Edition: U.S. / Global

Liberties; McCain Picks Up the Mo in Motown

Published: February 23, 2000

It is a campaign straight out of Capra.

A decent guy takes on the System, and the brutes who run the System move in to destroy the upstart. They paint the populist hero as crazy or deceitful. After a bout of self-pity, when he hates the whole rotten show, he rallies with some sentimental hooey about American ideals and routs the ruling-class bullies.

''Why, your type's as old as history,'' John Doe tells his tormentors. ''If you can't lay your dirty fingers on a decent idea and twist it and squeeze it and stuff it into your own pockets, you slap it down. Like dogs, if you can't eat something, you bury it!''

Of course, like John McCain, the Capra heroes battling Big Money could often get a little insufferable. They could be sanctimonious and overemotional and flaky. The idea of virtue triumphing over greed was always a celluloid dream. But it seems even more far-fetched now, in a society where greed is a virtue.

Mike Murphy, Mr. McCain's strategist, says he doesn't think the Republican Establishment ''is a bunch of guys in straw boaters on telephones yelling 'Get McCain!' It's more like 100 lobbyists in Washington scared that their contracts won't be renewed.''

With the help of moderates and without the religious right smothering him, Mr. McCain won in Michigan, so he can continue to dog the son of the Establishment.

Mr. Bush's greatest appeal was to conservatives. Many others here were less impressed. ''I've done a lot of research on Bush -- the man's done nothing,'' said George Thomas, 30, who works in computers, as he voted for Mr. McCain in Royal Oak.

What's remarkable about the Republican race is that the arcs of the two campaigns mirror the arcs of the candidates' life stories.

Mr. Bush started in New Hampshire as a slacker. As in his life, he relied on his name and powerful friends to keep him afloat in his campaign until he decided to apply himself late in the game.

''This is a process of steeling me to become your president,'' he told Newsweek on the eve of the South Carolina primary.

Usually, people get their steel before they run for president. Anyhow, Mr. Bush probably should have spelled it ''steal.'' He purloined everything he could lay his hands on from the McCain campaign -- the populist bus, the reformer message, the one-on-one town halls, even the design of the Web site.

Mr. McCain, who spent his life getting in trouble for his impulsiveness and thin skin, let his emotions get away from him in the last couple of weeks. If there was one thing that was obvious, it was that the Bush team, humiliated in New Hampshire, was going to be ruthless and vicious in that most conservative and wired state for the Bushes, South Carolina. It was clearly going to use all the tricks from the Atwater playbook -- nasty push polls, racial wedge issues, let-a-third-party-do-the-dirty-work fliers and e-mails. The candidate would smile and call himself a uniter, not a divider, while his team madly divided.

But when it began to happen, Mr. McCain reacted viscerally rather than cerebrally. He was furious about Mr. Bush trotting out a discredited veteran to trash him for ''forgetting'' veterans; he was enraged that a Boy Scout got a push-polling call branding him ''a liar''; and he overreached in a television commercial, comparing Mr. Bush to Bill Clinton, then pulled back too far, adopting an absurdly broad definition of negative advertising that tied his hands on pointing out unfair Bush tactics. He capped a bad week by using a self-defeating caustic tone in his South Carolina concession speech, and began intemperately railing about ''jerks'' and ''idiots.''

People said from the start that it was too easy to get under Mr. McCain's skin, and that his judgment was questionable at moments of maximum pressure. He also has a tendency to fall in love with an idea, harping so much on busting Washington's iron triangle that he never set out any other issues.

Not only did he not fight back strongly enough and quickly enough in South Carolina, but his Michigan campaign degenerated into a wish that voters would get huffy over Mr. Bush's brutal tactics. But Mr. McCain does have incredible tenacity, and he hung on until he got to an electorate more suited to him.

So far, we've learned that one candidate drifts and the other gets wound up. So now we know what we already knew.