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Columbine High School shut down
In the wake of new chat room threats and the release of the killers' videotapes, wary school officials cancel the last two days of class.
By Dave Cullen
[12/17/99]

Bush and McCain go head-to-head
The GOP front-runner blasts his rival's plan for campaign-finance reform.
By Anthony York
[12/16/99]

Midnight rendezvous
Did attorneys for Kenneth Starr and Linda Tripp arrange a secret tape exchange to leak information to Newsweek?
By Joshua Micah Marshall
[12/16/99]

Will big business gobble up Ben and Jerry's?
A protest movement tries to make sure that Cherry Garcia is never owned by Nestlé.
By Kenneth Rapoza
[12/16/99]

As long as he doesn't sound gay
The mayoral candidate who articulated a growing angst in San Francisco may have been hurt at the polls because of the voice he said it in.
By Paul Festa
[12/16/99]

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In last year's gubernatorial race in South Carolina, video poker magnates utilized unregulated, unlimited "soft money" donations to topple their enemy, Republican Gov. David Beasley. It got ugly and slimy. The video poker interests funneled their new-found wealth, amassed largely from the not-so-spare change of ignorant poor people, into tens of millions of dollars in campaign checks to the state Democratic Party and to "independent" groups that ran issue ads targeting Beasley.

McCain is hoping that memories of that grim debacle will help residents of the Palmetto State understand why he's made campaign-finance reform his cause. "They've seen the influence of soft money and how it can affect the whole political scene," McCain says. "There's no doubt that huge amounts of money came into this state and that campaign."

McCain's maverick message has found takers in New Hampshire, where he leads Texas Gov. George W. Bush in most polls, and where on Thursday morning he and Democratic former Sen. Bill Bradley held a joint press conference pledging to refuse party soft money if they become their respective party nominees.

But a New Hampshire primary win does not a nomination make. So McCain is also looking about 1,000 miles south, to the state with an estimated 400,000 veterans -- the highest per capita population of vets in the nation -- whom the former Vietnam prisoner of war constantly urges to join him "on one last mission."

"We're still very far behind and I think the odds are still against success," McCain said. But the strategy to change that is fairly simple. "It's win New Hampshire, win South Carolina."

For this reason, McCain didn't even spend the night in Iowa -- a state he's written off -- after Monday's debate in Des Moines. He hopped on a plane and flew to Charleston, S.C., for his 18th trip to the state since November 1998.

McCain worked closely with former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole during his '96 run for the White House, and clearly looks to Dole's campaign for lessons. After seeing his campaign temporarily derailed by Pat Buchanan's New Hampshire upset, McCain says, Dole got his campaign back on track in South Carolina. McCain doesn't want to let Bush deflate any momentum from any New Hampshire bounce McCain may receive. So South Carolina "is critical," said McCain.

According to a new CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll, McCain and front-running Bush would enter a statistical tie if McCain were to win a few early primary victories. "This suggests that Bush's support is based partly on the perception that he is a winner, and might fade in the aftermath of several early season losses," the CNN analysis stated. "McCain's newfound strength is due to Americans knowing more about him, and in this case, familiarity breeds respect."

McCain's fighting odds are far worse than a rigged video poker machine. Bush has tons more money and the support of much of the GOP establishment, including the four highest South Carolina Republican officeholders -- the lieutenant governor, the speaker of the House, the attorney general, Sen. Strom Thurmond -- as well as popular ex-Gov. Caroll Campbell. To woo veterans, the Bush campaign has been running TV ads addressing national defense and has secured the support of the state adjutant general, who heads up the National Guard. In a late-November CNN/Time Magazine poll of likely South Carolina Republican primary voters, Bush led McCain 62 percent to 15 percent.

McCain's internal polls show that he has chipped away at that lead in the last three weeks, cutting Bush's lead from 47 points to 26. This slight erosion has proven to McCain strategists that Bush's lead is as soft and squishy as his candidacy, that his chief selling point has been his inevitability. They say that unlike New Hampshirites who are taught from womb on to live and breathe presidential primary politics, South Carolinians are only just beginning to pay attention to this race.

"Gov. Bush had inherited his father's organization which is very impressive here in South Carolina," says Rep. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., a member of the class of '94, a former House impeachment manager and one of McCain's two congressional endorsers in the state. "But here's the dynamic I see happening. This is the post-Clinton election. And in South Carolina, military service is much appreciated.

"The thing that John has going for him is his personal story attracts the attention of the voters," Graham says. "When you compare him with the Clinton era you have differences in every area that matters in South Carolina. You'll have a different commander in chief, one who understands the nature of the military and who's served himself. Look at the campaign problems you had with the president and his crowd ... and here you've got a guy who's willing to take money as much as he can out of politics. That's going to resonate well here."

But McCain is not just a contrast with Clinton -- he is noticeably different from his fellow GOP rivals. On Wednesday at Converse College here in Spartanburg, McCain -- on the defensive from Bush and Bush surrogates who lamely argue that campaign-finance reform is un-Republican -- took on the GOP establishment, arguing that the GOP needs "a grass-roots movement to lead our party back from a leadership that has too often forgotten our conservative purpose, and too often surrendered to Washington's big-money-driven status quo."

Graham, one of the leaders of the failed coup attempt against ex-Speaker Newt Gingrich, knows something about a GOP leadership he regards as failing its grass roots. He thinks that McCain will be able to succeed without the RNC's help. Graham, in fact, sees McCain as the leader who can pick up the pieces of the 1994 Republican revolution.

"If you want somebody that gets the spirit of '94 back into politics where we were going to take the government and reform it, John's your man," Graham said. "He's not for the inside-the-Beltway Republican machine. I think Bush is getting a lot of support from the special interests in this country 'cause he's a safe bet. John McCain scares them. And scaring them is going to please most South Carolinians."

McCain has seized on South Carolina because it is a state that fits him. McCain's campaign here, as everywhere, is all about his compelling bio and his campaign-finance reform battles. On Monday, McCain launched two radio ads all about his POW experience. The ads, "A Christmas Story" and "Forged by Fire," are both narrated by McCain's senior ranking officer and a fellow ex-POW, Lt. Col. George "Bud" Day.

"Christmas of 1971 was centered around scripture that John had gotten from the first Bible we had been able to get from the Vietnamese," Day says in the first radio ad. "John composed an extremely compelling sermon that night about the importance of Christmas ... I think it was certainly a shot to everyone's morale to hear those Christian words in that very un-Christianlike place."

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