GOP Candidates’ Character at the Fore in Low-Key Debate

In a low-key debate that allowed the underdogs a rare voice, the six Republican candidates for the presidential nomination tossed barbs Friday at front-runner George W. Bush, bashed the Clinton administration and revealed more about their character than their stands on the issues.

The increasingly testy spat over tax plans and the candidates’ varying views on campaign finance reform threaded its way through the hourlong debate, along with a paean to states’ rights and a recurring theme of race.

When asked if he found the Confederate flag, which flies above the South Carolina statehouse amid growing controversy, to be distasteful, Texas Gov. Bush dodged the question in front of an audience that was largely white and rich and had just been served dinner by a service staff that was largely black.

“I believe the people of South Carolina can figure out what to do with this flag issue,” he told the raucous audience, which cheered his answer. “It’s the people of South Carolina’s decision.”

The debate was watched by an audience of Republicans who paid $120 apiece for a fund-raising dinner for the state GOP. There was a cocktail reception tribute to Republican Sen. Strom Thurmond an hour before, and the bar remained open for the dinner.

The Confederate flag issue came up in the debate the same day that a three-day Confederate rally and reenactment began. Supporters waving Confederate flags rallied in front of the Statehouse as journalists and candidates arrived in the city Friday afternoon.

The issue of race reared up again more directly when publisher Steve Forbes asked conservative activist Gary Bauer if he would join in a demand that Vice President Al Gore fire his campaign manager, Donna Brazile, and apologize for her recent “racist remarks about Gen. [Colin L.] Powell and Rep. J.C. Watts [Jr.],” both well-known black Republicans.

“Steve, you’re absolutely right,” Bauer said. “We have watched while the Democratic Party has attempted to smear our party with charges of racism. . . . It is time for us to stand up. We are a party of great principles. Al Gore’s campaign manager ought to be ashamed of herself, and she ought to resign tonight.”

Brazile, who is African American, had said in an interview with Bloomberg.com, “The Republicans bring out Colin Powell and J.C. Watts because they have no program, no policy. . . . They’d rather take pictures with black children than feed them.”

The hectic pace of the debate schedule--two forums in as many days--began to tell on the candidates, who were meeting for the fifth time. And the very structured format didn’t help any, either. Unlike Thursday’s televised verbal combat, the debate’s greatest emotion was a sort of prickly fatigue.

Bush and Sen. John McCain of Arizona continued their roles as the leading men of the ongoing Republican debate drama, with Bauer taking a supporting role as chief conservative, and former ambassador Alan Keyes becoming more strident with each installment.

Until Friday, Forbes had played the role of the incredible shrinking candidate, making less and less impact with each forum and suffering through questions about why his largely self-financed efforts have not caught on with voters.

But at Friday’s debate, he was a greater presence, winning, for example, loud applause for declaring he was against taxing sales done on the Internet.

Friday’s exchanges often illuminated the candidates’ character. Never was this more obvious than when the men were asked to come clean about the biggest mistake of their adult life. The answers, save one, were largely self-serving.

Bauer, a former official in the Reagan administration, traded on his relationship with the popular former president, describing a time when he was asked to advise Reagan and dared to tell him about an opinion poll. “Gary, don’t cite a poll. Tell me what’s best to do for the American people,” Bauer recounted Reagan as saying.

Keyes first used the question to scold the moderators for what he said was their improper invasion of his private life and then repeated his anti-abortion theme. The biggest mistake of his public life was “not to have spoken out on the issue of the life of the unborn before I did.”

A joking Bush used his popular mom as a foil: “As you know, I’ve had a perfect background,” he said. “After all, I was raised by Barbara Bush.” Sen. Orrin G. Hatch of Utah quipped that he’d made so many mistakes he couldn’t recall a single one. Forbes apologized for columns he wrote as a young journalist at his eponymous magazine--columns that touted such adult-Forbes anathemas as raising the gas tax.

Like an earlier debate in which he told corn-crazy Iowans that he thought tax credits for the corn-based fuel ethanol were a bad idea, McCain showed a flash of real courage Friday.

Without giving details, he admitted his greatest error was attending a meeting with four other senators and the since-convicted Lincoln Savings & Loan executive Charles H. Keating Jr. He did not even tell the crowd that he had been absolved of wrongdoing in the Keating Five scandal and was not fully investigated in the affair.

The problem, he said, was “the appearance of impropriety. It is something that will always be a mark on my record and something people will judge me for for the rest of my life.”

Friday’s debate comes nearly two months before the Feb. 19 South Carolina primary, which McCain and Bush have both targeted as crucial to their nomination efforts.

While focusing on New Hampshire and Iowa in January, the Texas governor plans to spend much of February here, where war hero McCain has zeroed in on the large veteran population.

The front-running Texan leads the Arizona senator 54% to 21% in recent polling here; all others limp along in the low single digits.

Bush and McCain carried their ongoing battle over tax policy into the Friday debate, with McCain declaring that “it’s fiscally irresponsible to promise a huge tax cut that is based on a surplus that we might not have.”

Bush said his $483-billion, five-year tax cut does more for low-income Americans and added that “there is enough money to take care of Social Security. There is enough money to take care of the basic services of government, and there is enough money to give the people a substantial tax cut. And that’s what I intend to do.”

The tax spat took to the airwaves Friday when Forbes unleashed a new TV ad featuring a Texas tax advocate saying that Bush’s record on taxes “is a record of broken promises.”

Bush responded with a dig at Forbes’ static candidacy, saying earlier Friday in New Hampshire, “I don’t think it’s good for the process when candidates, when their political clock is ticking, don’t lay out all the facts.”

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Times staff writer Janet Wilson and researcher Massie Ritsch contributed to this story.