Bill Bradley, a New Jersey senator from 1979-1997, didn't actually win the 2000 New Hampshire Democratic primary. However, the former Rhodes Scholar and Princeton basketball star finished second with nearly 46% of the vote, which was only three percent less than Al Gore, the sitting vice-president and presumptive favorite. Some thought the New Hampshire vote indicated the Gore campaign was in trouble.
The state's Republican primary that year was even more surprising: Arizona's John McCain won 48 percent of the vote, 18 percent more than the better-financed second place finisher, an inarticulate recovering alcoholic who had previously used family connections to avoid participating in the same war that had landed McCain in a Vietnamese POW camp for five and a half horrific years.
It briefly seemed at least plausible that two candidates of character would contend for the White House that November. Both Bradley and McCain were men of accomplishment and character, and neither was afraid of bucking members of his own party when he felt that it was the proper course of action. Bradley had broken ranks with Democrats by initially supporting Ronald Reagan's policy of aiding the Contras in Nicaragua. McCain had butted heads with GOP leadership on campaign finance reform, and while his views were primarily conservative, he voted to confirm Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the Supreme Court, even though both had been nominated by Democratic president Bill Clinton.
Sadly, inevitably and predictably, in 2000 money talked while character, ideals, and integrity walked. The Gore campaign regrouped, successfully tagged Bradley as a "left of center insurgent," and by March 14th the vice-president had cinched his party's nomination.
McCain's chief opponent possessed not only virtually unlimited finances, but also a Machiavellian, ethically unconcerned campaign manager. Less than three weeks after his triumph in New Hampshire the Arizona senator's campaign was over, ruined by a vile campaign of mudslinging, lies and misinformation prior to the pivotal South Carolina primary that was as odious as it was effective. E-mails, faxes, and flyers were circulated suggesting that McCain was unstable, that he was a homosexual, and that his wife was a drug addict. Perhaps the dirtiest trick was a push poll in which thousands of potential Republican primary voters got a phone call which asked, "Would you be more or less likely to vote for John McCain if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?" The McCains had in fact adopted a dark-skinned child from Bangladesh, but the suggestion that he had done anything untoward was scurrilous. McCain's wife was reduced to a quivering, weeping wreck and the notoriously combustible senator himself was justifiably irate, but his opponent carried the day, and less than a month later McCain's campaign was over.
Eight years later both defeated candidates are absent from public life.
Bradley, who had opted not to run for re-election to the senate in 1996, retired for a second time after his failed presidential bid and has voluntarily stayed out of the limelight since.
The GOP also-ran's disappearance was far eerier. McCain returned to the senate, where he was one of only two Republicans to vote against the new president's tax cuts in 2001. He also opposed his party on gun control and climate change, although by and large he concurred with his GOP colleagues on most issues. Then sometime in the late spring or early summer of 2004, the senator vanished. He was replaced by a lookalike who not only endorsed the incumbent president whose minions had savaged the real McCain four years earlier; he implausibly and publicly hugged the man. That was the first clue that the Arizona maverick was gone.
The person currently posing as McCain has changed the senator's positions on global warming, the president's tax cuts, offshore oil drilling, teaching intelligent design, the windfall profits tax, illegal wiretapping, detention of detainees, and a myriad of other issues far too lengthy to list here. He has also run a campaign that the admired John McCain of 2000 never would have considered. The real McCain wouldn't have tolerated his subordinates aggrandizing the record of his physically attractive but transparently unqualified running mate; in fact he wouldn't have even considered her in the first place. The admired McCain never would have allowed any of his followers to distort the record of his opponent like the new one is doing, much less repeat misleading half-truths or lies himself.
Wherever the genuine John McCain is today, he deserves our sympathy and our prayers. The man who served his country with honor both in the military and the senate has been deprived of his freedom for nearly a full decade of his adult life. When he was in his 30's he was confined by the Viet Cong for five and a half years, and for the past four he's been a captive of ambition, pride, selfishness and greed, only some of which is his own.
Andy YoungReturn to main page
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