McCain Aims for Turnout; Bush Attacks

John McCain focused all efforts Thursday on getting a large turnout for Saturday’s primary in South Carolina, while George W. Bush continued attacking his chief opponent for negative campaigning.

McCain also found himself answering questions about his use of a racial slur to refer to his Vietnamese prison guards.

But the main theme Thursday on McCain’s Straight Talk Express bus was turnout, turnout, turnout.

“It’s neck and neck,” McCain said of the contest before attending a rally with booming techno music in Greenville. “It all comes down to voter turnout.”

Getting voters to the ballot box is make-or-break for McCain in winning the South Carolina contest. Recent polls have shown him running far ahead of Bush among independents and Democrats, who can vote in the state’s open Republican primary but don’t usually show up in big numbers.

The Texas governor holds a commanding lead among Republican voters--56% to 34% in a recent Mason-Dixon poll. But among all voters, the poll showed a tight race, with Bush ahead of McCain, 45% to 42%. Another poll, by Zogby/Reuters, showed the race even closer, with Bush at 43% and McCain at 42%. In both polls involving all voters, the results were well within the margin of error, meaning they were statistical ties.

Some state officials are predicting a turnout as high as 400,000 people, compared with about 230,000 in the 1996 presidential election.

During several rallies, McCain appeared confident, saying he felt the same burgeoning enthusiasm in South Carolina that he did in New Hampshire, where he won on the strength of independents and Democrats. “If we win here, I don’t see how we can really be stopped,” McCain said at a pancake breakfast in Spartanburg.

McCain spent much of the day calling on the Republican party to be more inclusive, but then, in a heated discussion on his bus, repeatedly referred to the guards who tortured him when he was a Vietnam prisoner of war as “gooks.” McCain insisted that he did not consider the word a racial epithet and said that he meant it only to apply to his interrogators.

McCain’s use of the term was first raised in an article in a magazine in December, and a reporter quizzed him on that article’s accuracy Thursday. McCain said that he would continue to use the term to refer to his torturers.

“I’m referring to our prison guards. I will continue to refer to them in probably language that might offend some people here because of their beating and torturing and killing of my friends,” he said.

For his part, Bush swung through the Lowcountry and Pee Dee areas, attending rallies, giving interviews and shaking hands. He repeatedly charged that McCain had broken his pledge to forgo negative advertising.

Holding up copies of a McCain brochure at a news conference in Florence, he blasted the senator from Arizona: “He now says he’s going to continue to use it and it’s factual. It says I want to nationalize schools. There’s nothing factual about that. It says I’m going to spend 100% of the surplus. There’s nothing factual about that.”

McCain shook his head when asked about Bush’s charges, saying he wanted to stop “finger pointing.” However, he said he didn’t consider the flier to be a negative attack.