Copyright 2000 Globe Newspaper Company
The Boston
Globe
February 3, 2000, Thursday ,THIRD EDITION
SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A28
LENGTH: 1221 words
HEADLINE:
CAMPAIGN 2000 / IN WASHINGTON;
PUBLICLY, CAPITOL HILL TAKES N.H. FINISH IN
STRIDE
BYLINE: By Mary Leonard, Globe Staff
BODY:
WASHINGTON - In the film "Groundhog Day,"
Bill Murray portrays a TV weatherman who wakes up every morning to the same day,
powerless to change the course of events.
Yesterday was Groundhog Day,
and although Washington woke up after the New Hampshire primary to a new
political landscape, few dared to acknowledge that anything here had
changed. GOP lawmakers expressed surprise at the size of
Arizona Senator John McCain's win over Texas Governor George W. Bush in
Tuesday's Republican primary. But most attributed it to New Hampshire's
eccentricities or to McCain's endurance, not to the senator's promise to shake
up Washington and shake out its special interests. "Life goes on here," said
Representative Thomas M. Davis, a Virginia Republican who heads the House
committee that is raising millions for GOP candidates. Davis dismissed as "press
spin" the notion that McCain's message of removing big money from politics had
resonated too much with Granite State voters.
Minutes later, Davis
joined Jim Nicholson, chairman of the Republican National Committee, at a news
conference where Nicholson announced the party's plan for a "multimillion-dollar
initiative" to help elect GOP state legislators and influence congressional
redistricting in 2001.
Nicholson denied that the Republican Party
establishment, which overwhelmingly has endorsed Bush and has embraced him as
the best hope for winning the White House in November, was shaken by the results
in New Hamsphire, where McCain received 49 percent of the vote to Bush's 30
percent.
"I haven't seen anybody shaking, and I am not shaking," said
Nicholson, who attributed McCain's success to the fact that primary voters
"don't like or trust Al Gore" and are yearning for a candidate with integrity.
In their Capitol cloakrooms, however, members of both parties privately
expressed anxiety at Bush's drubbing, and how thin Vice President Gore's win was
over former senator Bill Bradley in the Democratic primary. Bradley, like
McCain, ran as an outsider, promising to practice a "new politics" and not abuse
the campaign-finance laws, which he accuses Gore of doing.
"A lot of
holy cows got wounded last night, and these guys are worried," said Tom
Korologos, who came to the Senate as an aide in 1962, worked in the Nixon White
House, and is now one of the cardinals of Washington corporate lobbying.
Yesterday, it was still business as usual: Korologos waited outside the chamber
for a word with senators who were voting on a bill, backed by the banking and
credit-card industry, to overhaul bankruptcy laws.
At his victory rally
in Nashua, N.H., Tuesday night, McCain pledged to turn his New Hampshire
campaign into "a national crusade" to change the way Washington works.
"I ask you to help me break the Washington iron triangle of big money,
lobbyists, and legislation that for too long has put special interests above the
national interest," McCain said. "We have sent a powerful message to Washington
that change is coming."
Korologos responded to that statement with a
laugh. "This place never changes. Being a special interest myself, I can tell
you that the First Amendment to the Constitution says we have a right to
petition the government, and somebody has to repeal that before I start
worrying," he said.
But Fred Wertheimer, who has been working on
overhauling the campaign-finance laws almost as long as Korologos has been
lobbying, said that both McCain and Bradley sent a powerful message to political
leaders in Washington and punctured their illusion that Americans don't care
about the access money buys in Washington.
"The Washington establishment
is in a state of shock today. McCain delivered the political equivalent of
announcing that the king has no clothes on," said Wertheimer, who is president
of Democracy 21, a public-policy group. "Would I expect them to be saying,
'We've changed our minds about the way we do business?' No. But they cannot
ignore this message."
Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a New York
Democrat who endorsed Bradley, agrees that a fundamental change is afoot,
although it may be hard for the current Congress to appreciate and adapt to it.
"The message I got is that the standard positions of the establishment
parties on both sides are not working anymore," said Moynihan, who is retiring
at the end of the year. "We have the making of a new generation of politicians.
This place, for good or ill, must recognize it is no longer very representative
of the American people."
That's pretty strong medicine to swallow. So
yesterday there were denials, excuses, and just plain puzzlement in the capital
over what New Hampshire's voters meant to say.
"I don't think the earth
moved in Washington, but I did hear people say, many times, 'What happened?' "
said Governor Paul Cellucci, who was here to testify before the Senate Budget
Committee on his opposition to taxing commerce on the Internet.
"Give
Senator McCain credit; his strategy worked and his message helped him in New
Hampshire," said Cellucci, who has endorsed Bush. "But the problem with his
message is that McCain isn't an outsider; he's an insider. And the Democrats are
going to pick apart every issue he has voted on in the Senate and every
contribution he has received as the chairman of the Commerce Committee."
Gore can't campaign as anything but the consummate insider. There he was
yesterday, in the Senate chamber, summoned from his campaign by Democratic
Senate leaders and the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights League, a
special-interest group, to break what they thought might be a tie vote on an
abortion-related amendment to the bankruptcy
bill. The amendment passed without his help, but Gore enjoyed a few minutes of
backslapping and encouragment from Senate supporters.
"Senator Bradley
ran a strong campaign in New Hampshire, and the campaign-finance issue had some
resonance," said Senator Byron L. Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat who endorsed
Gore. "But it's all personal politics in New Hampshire, and it's not that way
around the country. I believe Gore will be our party's nominee."
Senator
Chuck Hagel, a Nebraska Republican who supports McCain, wasn't prepared to say,
either, that McCain's promise to turn off the tap on political money was a
winning issue.
"I don't think voters go around saying, 'Gee, if we just
had campaign-finance reform, the world would be a better place,' " Hagel said.
"What resonates is McCain's story - that he's an outsider, experienced,
trustworthy, the antithesis of Clinton, and can define himself better than
Bush."
Maybe McCain was even understood better in New Hampshire, mused
Senator Phil Gramm, a Texas Republican.
"They speak a strange dialect up
there - you can't understand them," Gramm said, straightfaced and with a deep
Southern twang. "I don't think they knew whether Bush was saying 'Texas' or
'taxes,' and that created problems."
Things should improve for the Texas
governor, Gramm said, now that the campaign is moving to South Carolina.
"People from Texas have historically done poorly in contested New
Hampshire primaries," said Gramm, who made a brief run for the presidency in
1996. "It's a small state that tends to want to force candidates to grovel.
Texas politicians have plenty of skills, but groveling is not one of them."
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