McCain, Bush Get Back to Basics in S.C.

After toying with their styles and tweaking their strategies, John McCain and George W. Bush were back to basics Monday as they opened the final days of campaigning before South Carolina’s crucial GOP primary.

Amid a flurry of polls showing him narrowly trailing Bush, McCain returned to the core themes of political reform that helped him forge his landslide victory in New Hampshire.

Appearing before large crowds in Anderson and Greenwood, the Arizona senator highlighted his decision last week to pull his TV ads criticizing Bush. “Whether we win or lose, we will not run any negative ads in this campaign,” he said to loud applause at his first stop, in Anderson in the northwest corner of the state.

Texas Gov. Bush, in the meantime, scored big ovations by pushing his familiar themes of local control of schools, tax cuts and increased military spending. “It’s not the government’s money when we’re talking about a surplus,” he told supporters in North Augusta. “It’s the people’s money. I’ve been a tax cutter in Texas and a tax reformer, and I’ll be the same thing in Washington, D.C.”

Asked by a black man about the controversy concerning the Confederate flag that flies atop the South Carolina statehouse, Bush drew cheers from the mostly white audience when he gave his stock states’ rights answer: “This is an issue in your state that is only going to be solved by the people of your state.”

With recent surveys, including one by The Times, showing Bush opening a commanding lead among conservative voters here, McCain spent the day trying to shore up his standing with the right. At a lunchtime rally in Greenwood, he unveiled an endorsement from South Carolina Secretary of State Jim Miles, who had headed Steve Forbes’ campaign in the state. Forbes dropped out of the race last week.

“I am a prototype conservative, and when I hear people say a man who has a 17-year conservative voting record is not a conservative, that offends me; that’s just not right,” Miles said while introducing McCain.

Miles said he told McCain last week that he would vote for him but had intended not to make a public endorsement, out of respect for Forbes. But Miles said he changed his mind after watching Bush’s TV ads criticizing McCain. “I got so tired of hearing the negative attacks that were being run against an American hero,” he told the crowd.

McCain pressed with gusto his promise to curb pork-barrel spending in Congress. “Two million to study the effect of the ozone level on flatulence in cows,” he said, with theatrical incredulity during a stop in Anderson. “How many people know that we spent a couple of million dollars on manure handling and disposal in Starkville, Miss.? How many Americans know we spent $235 million for a helicopter carrier that the Navy neither needs nor wants?” He was referring to a carrier built in Pascagoula, Miss., by Litton Industries Inc.

Reporters asked McCain if it was coincidence that his final two examples of wasteful spending were both programs directed at Mississippi--the home of Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, who has sparred with McCain repeatedly in Congress and has been cool toward his campaign. “It’s only coincidence,” McCain answered, laughing. “Manure handling and cleanup. What’s going on in Starkville? What’s going on?”

McCain also stressed veterans’ issues during the day, traveling with several former prisoners of war and appearing at an evening rally in Aiken billed as “A Salute to Veterans.” One measure of the heavy presence of veterans was the high percentage of questions addressing veterans’ issues that McCain fielded from audience members.

At his own town meetings across the state, the new, more open and accessible Bush answered questions about issues ranging from Israel and foreign trade to taxes, education and drugs. But the question that seemed to stop him in his tracks came in Saluda, from a sympathetic former Texan: “What is the No. 1 misperception of you that’s keeping you from getting all the votes you deserve?”

He paused. And he paused. And then he punted with a joke: “A lady walked up to me at church the other day and said my hair’s too short. . . . Sometimes the filter’s a little rough. Sometimes the people don’t get the full picture of me being able to relate to people. I think that’s my strength, I can relate to people.”

The third Republican in the race, Alan Keyes, went to Greenville to visit Bob Jones University, a school that bans interracial dating, and said religious and racial intolerance must end. “There are folks who told me I shouldn’t come here because I am a black man and--I say it with pride--a Roman Catholic Christian, and I would not be received in that place on that account,” he said to nearly 6,500 people in Founder’s Memorial Amphitorium. “I have, thankfully, put the lie to that by coming.”

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Times political writer Mark Z. Barabak in Columbia, S.C., contributed to this story.