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From Republican Outsider to Darling

McCain Triumphs in South Carolina

By Gregor Peter Schmitz in Charleston, South Carolina

South Carolina is considered one of the most important early primaries for Republic candidates. John McCain scored a clear victory here over Mike Huckabee, even attracting one out of four Christian conservative voters. The Arizona senator’s chances of scoring the Republican nomination are better than ever.

Green is John McCain’s color tonight. The jacket he’s wearing is green, as is the lectern in front of him and the movable wall behind him. Green is the color of hope -- and the 71-year-old is beaming like a young hopeful.

It’s shortly after 10 p.m., the television networks have just declared him the victor of the Republican primary in South Carolina, and he’s now the Republicans’ undisputed favorite for the nomination to become the party’s presidential candidate. “It took us a while to get here, but what’s eight years among friends?” a smiling McCain says, standing before the Citadel military academy in Charleston, a school rich in tradition. “I am running to keep America safe, prosperous and proud,” he adds. But his supporters keep interrupting him with shouts of “USA, USA” that last for almost a minute.

His words more or less describe the McCain phenomenon. To most Americans, the war hero, who spent five years in solitary confinement as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, is a genuine patriot. Yet it still took him eight years to rise from being an outsider to become a Republican Party favorite. During McCain's first stab at the presidency in 2000, George W. Bush buried his hopes with a crushing defeat after a particularly nasty campaign battle in South Carolina. At the time, the party humbled McCain and its conservative establishment put him in his place. But after his triumphant win this weekend in South Carolina, they will likely flock to him. McCain had barely had a chance to finish his speech before influential TV commentator Chris Matthews concluded: “This was his night. He could be the new Reagan. He could bring the party together.”

Unlike a handful of the states that have held primaries in recent days, South Carolina really does count. Every Republican who has secured the party’s nomination for its presidential candidacy since 1980 has won in the state. It’s a bastion of the religious right that has become so important to the Republican Party, especially in the US South. Up to 60 percent of the state’s Republican voters describe themselves as evangelical Christians. Former Baptist preacher Mike Huckabee performed best among these voters, with 30 percent, but that was still only enough to land him in second place. Meanwhile, McCain managed to score votes from one out of four deeply religious voters.

McCain’s path to victory was a long one. With its imposingly high walls, the Citadel, where McCain held his victory party, seemed symbolic of the high hurdles his campaign has succeeded in overcoming. When first founded in 1842, young recruits were taught in drills how to quash possible slave uprisings. School officials also fought vociferously against allowing the admission of African-Americans and women. It took until 1999 for the first woman to succeed in graduating from the school. Like other broad swaths of the state, it’s a bastion of hardcore conservatives.

Eight years ago, McCain arrived here beaming after his victory in New Hampshire -- but the religious right, with tons of support from the Bush team, launched a smear campaign against the moderate senator. They accused him of suffering from depression and spread rumors that he had sired a black child (in reality he and his wife had adopted a girl from Bangladesh). A frustrated McCain dismissed them as the “ambassadors of intolerance,” and even six months ago it looked like they would stall his new campaign in the state. McCain’s team had trouble collecting campaign donations because conservative donors were outraged by his proposal to give illegal immigrants the opportunity to become US citizens.

But McCain proved tenacious and pragmatic -- and at the very least, he forced his opponents on the right to reconsider. Inside the Citadel in Charleston a few months ago, he expressed his unconditional support for going the whole course in Iraq and received standing ovations. In his stump speeches, he focused on issues like the threat of radical Islam and mentioned climate protection. Both issues hit home with the religious wing of the Republican Party, where concerns are prevalent about the environment and the conflict of civilizations. The economy has consistently polled in recent weeks as voters’ most important issue, and McCain cautiously began raising the possibility of the kinds of tax cuts he had earlier criticized that have become the legacy of the Reagan and Bush presidencies.