by Larry King
KING: But you would favor the exceptions.
BUSH: I would favor the exceptions.
This was something I just didn’t understand. And on the night of the Iowa caucus when we were more concerned with vote totals than another abortion debate, this wasn’t the moment to get into it. But if a person believes abortion is killing an unborn human being, trying to gradually slide into the three exceptions (a fetus that is the result of rape or incest or threatens the life of the mother) doesn’t change the fact it is still a human being. To me, it’s either one side of the street or the other. I’m not arguing for or against abortion, I’m just questioning the rationale that is used here. I’ve hosted hundreds of debates on radio and TV and at conferences on this issue, and I’m not certain if anyone has ever changed their mind as a result of the forums. It’s decided inside rather than in all the arguments outside.
While campaigning in New Hampshire, John McCain was asked about abortion too. But the question had a familiarring (read: Dan Quayle and Larry) because he had to answer what he’d do if his fifteen-year-old daughter became pregnant. McCain said it would be a family decision and not his daughter’s alone. Bush got the same question about his twin daughters and said it’s personal. It proved that a person can talk forcefully in public about this key issue, but when it becomes a family issue, there will be discussions about whose decision it ultimately becomes and what that decision will be.
We had assembled a panel for the Iowa counting that included former Texas Governor Ann Richards, who had become a “former” as a result of losing to George W., and Jack Kemp, who had run with Bob Dole four years earlier. As soon as I finished talking with Bush about abortion, Richards and Kemp started in:
RICHARDS: It is being brought by the guys who are running against him in his own party. And it’s a tar baby he can’t turn loose of.
KEMP: You know, with all due respect, will he be dogged by the left, the pro-abortion folks? Yes, absolutely.
KING: No, she’s saying he’ll be dogged by the right.
RICHARDS: I certainly hope so in the general election.
KEMP: Oh no, I disagree with that. He has clearly put himself on the side of that Reagan plank that was in the ’80 platform. He may get dogged by both the left and the right.
Bush was taking the position that any attempt to pass a constitutional amendment banning abortion would be defeated in the Senate. He was right on the money. And so he decided to slowly make the case why Roe v. Wade had to be overturned and, if a constitutional amendment went before the states, he would support the exceptions. The problem, however, was that the issue wasn’t going to be handled at his preferred pace. It never is, regardless of who’s running. But this already volatile topic was even more volatile because most believed the next president would select as many as four Supreme Court justices. And that could change the balance from no change in Roe v. Wade to overturning the 1973 decision.
The pundits had been right about Al Gore beating Bill Bradley. Still, it was a weird feeling to spend so much time talking about what might happen, or how something else could happen, or why it worked that way, and then have the hard facts appear in front of you. Bradley went down by a 2–1 margin. I always feel the air going out when possibilities become impossibilities. But if Bill Bradley felt the same way, he sure wasn’t giving any indication of plans to make an exit. Besides, we still hadn’t decided, even with the pundits at work twenty-four hours a day, if Iowa was a test.
For me, the news on the night of the Iowa caucus took place far from Des Moines. As the votes were being counted, I learned that Democratic strategist Bob Squier was dead at age sixty-five of colon cancer. We ended the show that night with a clip of an interview I had done with him six years earlier. He said this was a different time for politics and part of the reason was there were so many news outlets trying to find “the new in the news.” I looked around the Iowa set we were on, thought about the electronic town halls we were a part of, the questions being asked, and, of course, the speed at which it was all happening. Bob was talking about the year 2000 in 1994. Things were moving faster than I thought.
Non–electronic town halls, though, was how John McCain had been campaigning throughout New Hampshire. When I spoke with him on the night of the Iowa caucus, he had appeared at more than a hundred of these forums (and when it was over he would have attended 114). Since it is a pundit’s job, and to a lesser extent an interviewer’s, to connect the dots between events in the hope there might actually be some sort of cause and effect, I asked McCain to look ahead.
McCAIN: I see it very close. I see a large undecided, as always. I think some citizens in New Hampshire will change their mind three or four times between now and a week from tomorrow$#8230;I think the outcome is going to be very close.
KING: Will Iowa affect New Hampshire?
McCAIN: Well, history shows that it doesn’t. But I— I think I’d have to leave that to other pundits.
McCain was right. I was starting to hear more and more that voters focus very late on a candidate. I left Iowa with a single thought: In these accelerated times where history is three minutes ago and Tuesday is speeded up to Monday, maybe important decisions like who should be president are still handled with reflection and deliberation? I sure hope so.
IOWA CAUCUS 2000
· George Bush - 41%
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· Al Gore - 63%
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· Steve Forbes - 30%
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· Bill Bradley - 35%
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· Alan Keyes - 13%
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· Gary Bauer - 9%
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· John McCain - 5%
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TURNOUT:
1996 IOWA CAUCUS: 200,000
2000 IOWA CAUCUS: 150,000
When historians write the story of the 2000 presidential campaign (the first version will be completed just as the California polls close on election day), much of it will be about the debates, which is how we measure a candidate, but the focus will be on the number of debates between candidates. Less than twenty-four hours after we had results in Iowa, both Democrats and Republicans gathered in New Hampshire to address issues and each other. CNN carried it and, of course, we talked about it. Two things happened in the separate encounters: George Bush played it safe and Bill Bradley didn’t go after attacks from Al Gore about the cost of Bradley’s health care proposal.
I kept thinking of Michael Dukakis. In 1988 the Massachusetts governor was campaigning against George Bush and was slow to answer charges about prison reform and liberalism. He later admitted to me, in a conversation off the air, it should have been handled differently:
It was clear that by ’92, no Democratic candidate would attempt to blow off the attack stuff. I mean, I tried to do that and, obviously, it was a huge mistake. Clinton was ready from the get-go. He had a unit in his campaign of ten people called “the defense department” and all they did was be ready for the attacks and respond.
I suppose we’d like to think of the perfect campaign between candidates as resembling something like William F. Buckley’s Firing Line where voices aren’t raised and issues are argued without one-liners. It ain’t gonna happen. On the night of the debate, historian Michael Beschloss made the point we may all look back on this, including Bill Bradley, and say Bradley’s chance to topple the incumbent vice president was to go into this campaign with both fists. He didn’t do it. Given another chance, I still don’t think he’d do it.
In sports, it has now become common for a coach to be interviewed along the sidelines during halftime and players interviewed immediately after a game. In political coverage, we do the same thing, which proves there are few original ideas in this business. I went right to Bill Bradley after the panel discussion and asked about what we hadn’t seen in the debate with Al Gore:
So the question is, what kind of politics do we want? Do we want a politics that holds people to higher standards, or do we want a politics where
we just sort of spiral to the bottom and everybody attacks everybody?
I appreciated Bradley’s insistence to take the high road, which, of course, is a diplomatic way of saying I didn’t understand why he wouldn’t go negative. It is a lofty idea, but when the day is over—and we’re talking politics here—the high road is usually a dead end. Bradley also said in that segment that he thought he had done a good job with counterpunches. I’m no expert but I didn’t see any being thrown by the senator. He gave the “spiral to the bottom” answer a lot. That’s because he was asked about it a lot.
A week later the entire country was focused on New Hampshire to get a sense of how the candidates were going to be received in the first primary and, of course, if this would be a sample of things to come (every president has won New Hampshire except, guess who, in 1992?). Exit polls all day were showing strong support for John McCain. And that was the buzz throughout the hotel as, again, producers and correspondents started in again with the banter about what they had heard from somebody inside one of the campaigns. Like Iowa, it seemed I was hearing the same things but with different names. McCain was going to go to a VFW post and Gary Bauer was going to a church somewhere and Bill Bradley was going to shoot hoops with a local high school basketball team and on and on and on. I was interested in the primary but I just didn’t care about all the “might-be/could-be/won’t be” going on. And, of course, I listened to it all. High roads don’t work in campaigns and they don’t always work in coverage of campaigns, either.
By 4:00 P.M. we knew what was going to happen as a result of exit polling. I’ve never been polled after casting a ballot but, obviously, the people of New Hampshire are truthful when they answer the questions. If asked, I’d say I voted for Hitler. Guess that means I can’t live in New Hampshire.
The story was John McCain. He had beaten George W. Bush by a double-digit margin. Again, there was excitement as all the nonstop supposition we’d had for weeks was tossed and replaced with cold facts. After congratulating McCain, and before getting on a plane for the flight to South Carolina where the next primary was to be held, George W. Bush spent a few minutes with me on the air.
BUSH: I will tell you this—I am—he came at me from the left here in New Hampshire, and so it’s going to be a clear race between a more moderate-to-liberal candidate versus a conservative candidate in the state of South Carolina.
KING: Are you shocked tonight, Governor?
BUSH: No, I am not shocked at all. I am a realist and realize that sometimes there’s bumps on the road to the White House and the state of New Hampshire oftentimes is that bump in the road.
I could see what was going on here. New Hampshire was over. Bush was talking to the conservative South Carolina Republicans and framing John McCain as the more liberal of the two choices. My show was being used to deliver the message. I knew it. Bush knew it. What nobody knew was whether or not South Carolina Republicans knew it.
Al Gore slid past Bill Bradley in New Hampshire. That was the news: slid. Since their last debate a week earlier, Bradley had gone so far as to say Al Gore was lying. But that was the limit of his “new politics,” as he called it, which, in another life, had been called the high road. Gore responded to the close vote by saying he had become a better candidate. Through the evening I wondered, albeit to myself, if we were dealing with the fact that Gore had won or that Bradley had lost. I leaned toward the latter. And I asked our resident pundit Jeff Greenfield how he saw the New Hampshire result:
Unless Bradley has a message to deliver to core Democrats, as we get down into these next primaries on March 7, he’s in trouble, despite the fact that he did recover and made a strong showing tonight.
Was New Hampshire a test of the future? Absolutely. Bradley never got “on message.” That was a phrase people started using a lot. If you were going to do well, you had to stay “on message.” Shoptalk was creeping into our jargon and it isn’t surprising, I suppose, when so many of the talking heads had an earlier life running campaigns. It was Bob Wood-ward, however, who offered the idea that Bradley ought to stay in the race just to make Gore improve with every primary. And it was the first hint I’d had of a possible Gore-Bradley ticket. The panel that night in New Hampshire started laughing. I did too. And all the while I was thinking, you know, this makes sense.
NEW HAMPSHIRE PRIMARY, 2000
· John McCain - 49%
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· Al Gore - 52%
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· George W. Bush - 31%
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· Bill Bradley - 47%
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· Steve Forbes - 13%
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· Alan Keyes - 6%
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And then there was New York. How many lines have been written and uttered and even just thought about The Way Things Are, but then, there’s New York? The world works like this, but then, there’s New York. It makes sense here, but then, there’s New York.
All eyes were on the Senate race for the seat of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, which was becoming a battle between New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Hillary Clinton. The first lady made a formal announcement that she was a candidate in early February. Nobody will remember her speech, nobody will remember the issues she would go after. Nobody will even recall if it was made in the city or upstate (it was upstate and that’s my final answer). Instead, they remember the song. And the controversy. I spoke with political observer Bill Maher about the ramifications.
MAHER: She’s going on stage to make the announcement. They put a tape of Billy Joel, probably his greatest hits. The song “Captain Jack” plays.
KING: I know the song.
MAHER: I love that song. And it talks about drugs and masturbation and liquor. He [Giuliani] says because that song is playing when she got on stage that she’s saying yes to drugs and masturbation. And that’s ridiculous.
But this was New York. Innocence is always suspect. I asked Giuliani about when he was going to make an announcement and he looked at me like I was crazy. He told me there were no plans to make an announcement. If anything, he was just going to file some paperwork in July. See, there’s a way to do it and there’s New York.
KING: You can’t run a normal campaign, can you, against someone like that? Don’t you say, “Isn’t this going to be weird?”
GIULIANI: No.
KING: No?
GIULIANI: I mean, everything’s weird in New York.
I figured it this way: On election day New Yorkers will go to the polls to pick a United States senator. If there’s a presidential race of some kind going on, they might vote in that too. But there wasn’t any pundit anywhere who could have predicted how weird the New York senate race was about to become.
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I had been asked to moderate a debate to be seen around the world among the three remaining Republican candidates in South Carolina. CNN aired it from Seawell’s Banquet Center in Columbia in front of a live audience. George W. arrived in South Carolina for an eighteen-day campaign calling himself “the reformer with results.” McCain, who was using campaign finance reform as a theme, said his win in New Hampshire proved the Republican party had recovered its heritage of reform. I was starting to worry that someone was going to trademark that word.
More important, I was looking forward to this opportunity because so many of the other debates seemed to get bogged down with goofy rules about thirty seconds for a response and questions that went on forever. Debates are the best format we have to learn the differences of ideas but if the format gets in the way, what happens to the idea? I wanted to try something different and that was to do what I’ve been doing for the past thirty years: control the ninety minutes myself rather than by a format.
Alan Keyes was waiting offstage when I arrived. I have always liked the former assistant ambassador to the United Nations (he worked with Jeane Kirkpatrick), but with only single-digits showing in the New Hampshire primary, I didn’t think he belonged in the debate. He was eloquent, he was smart, he ce
rtainly was conservative and it was clear he wasn’t going to be president. And you know what? Those are crumby reasons to keep someone out of the national discussion. But I’d have preferred the duet of Bush and McCain because the differences wouldn’t be watered down by a third voice with no chance of winning.
Keyes and I said hello and engaged in the usual how’s-it-going banter until George W. showed up. We spent a minute or two talking about, what else, baseball. And then McCain appeared. He didn’t seem himself. He seemed off. Not even a joke. Not even the same joke. The room turned cold. These guys didn’t like each other.
Bush nodded. “John.”
McCain looked at him. “George.”
There was an uncomfortable quiet moment and then Bush said, “Hey man, it’s politics.”
McCain glared back. “There is more to life than politics.”
And that was the moment we were called on stage to spend an hour and a half learning the differences. We covered China and the World Trade Organization, rogue states and terrorism, concerns about the U.S. military being overdeployed and undertrained, abortion, tax cuts, the death penalty, and, of course, the campaign. McCain had run an ad comparing George W. Bush to Bill Clinton on the issue of trust. Bush had held an event in which a veteran said McCain had turned his back on those who had fought in wars. Bush waited until the next day to say he didn’t think that was the case (McCain had spent five years in a North Vietnamese prison camp). Bush had spoken at Bob Jones University, which bans interracial dating and calls Catholicism a cult and never suggested these policies were out of line. Bush charged that McCain’s people had labeled the Christian Coalition as “bigots.” Despite every claim of running a positive campaign, both McCain and Bush were running ads that proved it was anything but positive. And this was the only moment of the debate that I thought Alan Keyes had something to offer.