Fire And Brimstone

By NANCY GIBBS

The funny thing about the Holy War now raging in the Republican Party is that there was never supposed to be one--not this time, not after eight years in the wilderness, not after Gingrich flamed out, not after one faithful conservative candidate after another collapsed in ruins in 1998. Leave the fratricide to the Democrats; leave the theological weight lifting to Forbes and Keyes and Bauer and Quayle. Both George W. Bush and John McCain were heirs to the victory wing of the party, not the purity wing; both based their appeal on being conservative enough to win the purists but expansive enough to capture the radical center as well.

So how is it that fire and brimstone were raining down on the candidates last week as they alternately attacked each other's positions and apologized for their own--much to the delight of Democrats watching from the sidelines and imagining that neither man could emerge from this inferno unscarred? McCain embarked on what looked very much like a kamikaze run, flying straight into the heart of Christian evangelicalism and declaring, in a speech in Virginia Beach, Va., that "neither party should be defined by pandering to the outer reaches of American politics and the agents of intolerance, whether they be Louis Farrakhan or Al Sharpton on the left, or Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell on the right." And then, for good measure, a day later McCain branded G.O.P. clerics "evil" as Bush went on to sweep all three Tuesday primaries by comfy margins.

It seems that both victory and defeat have a way of changing people, rewiring the circuits and rewriting the scripts. The theme of brotherly love disappeared when Bush had the wits scared out of him in New Hampshire and discovered he would have to give up his pound of flesh to the right wing after all; when Bush allies passed out leaflets about Cindy McCain's past addiction to painkillers; when McCain slashed back by suggesting that Bush was intolerant in reaching out to the Fundamentalists at Bob Jones University. Even before last week, the race that was supposed to be cheap and easy and over by now had grown ugly and expensive and long.

It all sounded so personal that it was easy to miss that the war was less about ideology than about power. McCain could claim that his assault last week on leaders of the religious establishment was just his latest rage against the machine, to tell Republicans that they cannot hope to draw people into the fold if they continue to be obsessed with soft money or partisan power or ideological purity. But when he went too far and called the mullahs evil, he allowed the Texans to whisper once more that McCain was simply not steady enough to carry the flag for his or any other party. All Bush needed to do was persuade his team to quiet down, quote Scripture, turn the other cheek and hope McCain would hang himself.

"No matter what happens," McCain told TIME last week, "we have changed the Republican Party." But will the effort cost him his chance to lead it?

The thing to remember about the McCain campaign is that even if the candidate sees himself in epic Hollywood terms, the campaign has more of a "rambling" quality, as an aide described it. Having reinvented primary strategy by skipping Iowa and media strategy by his constant skinny-dipping with the press corps, McCain was now ready for the next improvisation. These turning points tend to just happen, as much for tactical reasons as for theological ones. "The campaign is organic" is a favorite phrase used by McCain's aides. "It becomes what the candidate becomes."

The idea of going to Virginia Beach and throwing down the gauntlet arose at McCain's Arizona ranch two Fridays ago in the happy aftermath of his victories in Arizona and Michigan. McCain's advisers had seen how attacking Bush for speaking at Bob Jones University had put him on the defensive and helped them in the swing state of Michigan. "This was a way to keep him in that South Carolina box for another week," said a top adviser. Even if Virginians didn't like the message, surely folks in Ohio, New York and California would. It was to be a neat mix of principle and pragmatism. "I'm sick of shady theocrats," said strategist Mike Murphy, "and I'm tired of losing."

But there were more personal motives as well. McCain always needs something to push against. Whether it's the iron triangle of "lobbyists, legislation and money" or his Senate colleagues, McCain is most comfortable when he's up against the barricades. "In John's mind--he doesn't articulate it all that well--this was about going beyond the narrowest of interests, doing something fine, noble, enduring, all those things he intuitively understands," said an adviser. And what's the point of launching a crusade if you don't go straight to the enemy's backyard? "It instantly felt right. We would be allegorically doing what Bush should have done at Bob Jones University."

Mark Salter, McCain's Cyrano, pounded out the speech in two hours on Sunday afternoon. Among those who vetted the draft was Gary Bauer, the Christian conservative who signed on with McCain after he dropped out of the race and who the campaign hoped could help guide them through the evangelical minefields. But Bauer had scores of his own to settle--a longstanding rivalry with Robertson and a rift with Bauer's old mentor James Dobson that was in need of patching up. It was Bauer who urged McCain to praise some "good" Evangelicals, like Dobson and Charles Colson, so that he would not appear to be slamming all Christian leaders indiscriminately. Never mind that Dobson had hammered McCain a few weeks earlier for his failed first marriage and other moral lapses.

The speech was supposed to be a bold call for unity and understanding, not a jihad. McCain ended with a story of one of his Vietnamese captors, the "Good Samaritan" who loosened McCain's torture ropes. On Christmas, when McCain stood alone in the courtyard, the captor walked up to him and with his sandal drew a cross in the dirt. "Both prisoner and guard stood wordlessly there for a minute or two, venerating the cross, until the guard rubbed it out and walked away," said McCain, using the third person because Salter was worried that McCain would choke up otherwise. The message was one of tolerance and unity between two enemies. "This is my faith," said McCain. "The faith that unites and never divides, the faith that bridges unbridgeable gaps in humanity. That is my religious faith, and it is the faith I want my party to serve and the faith I hold in my country."

As McCain gave the speech, his devoted aides could hear the Hallelujah Chorus. "It may be the biggest moment of the campaign," says Salter. "It just felt right." Aides hugged on the spot. They high-fived each other. Political director John Weaver had tears in his eyes. "It's confrontational politics that have worked for us," says campaign manager Rick Davis, "and we had to put a little drama into the campaign. We need to get people excited. If they don't get excited, they don't come out. And if they don't come out, we lose."

The problem is that the people who got most excited were the ones who felt McCain had attacked them and not just their nominal leaders. Most voters never saw the full text; they heard only the parts of the speech where McCain named names and threw fire bombs. Evangelicals have never been a monolithic group; many of them have their differences with the Robertson crowd and are far more tolerant than the Bob Jones wing. And yet many took McCain's salvo personally, as an attack on their convictions and their role in the Republican coalition. Bush's 9-point margin in Virginia the next day owed a lot to the fact that Christian conservatives turned out in large numbers and voted for him 4 to 1, an even higher ratio than in past races.

The Bush team doesn't pretend that it never worried about how McCain's speech might play, especially in states like New York and California. Had it been more about the entrenched Establishment in general and less a personal salvo against Robertson and company, the speech might have worried them more. "There are artful ways of making this work," chirped a senior Bush official, "but McCain is inartful." Bush allies delighted in pointing out the inconsistencies that have been piling up for a while now. McCain attacked Bush for speaking at Bob Jones University, even though Congressman Lindsey Graham, who was never far from McCain's side all through South Carolina, received an honorary degree there last year. McCain attacked Robertson, even though when the Senator appeared on the 700 Club in 1995 he had nothing but kind words. He promises at every stop that he'll never lie, but changed his story about whether his campaign was behind the Catholic Voter Alert calls--calls that implied Bush was a religious bigot or at least willing to tolerate those who were. Was that not negative and divisive in the way McCain had promised never to be?

And it got worse from there. Any Evangelicals left on the fence after Monday probably toppled off the next day, when McCain was pressed to elaborate on his speech. Up until now, the Straight Talk Express has been a rare rolling laboratory where reporters--and by extension, voters--could see the inside of the candidate's head, his mood swings, his flights of fancy, his blind spots. But the nature of these sessions has changed. It's no longer about getting to know the amusing long shot. It's about testing his mettle. So the gaffes, all of which are revealing, are coming faster and more frequently.

McCain was just sloppy and tired, his aides say, when he began talking about Falwell's and Robertson's "evil influence" on the G.O.P. Though he later tried to say that he had been joking, that this was all part of his Luke Skywalker routine, the comments were much edgier than that. "You're supposed to tolerate evil in your party in the name of party unity?" he asked rhetorically. This is often the way McCain talks. He divides the world between good and evil, and when he is talking about someone he truly reviles, like his Senate foe Mitch McConnell, you can see him squint and grow cold with contempt. McCain's rift with Robertson is nowhere near that intense, but it was a kind of divine justice that reporters last week took him at his word.

It was all the more painful because the uproar over his "evil" remarks erased the nuance in his original argument. Bauer went from defending McCain to demanding that he retract his "unwarranted, ill-advised and divisive attacks on certain religious leaders." Every stop required another clarification, another apology. "We've made a lot of mistakes in this campaign," said McCain on Thursday at a press conference where he desperately tried to bring the subject back to other issues. "Primarily because we don't have the most brilliant candidate."

The Bush team, for its part, was doing everything it could to stay out of the way and let McCain hang himself. "Amazing!" declared a delighted senior Bushie. "McCain is self-immolating. Why do anything but watch?" Although they have insisted all along that they had nothing to do with Robertson's phone calls on Bush's behalf, they sent out the message through surrogates that Robertson should quiet down, stay off TV and off the attack. "It's the first time in the history of Christian Fundamentalism that Jerry Falwell has said 'No comment' two days running," quipped Michael Cromartie of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. And when Falwell did finally respond, it was simply to say McCain was having a bad day.

Meanwhile, after weeks of fudging, Bush sent a letter of apology to New York's John Cardinal O'Connor (though not to leaders of any of the other faiths that might have felt equally aggrieved), saying he regretted not speaking out earlier against intolerance at Bob Jones. (By week's end, tired of the rumpus, Bob Jones III told Larry King the university would lift its ban on interracial dating.) Bush spent the week surrounding himself with Roman Catholic supporters and clerics, visiting Catholic charities and generally waltzing back toward the center and the soothing themes he was singing last summer. When he campaigned in Georgia, conservative adviser Ralph Reed was nowhere in sight--because he was keeping out of sight, meeting with Bush away from the public and the press. Meanwhile, Reed and his firm continue to do mailings and phone-bank work for Bush in key states like California, targeting the homes of self-identified social-conservative voters.

Once again the dirty work was left to others. Major Bush backers financed a last-minute multimillion-dollar advertising barrage attacking McCain's environmental record while praising Bush--the kind of shady, unregulated dirty trick McCain has been railing against for so many years in the Senate. The candidate was powerless to respond. For his part, Bush was running ads in New York charging McCain with voting against breast-cancer research. When the Governor was asked whether he knew that McCain's sister had had the disease, his response was ice cold: "All the more reason to remind him of what he said about the research that goes on here." Back on his bus, McCain--who has voted to increase breast-cancer research--was not replying when reporters pressed for a response to Bush's remark. Nothing. He said he talked too much, was too open, and it kept getting him into trouble. And so he left it at this: "I hope my sister wasn't watching the news tonight."

--Reported by James Carney with Bush and John F. Dickerson and Priscilla Painton with McCain

With reporting by James Carney with Bush and John F. Dickerson and Priscilla Painton with McCain