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Monday, December 27, 1999
Arizona senator stands ground in political race
McCain ties Texas governor in New Hampshire polls
By Ron Fournier
Associated Press
LEXINGTON, S.C. - Rising from his table, John McCain suddenly realizes that breakfast is served with a slice of symbolism at the Flight Deck diner.
"Well, we got a big King Kong here," the Republican presidential candidate says. An 8-foot-high fiberglass likeness of the big ape, a biplane clenched in his muscular fingers, looms over the diner - unnoticed by the Arizonan until he stands to give a speech.
"We got a King Kong in this race, up there with all his money. And I'm the tiny plane strafing him," McCain says. "Yep, that looks a lot like Governor Bush."
Just joking, McCain tells the crowd, but he's got a point: Texas Gov. George W. Bush is the 800-pound gorilla in his midst.
The third-term senator's challenge has gotten Bush's attention. McCain has climbed into a first-place tie in New Hampshire polls, landed on the cover of Time magazine and engineered a high-profile handshake with Democrat Bill Bradley - another longtime politician running as an outsider.
Voters in New Hampshire find McCain more inspiring, more sincere, more capable, more of a leader and less political than Bush, polls show.
Yet his obstacles are still as high as King Kong's reach.
"I think McCain is running well in New Hampshire, but the goal is not to win a battle, the goal is to win the war," said GOP consultant Alex Castellanos, who isn't allied with any presidential campaign. "McCain has to hope that he can shout in New Hampshire and they'll hear him in California. That's pretty hard to do."
Indeed, the Arizona senator's strategy - dubbed "Final Four" by advisers - calls for him to win New Hampshire's first-in-the-nation primary and quickly follow with victories in South Carolina, Arizona and Michigan.
He decided to bypass Iowa's Jan. 24 caucuses, running the risk of dropping off the political radar screen in January - though he showed up for a mid-December debate, pleading for "a hardy band" of supporters to come out for him on caucus night.
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© 1999 Caller-Times Publishing Company,
a Scripps Howard newspaper. All rights reserved.
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