remark ricocheted throughout the city and across upstate New York. Cleveland won the state by 1,047 votes out of a million cast. New York's 36 electoral votes meant Cleveland's victory.
Silence is golden, but not always in presidential politics. When the Bush campaign limped into South Carolina after losing in New Hampshire, all its operatives could see was a captive audience of 7,000 telegenically polite supporters at Bob Jones University. None of the campaign's many foreign-policy advisers seems to have informed Bush that among the university's prominent supporters is the Rev. Ian Paisley of Belfast, whose affinity for the Bob Jones philosophy is obvious. No Bush adviser seems to have pointed out a principle on which Americans of all faiths and parties agree, as enunciated by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932, that the presidency ''is preminently a place of moral leadership.''
Bush won South Carolina, but at a severe cost. On Feb. 25, when he took pen in penitent hand to write a letter of apology to Cardinal John O'Connor of New York, Bush was a prisoner of history, still a regional candidate, a stronger candidate in the late Confederacy than in the Union. His only two primary victories, Delaware and South Carolina, were below the Mason-Dixon line.
The candidate apologized to Cardinal O'Connor because New York Republican Catholics, though still conservative, share a tribal memory of how the South rejected Al Smith when he ran for president in 1928. Blood tells. In some high-Irish precincts in Westchester County, many voters chose John F. Kennedy in 1960, then switched back to Republican Barry Goldwater in 1964.
However Christian he is, Bush must be seething. John McCain's attack on the broken-down Pharisees of the Christian Coalition is pharisaic itself: ''God, I thank thee, that I am not as other men are'' (St. Luke 18:11).
Politics is seldom fair, nor, hallelujah, dull. Bush's brother is Catholic, but his ''some-of-my-best-friends'' response echoes that of Blaine in 1884. His mother was Catholic.
In 1884, Cleveland was accused of fathering a child by Maria Halpin, a Buffalo woman, who called the child Oscar Folsom Cleveland. When the news broke, Cleveland did not take a poll, but told his supporters in Buffalo in a telegram, ''Tell the truth,'' which was that he had supported the child. Negative ads in those days were street chants. ''Ma! Ma! Where's my Pa?'' competed with ''Blaine, Blaine, James G. Blaine, the continental liar from the state of Maine!'' Democrats enjoyed the last shout: ''Hurrah for Maria! Hurrah for the kid! I voted for Cleveland and damned glad I did!''
Martin F. Nolan's column appears regularly in the Globe.
