McCain Drops Negative TV Ads

Backing away from an escalating air war, John McCain unilaterally pulled all his negative TV advertising Friday and urged rival George W. Bush to do the same. Even if he won’t, McCain said, he will stick to a new standard and wage a “positive . . . upbeat” campaign for the rest of the Republican race.

Bush immediately rejected McCain’s proposal, saying he does not consider his own ads negative.

“It’s an old Washington trick,” Bush said while campaigning in Charleston, S.C. “His ads trying to link me to Bill Clinton didn’t work. He’s been campaigning this way for 18 days now and it has failed.

“My ads aren’t negative. My ads clarify who I am and what I believe.”

Diffusing an Advertising War

Sen. McCain of Arizona, who is locked in a pitched battle with Bush in South Carolina, said he knows that his move “defies a lot of conventional wisdom, and I know that some may view this as not an intelligent approach to winning the primary. But the most important thing to me at the end of this campaign is that my kids, my children, would be proud of me.

“So we’re going to run nothing but positive ads from now on. We’re going to be upbeat.”

McCain announced his move during a fund-raising pass through New York and New Jersey, a brief detour from the neck-and-neck South Carolina campaign that has become the fulcrum of the Republican race. Some polls have suggested that McCain was dirtying his own image with his attacks on Bush.

At a Manhattan news conference, McCain unveiled a new 30-second spot. He replaced the negative ads that began running in South Carolina earlier this week, returning to familiar themes of “attacking big government waste” and Washington’s “special interests.”

The commercial makes no mention of Bush or, for that matter, President Clinton--to whom the Texas governor was likened in a McCain spot that even some admirers criticized.

At the same time, the Bush campaign unveiled a television commercial calling McCain’s attacks “over the line” and said it would appear in South Carolina beginning Friday evening.

Bush has responded especially strongly to a McCain commercial that accused him of “twisting the truth like Clinton,” saying it was out of bounds.

By pulling back from the brink of their bitter ad war, McCain moved off the defensive and sought to place the onus for the campaign’s tone on the Bush campaign. The governor is “a good man, from a good family,” McCain said, urging him to meet his peacemaking gesture in kind.

The GOP underdog has predicated much of his candidacy on his image as an unconventional, against-the-grain politician, and his impulsive move carries some risk.

Experience shows that most voters, while professing their distaste for negative advertising, are greatly influenced by the content. So McCain’s action, tantamount to unilateral disarmament, could give Bush a one-sided advertising advantage.

“I’m concerned about it,” McCain said. “But it’s far better for us to present the people of South Carolina with a positive vision for the future . . . than it is to get into the kind of responses and responses and responses that this campaign is on the verge of evolving into.”

For all the high-minded talk, however, some saw cunning in McCain’s move, saying it plays to his image as a reformer and could turn a liability--his incapacity to match Bush dollar-for-dollar--into an asset.

“He doesn’t have the money to put on a saturation negative campaign of his own. So it’s probably better for him to call a cease-fire and get the benefit of that,” said Darrell M. West, a Brown University expert on political advertising. “The benefit for him is that now he comes across as the white knight.”

Still others saw the move as damage control. “He was getting his halo tarnished a little,” said one GOP strategist, who is working for neither Bush nor McCain. “People were looking at his ads and saying, ‘Hmmm, maybe he’s not that different after all.’ ”

Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster unaffiliated in the contest, said he was loath to second-guess McCain, given his improbable success so far.

“There’s a lot of disgust with negative advertising, as there always is,” Ayres said. “But whether it works is the kind of question we won’t know until Feb. 19,” the date of the South Carolina primary. “If McCain wins, it will be seen as a stroke of genius. If he loses, it will be seen in retrospect as a stupid move.”

Strategists for McCain conceded a certain calculation in his self-imposed civility. “We know we can’t out-negative him,” campaign manager Rick Davis said of Bush, outlining the Texan’s extravagant ad spending. He also conceded that the negative tone of McCain’s own campaign could turn off political independents and more casual voters, diminishing the turnout that is vital to McCain’s hopes of a South Carolina upset.

In a related development, McCain’s campaign began running television commercials in Los Angeles on Friday, featuring a 30-second biographical ad on network affiliates.

McCain’s media director, Greg Stevens, said the ad run is a “heavy buy” that the average Californian will see at least 10 times. The ad will begin running across the state Tuesday, he said.

Back on the campaign trail, Bush held a brief news conference at the elegant Kiawah Island golf resort to press his charge that McCain “says one thing and does another,” especially on the Arizonan’s signature issue of campaign finance reform.

He noted that McCain held a $250,000 fund-raiser in Washington on Thursday, with lobbyists among the guests.

“I can just hear him now: ‘Give ‘em hell--and pass the hors d’oeuvres,’ ” Bush said.

Bush offered a reprise of the daily charges he has made against McCain all week: that the senator took contributions from lobbyists and political action committees, that he transferred $2 million from his Senate campaign to his presidential campaign despite promoting a ban on the practice and that he voted for a bill that would have provided public funding for congressional campaigns even though he says he opposes public funding.

Bush called on McCain to join him in reporting contributions on a daily basis.

Barabak reported from New York and McManus reported from South Carolina. Times staff writer Janet Wilson in Los Angeles also contributed to this story.