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"Scam" ads the norm Trail Mix: Hillary haters spam cyberspace Gunning for the center Democrats make Hillary legit The blundering pundit Don Giuliani Campaign video: |
Smells like team spirit
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March 6, 2000 | It's hard to get excited about much of anything when you follow a candidate for months, watching him give the same stump speech over and over again. Even those of us who hop back and forth among the different candidates get tired of the routine. But it sharpens your ear to nuance, and every little addition or subtraction to a stump speech becomes a media event. The latest addition to the Bush repertoire is his use of the word "standard-bearer" to refer to himself, which he did more than a dozen times in Oakland, and many more times in his speeches throughout the day. Perhaps more significant, strategically speaking, is that any mention at all of McCain has disappeared from Bush's stock remarks. Bush's latest California swing, which culminates with a "Tonight Show" appearance on Monday night, was like stepping into a time warp. Suddenly, we were all back in the summer of '99, a time when Bush was the unchallenged GOP front-runner, and McCain was but a twinkle in the soon-to-be-adoring eyes of the national media. Watching the Bush victory march through California Sunday was to remember a simpler time for the Republican Party, when it was united behind a Texas governor who had been elected to a second term with unprecedented margins, including record support from Latinos and women.
Once again, it is a time without an immediate sense of urgency, probably because most polls show Bush's lead growing here, both among Republican voters and in the so-called beauty contest in which independent and Democratic voters can participate. In fact, the only indication that there is an election at all Tuesday was the familiar Bush refrain that he uses as a lead into election days. "There's something in the air here in the great state of [fill in the blank]," goes the routine. "It's called victory!" All of his speeches in California began with this riff, but with this sixth sense, Bush is batting only 2 for 4. He was wrong on Feb. 1 in New Hampshire, right two weeks later in South Carolina, wrong again in Michigan and Arizona and right on the money Tuesday in Virginia and North Dakota. (His presumed victory in the beauty contest in Washington state has not yet been confirmed.) As for this week's showdown, even pundits who have been uncharacteristically humbled by the seesaw nature of the early primaries are predicting now that Bush will win the state's 162 Republican delegates Tuesday night. The only remaining intrigue in California is whether McCain can pull out a victory in the state's blanket primary, where he is currently neck-and-neck with Bush. A split decision in California coupled with a McCain victory in New York and a sweep of New England would set the TV talk show circuit abuzz yet again, with journalists and junkies spinning all sorts of tales of political intrigue, hypothetical scenarios and a potential showdown on the floor of the Republican National Convention this summer in Philadelphia.
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