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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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Forget the fact that the footballer's only being nice because he needs the frosh to help him cram for his exams -- the attention still feels good.

McCain says his accessibility to the media is also something he learned from mistakes made during the Dole campaign. In an R.V. packed with reporters, as we drove from a diner in Lexington to a women's college in Spartanburg, McCain -- gregarious, funny and outspoken as always -- sat and chatted with us and explained why he, unlike any other major candidate, hung out with us so often, as he was doing at that very moment.

"I learned in the Dole campaign, and maybe I over-learned, OK? I'm sure that I've over-learned things all my life, but when Dole cut off relations with the media because of the tobacco flap ... I don't think it was helpful to his campaign at all."

McCain said it was an error in judgment, "when [Dole] had a group of people in the back of the airplane that were trying to do their jobs -- which required some kind of interface with the media -- and his campaign people cut off a guy who, one of his greatest assets was his relations with the media.

"A lot of the people on that plane knew him for years and they liked him. What do I mean by 'liked him' -- they would not sandbag him because maybe he said too much, because they knew him very well. So again, maybe you over-learn those lessons, but the people on the back of that plane were very unhappy and they were unhappy because they couldn't do their job. Their job was to cover the candidate. How can you cover the candidate if you're not allowed to speak to him?"

"Do you think the media's too liberal?" I asked.

"Sure," he joked. "Buncha commies." He turned to one reporter and laughingly accused her of being "one of the few Trotskyites left in America."

"I think the bias of the media probably is left of center if I had to judge it in its entirety," he said. "But now there's so much media in America today. There's Rush Limbaugh. There's the guy who broadcasts in Nevada about all of those conspiracies -- what's his name? Bell. He has one of the highest ratings in America ... So I don't think this 'liberal or conservative bias' has any role. I think the overwhelming majority of people in the media report stories in as objective a fashion as they can."

I asked him how much he actually liked us, and how much he was schmoozing us so we would write nice stories about him.

"I'm a great suck-up," he joked. "It's the worst kind of shameless behavior."

He motioned to his campaign consultants, his somewhat gloomy political director John Weaver and impish strategist Mike Murphy. "But if I didn't [spend time with reporters] I'd have to spend time with the exciting, wonderful, 'Sunny' John Weaver, who always brightens every room he walks into. Or Murphy -- [I'd have to] listen to his bullshit for hours on end. Look at the options I have!" He joked that he only keeps Weaver and Murphy on his payroll because "deep down I have a fundamental sense of charity."

"Murphy is very entertaining," McCain went on. "When the temper thing was going on, Murphy says, 'Here's what you're gonna do. We're gonna say "banjo" and you're GONNA GO CRAZY!'"

We all were in hysterics.

"It's gonna be 'Operation Banjo,'" McCain laughed.

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