The democratic myth machine: about John McCain and Max Cleland, those (alleged) political martyrs.

IF you spend much time listening to John Kerry, Democratic chairman Terry McAuliffe, or any of a host of other national party leaders, you'll hear lots of references to something called the "Republican smear machine." Sometimes it's called the "Bush smear machine," or the "attack machine," but in each case Democrats use the phrase to describe what they claim is a pattern of dirty politics by the president and his GOP supporters in recent elections.

Now, Democrats charge, Republicans are at it again. "George Bush and the Republican smear machine have begun trotting out the same old tired lines of attack," Kerry said during a February campaign appearance in Virginia. In years past, Democrats have taken it lying down, Kerry explained, but now things are different. "This is one Democrat who's going to fight back," he vowed. "I've only just begun to fight."

While Kerry and his fellow Democrats claim that Republicans have been guilty of all sorts of dirty tricks over the years, the "smear machine" allegation actually refers to two very specific instances in which Democrats believe--or at least would like their audiences to believe--that Republicans have smeared and bullied their way to victory over more principled opponents. "It was the Republicans who went after John McCain and attacked his patriotism, attacked his wife, attacked his children," McAuliffe said recently, referring to George W. Bush's victory in the 2000 primaries. "[And] it was the Republicans who went after Max Cleland, a triple amputee, and put up pictures with him and Saddam Hussein," McAuliffe continued, referring to the Georgia senator's defeat at the hands of GOP challenger Saxby Chambliss in 2002.

By now, the idea that both McCain and Cleland were victims of the Republican attack machine has become accepted wisdom. But is it true? A look at what really happened in 2000 and 2002 suggests that the conventional wisdom is more wishful thinking than fact.

THE MCCAIN MYTH

The allegation against Bush in the McCain affair stems almost entirely from the 2000 South Carolina primary. McCain had beaten Bush badly in New Hampshire, and Bush might have been knocked out of the race if he had lost again in South Carolina. Therefore, according to the Democratic scenario, Bush viciously attacked McCain, smearing him with a so-called "push poll" in which the Bush campaign or its supporters called thousands of voters, ostensibly for the purpose of taking a poll, but actually to spread negative personal information about McCain. Only by resorting to underhanded tactics, the story goes, was Bush able to win South Carolina and, later, the GOP nomination.

Even though the campaign was hard fought from the beginning, the controversy really began on Feb. 10, 2000, nine days before the primary. McCain held a town-hall meeting in Spartanburg, and a woman named Donna Duren said her 14-year-old son, who idolized McCain, had answered the phone the night before and had become distressed. "He was so upset," Duren told McCain. "He said, 'Mom, someone told me that Senator McCain is a cheat and a liar and a fraud.'" "What you've just told me has had a very profound effect on me," McCain told Duren. He subsequently sent an impassioned message to Bush: "I'm calling on my good friend George Bush to stop this now. He comes from a better family. He knows better than this." Duren's story became a staple of McCain's campaign. He told it at a debate, in stump speeches, and on TV. But despite all the attention McCain lavished on the tale, there was no evidence, beyond Duren's testimony, that it was true.

The Bush campaign had hired an out-of-state company to make about 200,000 "advocacy" calls to voters. After McCain's criticism, the campaign released the script of those calls. The script said Bush was "working hard and stressing his message of reform with results." It went on to say, "Unfortunately, the race has turned ugly," and urged listeners, "Don't be misled by McCain's negative tactics." It ended with more positive words about Bush. There was no mention of cheats or liars or frauds.

Nearly a week after McCain's initial accusations, the Los Angeles Times looked into the matter. The paper found voters who had received the "advocacy" calls, but none who had received a call like the one described by Duren. "The McCain campaign has provided the names of only six voters complaining about calls from the Bush side," the paper said. Of the voters the Times's reporters could reach, "three described questions that, while negative, appear to have been part of a legitimate poll. Another said she heard no negative information at all." The paper found no one who supported Duren's accusation.

The lack of evidence, while not proof that the call story was untrue, is nevertheless telling. Republican strategists point out that in controversies over mass callings, there has almost always been a tape of the calls, usually made by the answering machines of voters who received them. When Pat Robertson made a negative call on Bush's behalf in Michigan, for example, the story ended up on the front page of the New York Times, because someone had a tape of it. Likewise, when the McCain campaign made its infamous anti-Bush "Catholic voter alert" calls in Michigan, there was taped evidence. But there was no such evidence of the "cheat/liar/fraud" calls.

"If those calls took place, then where is the tape?" asks one GOP strategist. "You can't make more than five phone calls and not have it end up on somebody's answering machine. They've never been able to produce the individual who made the calls, they've never been able to produce the phone vendor who made the calls, and they've never been able to produce a script or a tape recording."

The same was true of rumors of other "push poll" calls that allegedly claimed that McCain had fathered an illegitimate mixed-race child. Although later commentary has simply accepted the existence of such calls as fact--in January of this year, National Public Radio's Linda Wertheimer reported that "mysterious callers posing as pollsters asked voters how they felt about John McCain's black child"--there is no hard evidence that the calls occurred.

That is not to say there was no low-road campaigning. A Bob Jones University professor named Richard Hand, who had no connection to the Bush forces, sent out an e-mail containing a variety of charges against McCain, including the one that he had fathered illegitimate children. But in that case, there was evidence of the smear: the e-mail. Hand's name quickly became public, and his message was discredited.

McCain, meanwhile, was doing real, substantial things to lose the race. He alienated a number of party loyalists by openly courting the support of Democrats. "I say to independents, Democrats, Libertarians, vegetarians, come on over," McCain said at rally after rally. McCain further alienated GOP voters with a negative ad saying that Bush "twists the truth like Clinton. We're all pretty tired of that." Bush's response got a lot of applause in the final debate when he told McCain, "Whatever you do, don't equate my integrity and trustworthiness to Bill Clinton. That's about as low a blow as you can give in a Republican primary." In the end, McCain lost, with 42 percent to Bush's 53 percent. Among Republicans, McCain lost big, with 26 percent to Bush's 69 percent. "The things that beat him in South Carolina were when he compared Bush to Clinton and he publicly encouraged liberals and Democrats to vote for him in the primary," says the Republican strategist.

Nevertheless, the myth of the anti-McCain smear persists, cited on a regular basis by the Kerry campaign. In early March, when for a few hours McCain fueled speculation that he might become Kerry's running mate, a Kerry spokesman took the opportunity to bring it all up again. "The Republican party shamed itself in 2000," the spokesman told the New York Daily News, "when they allowed the Bush attack machine to smear John McCain."

MAD MAX

The other enduring Democratic grievance is the 2002 re-election loss of Democratic senator Max Cleland of Georgia. Cleland, the veteran who lost both legs and an arm in a grenade explosion in Vietnam, ran against Republican Saxby Chambliss, then a four-term member of the House. Campaign watchers knew the race would be tough for Cleland. In 1996, he won a very narrow victory, defeating his Republican opponent by 30,024 votes out of 2.25 million cast. Since that time, Cleland had built a voting record that ran contrary to the wishes of a significant portion of the generally conservative Georgia electorate. In 1999, for example, Cleland earned a 100 percent rating from the liberal Americans for Democratic Action, and a zero from the American Conservative Union.

Chambliss hammered away at Cleland's voting record. One of Chambliss's early successes was a series of simple, low-budget, and very effective ten-second ads. In each ad, a black screen with white lettering appeared, with a woman narrating. One ad said, "Max Cleland voted three times to make partial-birth abortions legal." The screen changed to a photo of Cleland, and the narrator said, "Why would he do that?" Another ad said, "Max Cleland voted to ban the Boy Scouts from meeting in public schools. Why would he do that?" A half-dozen others followed the same formula.

For his part, Cleland ran ads accusing Chambliss of wanting to gut Medicare and deny health benefits to the poor. One such ad ended: "The more you learn about Saxby Chambliss, the sicker you get." But the issue that drew the most attention in the ad war was national security. President Bush was then urging Congress to give the new Department of Homeland Security the flexibility to hire and fire workers without going through some of the union processes that were impeding personnel decisions in other government departments. The Senate Democratic leadership, backed by their union supporters, opposed the president. Georgia's other Democratic senator, Zell Miller, sided with the president. Cleland sided with the Democratic leadership.

Chambliss began to make it an issue in the campaign. On Sept. 30, 2002, he wrote Cleland a letter, saying, "I implore you to reconsider your current position against President Bush. I urge you to join Senator Miller [on this issue]." Cleland did not change his position, but, sensitive to the political risks involved, made a campaign commercial saying he supported the president's homelandsecurity efforts. Like many of Cleland's other ads, it ended with the phrase, "Max Cleland--the courage to lead."

That was too much for the Chambliss campaign. "He ran an ad showing him with the president, saying he voted with the president to support homeland security," Chambliss recalls. "That was just wrong." The Chambliss campaign came up with a now-notorious ad in response. The ad opened with a split-screen picture. In the upper left was video of Osama bin Laden. In the upper right was video of U.S. soldiers. In the lower left was video of U.S. fighter planes, and in the lower right was video of Saddam Hussein. The narration said, "As America faces terrorists and extremist dictators, Max Cleland runs television ads claiming he has the courage to lead." The video changed to pictures of Cleland, with the narration continuing: "He says he supports President Bush at every opportunity, but that's not the truth. Since July, Max Cleland has voted against the president's vital homeland-security efforts eleven times. Max Cleland says he has the courage to lead. But the record proves Max Cleland is just misleading."

Cleland and his supporters went ballistic, claiming the ad questioned his patriotism and belittled his Vietnam service. "I don't have to prove my patriotism to anybody," Cleland said. "I volunteered to defend my country 35 years ago and served in the war of my generation. The individual who's made those attacks on me never served in the American military at all." But Cleland had a tough time convincing voters that the ad in fact impugned his patriotism. Chambliss kept running the ad (although he took out the pictures of bin Laden and Saddam). And Cleland suffered a real blow on the national-security front when the Veterans of Foreign Wars endorsed Chambliss, saying the Republican was "more supportive of our legislative agenda."

Cleland lost, with 46 percent to Chambliss's 53 percent. But after his defeat, Cleland's fellow Democrats kept up the campaign. Sen. Patrick Leahy called Chambliss "a draft dodger who attacked Senator Cleland on his patriotism." Kerry called it "one of the most despicable campaigns ever conducted." Liberal columnists took up the charge. Still, there's no indication the voting results were about anything other than Cleland's record as a senator. He had originally won a Senate seat on the strength of his record as Georgia secretary of state and on his service in Vietnam. The 2002 election was the first time Cleland had to run on a voting record, and he found it tough going. "He didn't want to answer for his voting record," Chambliss recalls. "He sent up the smokescreen about questioning his patriotism."

Even Zell Miller, Cleland's friend and defender who says he still considers the ad, or at least the inclusion of bin Laden's picture, a "low blow," doesn't blame the commercial for Cleland's defeat. "I think the reason he lost is because the Democratic leadership in the Senate, eleven different times, asked him and put pressure on him to vote against the Homeland Security bill that the Democratic leadership and the employees' unions were opposing," Miller says. "If you vote the Democratic party line in Washington ... you can't do that and be re-elected in Georgia."

THE CONTINUING CAMPAIGN

In some circles today, it has simply become accepted wisdom that Cleland and McCain lost because of unethical Republican tactics. That, in turn, has become a key argument of the Kerry campaign as it seeks to preemptively tag Republicans with the dirty-campaigning label. For example, when Chambliss criticized Kerry's Senate voting record, a Kerry spokesman said, "The GOP has unleashed the same partisans they used to smear John McCain and Max Cleland in an orchestrated attack against John Kerry."

Such statements will undoubtedly come up again and again as the campaign proceeds. The McCain and Cleland myths are important to Democrats not only because they explain electoral defeats in terms of Republican misconduct, but also because they give John Kerry an all-purpose response to Republicans who question his record. Yet it's not clear that such a response will work any better in 2004 than it did in 2000 and 2002. The president's campaign will not be brushed back by Democratic complaints, and voters will likely make their decision based on their assessment of each man's performance in office. Bush will question Kerry's record, and Kerry will question Bush's. That's fair. "An honest look at someone's voting record is not a personal attack, nor is it a smear against someone," says Sen. Miller. "Questioning one's voting record is not questioning one's patriotism."