“Debate prep” for Sen. John McCain was more like shore leave than basic training. He motored here and there in his “Straight Talk Express” bus, giving interviews between swigs of coffee or bottled water. He hosted a “town hall” (his 60th of the campaign) for an overflow crowd at Exeter Academy, fielding questions as he paced the stage with a wireless mike. At dinner afterward, he recalled with a laugh how he had once been blindsided on camera by CBS’s Mike Wallace–and kept his sailor’s temper in check. The next day, in his “holding room” at WMUR-TV, McCain propped his feet on the desk as he waited to be summoned to the studio. Someone suggested that he might get a “gotcha” question about, say, Turkmenistan. “Been there,” McCain deadpanned.
Most of the rest of the country has yet to pay attention, but in New Hampshire, where the campaign is intense, the race for the Republican nomination is shaping up as a Bush-McCain affair. In the cartoonish view of media critics and GOP foes, it’s The Lightweight versus The Hothead: a carefully handled but nationally untested governor of Texas against an outwardly jovial but intensely combative senator from Arizona. In the second special NEWSWEEK Poll of the state, Bush’s lead over McCain among likely voters in the GOP primary has dwindled from 44 to 27 percent a month ago to 38 to 33 percent after last week’s debate. A hypothetical two-way match was even closer: Bush over McCain, 47 to 45 percent.
For now, Bush and McCain are cordial rivals. “He’s a good man, a good friend,” Bush said in the debate. McCain vowed not to attack any of his foes–including Bush. “Why should I talk about George Bush at all?” McCain told NEWSWEEK. “New Hampshire voters are looking at us side by side now, and I seem to be doing pretty well.”
Meanwhile, both are eager to puncture the parade-balloon stereotypes of them before the lights go up on the Y2K campaign from coast to coast. In John McCain’s case, that means fighting back against swirling allegations that his years as a prisoner of war somehow left him temperamentally unsuited for the job of president. Last weekend McCain’s campaign made public his post-POW Navy medical record, starting from his return to the United States in 1973 through 1993, when he stopped having yearly evaluations at a Naval medical facility in Pensacola, Fla.
The bottom line: McCain, according to the Navy and his personal physician, is perfectly sane–in “good physical and mental health.” He’s never been treated in any way for a mental condition. The 20 years of annual evaluations record his recovery from extensive injuries. But at no time was he judged in less than good mental health. It discusses his suicide attempt in a Hanoi POW camp, but doesn’t find any evidence of suicidal tendencies. There’s one major reference to his temper, depicted as stemming from his stormy relationship with his father. In 1974 he talked about it with a Navy psychologist, who reports McCain told him that “he had finally climbed out from under the image of his father. He learned to control his temper better, to not become angry over insignificant things.” Asked to rank McCain’s anger on a low-to-high scale of one to five, doctors never judged him above two.
For Bush, the issue isn’t his psyche, but something less specific: whether he has the depth and experience for prime time. At first glance, people of New Hampshire seem to think so. In fact, the special NEWSWEEK Poll shows GOP voters there giving Bush higher marks (88 percent) than McCain (79 percent) for being intelligent and educated enough to be president.
Still, Bush knows that the questions will be asked–just as they were when he ran for governor in 1994. Texas critics depicted him as a pampered kid who’d done nothing more than trade on his name and connections all his life. But Bush won with a highly disciplined race, and has neutralized the skeptics since by focusing on specific checklists of items. “I know the ’empty suit syndrome’ is out there,” Bush said in New Hampshire last week. “But I know how to set priorities, I know how to lead and I know how to get things done. If you want to see that, go to Texas.”
The country can’t go to Texas, of course, but the country can–and eventually will–turn on TV. That is how they will judge George Bush. Those who watched last week saw a candidate who seemed serious enough to have mastered his basic brief, but who clung as closely as he could to the script in what was only the third TV debate of his career. He was momentarily rattled by a question about his reading habits, and issued a blustery threat to Iraq’s Saddam Hussein that he later repeated–and had to repeatedly clarify. McCain’s performance, by contrast, was full of smooth confidence and humor. There’s some evidence that the event created some doubts about Bush. Before the TV show, 70 percent of New Hampshire Republicans thought he’d be the strongest candidate against the Democrats. Afterward, only 55 percent thought so.
The “forums” have just begun–and the scrutiny is just beginning. In a letter to Ed Rendell, NEWSWEEK has learned, Bush’s father jokingly asked the former Philadelphia mayor to go easy in his new role as Democratic Party chair. “Now don’t be too hard on my son, he’s a good man,” the elder Bush wrote. The DNC chair wrote him back. “Rest assured, I won’t be too hard on him,” he said. It’s a quaint idea: a letter of recommendation from Dad. That worked many times for W before. But it isn’t going to be of much help in New Hampshire.
