Bush Hammers Home His Retooled Strategy in S.C.

The air in the National Guard Armory is hot and getting hotter, the thick, sweet heat of too many people eating pork barbecue in too little space. The man on stage is hot too, a sheen of perspiration on his forehead as he hammers at his sermon with the high-energy rhythm of a revivalist preacher.

“If you’re tired of the typical politics of Washington, D.C., where people say one thing and do another, come and join this campaign,” shouts George W. Bush, the Republican front-runner turned would-be insurgent.

The audience is rapt, the applause strong. Bush stays for nearly three hours, answering every question, shaking every hand. It’s a far cry from chilly New Hampshire, where Bush waged a distant, overconfident campaign--and lost by 18 percentage points to upstart John McCain.

Now, with the next test only six days away, the Texas governor is trying to “retool” his presidential campaign on the fly. Gone is the stately four-day-a-week procession from one scripted event to the next. The New George W. is barnstorming South Carolina in a McCain-style bus, stealing McCain’s technique of fielding endless questions from ordinary voters and relentlessly attacking McCain as a hypocrite or--worse--a liberal.

He stands now, hour after hour, beneath a big new blue banner inviting voters to go “One on one with Governor Bush.” He’s even renamed his campaign jet, puckishly, “Retooled One.”

But will it work? Bush and his allies in South Carolina, a state he once proclaimed his “firewall” against McCain’s insurgency, acknowledge that even they aren’t sure.

“How you doing?” Bush asked, parroting the question from the front seat of his bus. “Fine, I guess. I mean, how do you know? The crowds are big and enthusiastic, and there’s polls and all that business. . . .”

He shrugged. “I guess the definition of a successful retool is who wins the primary.”

Aboard the Bush bus the mood is upbeat and combative--but a little edgy too. The candidate and his aides say they believe their new in-McCain’s-face strategy will work, but they don’t know yet whether they are right.

The stakes are high. If Bush loses South Carolina, he faces a long ground war through the Michigan and Arizona primaries Feb. 22 to the March 7 Armageddon of California, New York and 14 other states. But if he can win South Carolina, “obviously, victory would make life a lot easier,” Bush said dryly.

Bush and his aides say they have drawn humbling lessons from the drubbing they took in New Hampshire, an experience they recount in tones appropriate to a near-death experience.

“People know [now] that I am willing to fight for the vote,” Bush said in an interview last week. “I thought I was . . . , but what matters a lot is the perception.

“People need to see that I have the capacity to relate with people, answer their questions, stand up in an environment that allows me to speak my mind, defend my positions.”

That wouldn’t seem a hard sell for a second-term governor from a rough-and-tumble state like Texas. But Bush’s early campaign--in South Carolina as in New Hampshire--gave many voters the impression that he intended to inherit the nomination rather than win it.

Only two weeks ago, Bush’s South Carolina campaign was a parade of retired Republican grandees, from the candidate’s father, former President George Bush, and former Vice President Dan Quayle to a brace of former governors.

Meanwhile, McCain won over the state’s hottest young Republican talents, Reps. Lindsey O. Graham and Mark Sanford, splitting the party’s leadership on generational lines. The polls showed McCain gaining fast.

In a series of discussions that spanned a week, Bush and his advisors agreed on a new tack: Get McCain.

Bush’s positive message in the South’s most Republican state has been twofold: that he is more conservative than McCain and that as a governor he knows better how to get results than any senator.

But in practical terms, the real focus has been on a negative message: to paint the Arizonan as a hypocrite for taking contributions from lobbyists even as he calls for campaign finance reform.

Bush says he blames himself for not responding to McCain’s challenge earlier. “In New Hampshire, I sat there and kind of smiled and waved as I was being defined . . . as the insider. Those days are over.”

The candidate is too polite to say it, but those around him believe McCain has also benefited from a free ride in the press. As Bush’s younger brother Marvin told reporters aboard Retooled One last week, “That great sucking sound you hear is the sound of the media’s lips coming off of John McCain’s . . . “ The sentence, alas, was never finished.

The governor said he doesn’t need to shake up his staff--”Our organization performed well in New Hampshire. If there was anything that needed to be retooled, it was my ability to promote my strength and defend my record.”

So, in a flood of television and radio advertisements--plus “several hundred thousand” telephone calls to voters--the Bush campaign has castigated McCain as a Washington insider whose tax cut plan (“smaller than Clinton’s”) would result in smaller contributions to churches and other charities. And Bush accused McCain--inaccurately--of getting more contributions from lobbyists than his $68-million Texas fund-raising machine; aides later said he meant a larger percentage of McCain’s money came from lobbyists.

The race, meanwhile, remains close, with a Newsweek poll released Saturday showing Bush leading McCain, 43% to 40%. The South Carolina contest is also volatile. A poll by the American Research Group released two days earlier showed Bush ahead, 46% to 39%.

Significantly, McCain’s standing slipped as his unfavorable rating went up from 4% to 15%--just about the time Bush launched his attacks.

Bush has clearly benefited from the negative campaigning, said Republican pollster Whit Ayres. “But there’s still a week to go--and a week is an eternity in politics.”

Initially, McCain matched every Bush salvo with counter-fire, turning most news coverage of the race into a dispiriting chronicle of negative campaigning. But Friday McCain announced that he was pulling his negative ads off the air and challenged Bush to do the same.

Bush didn’t budge. By puncturing McCain’s image as a straight-talking reformer, the Bush campaign hopes to slow him in two ways. The first is to stop conservative Republicans from defecting to the challenger. The second, perhaps more important, is to pour cold water on the sudden enthusiasm of independent voters and Democrats for voting for McCain in the GOP’s open primary.

The Bush campaign insists it isn’t engaging in “voter suppression,” but aides acknowledge they do hope to dissuade some independents and Democrats from coming to the polls.

South Carolina’s Democratic Party decided to hold caucuses rather than a primary this year, so more Democrats than usual may decide to vote in the GOP primary.

“I think the wild card in this is the Democrats,” Bush said. “I never thought I’d be running for president of the United States and saying, ‘Gosh, I wonder how many Democrats are going to vote in the Republican primary?’ ”

In fact, polls suggest independents are more likely to show up and vote for McCain than Democrats.

In either case, turnout is key, said Jack Bass, a scholar of Southern politics at the College of Charleston.

“They’ve finally wakened up,” he said of the Bush campaign. “Until last week, they were fighting the last war. The fact that this primary has taken on national significance . . . is going to stimulate turnout enormously.”

This will put a premium on old-fashioned organization--each campaign’s ability to get its people to the polls on election day. Bush’s reliance on the GOP old guard’s existing organization suggests he hasn’t renounced all the advantages of being an establishment candidate.

Meanwhile, the Bush campaign is setting up three town meetings a day so the retooled candidate can take the voters’ questions.

Bush turns out to be good at the format--folksy and unflappable. He tends to get tired and garble his answers on days when he hasn’t gone running, so he’s told aides to set aside time for exercise every day. And as he did in his speech in the white cinder-block National Guard Armory here, he occasionally can make an audience roar.

He draws applause from conservative, virtually all-white audiences with his crisp answers on abortion (“When Congress passes a ban on partial-birth abortion, I will sign it.”) and the controversy over flying the Confederate flag over South Carolina’s state capitol (“It’s up to you.”).

He politely rebuts some questioners, like those who demand draconian measures against immigration. “Family values don’t stop at the Rio Grande River,” he said.

“If you’re a mother and father with hungry children . . . you’re going to try to put food on the table. That’s reality. That’s called love.”

He fields friendly questions on his father and (more often) his mother with an aw-shucks grin. “He’s my dad. I love him. He’s not my political advisor; he’s my dad.”

He’s uncomfortable with questions about his religious faith. When a college student suggested that God had chosen Bush to lead the nation, the governor replied after a pause: “I’ve got a personal faith, but far be it from me to tell you this is God’s will. I don’t get to put words in God’s mouth and neither do you.”

In Gaffney, a blue-collar town of small farms and textile mills deep in the state’s hilly upcountry, some listeners were swayed and some were not.

“I’ve been straddling the fence, going back and forth, but after hearing him tonight I think I’ll go with Bush,” said Polly McGee, 52, a medical secretary. “Most of the people I’ve talked with have been basically undecided, though.”

In the back of the room, state Sen. Harvey Peeler, a scion of Gaffney’s GOP dynasty (his brother Bob is lieutenant governor), surveyed the enthusiastic crowd with a practiced eye.

“The more of this kind of meeting [Bush] goes to, the better off he is. It’s a real horse race. I think the Democrats and the independents are going to make the difference. The one who can appeal to them may make it.”

Meaning McCain?

Peeler, a Bush supporter, hedged. “It’s going to be very close.”