Garbagegate, With a Twist

The media’s penchant to balance the two parties and control the narrative didn’t quite work when it came to a Trump insult comic’s comments about Puerto Rico.

by Rick Perlstein November 5, 2024

Going into the 2000 presidential election, the Republican establishment tapped Texas Gov. George W. Bush to beat Al Gore. But the 54-year-old scion’s first electoral test, in the New Hampshire primary, threatened to inscribe him in the annals of history as an obscure loser, when Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) upset him by 18 points. The stakes for the next contest, in South Carolina, couldn’t have been higher.

Eight years later, during McCain’s next presidential campaign, a Vanity Fair reporter named Richard Gooding traveled the Palmetto State to learn how that primary had gone down. He told the locals that he was there to learn about dirty politics. “Over and over, that provoked pride: ‘You’ve come to the right place!’”

Gooding learned that Bob Jones University had functioned as the Bush campaign’s de facto headquarters. Ralph Reed of the Christian Coalition was a key ally, having “pledged to [Karl] Rove,” a source told Gooding, “that he could deliver.” The stakes for the Christian right were as high as they were for Bush. Pat Robertson’s 1988 presidential run had crashed and burned; their churchy crusade in 1998 against Bill Clinton’s sexual peccadillos saw them blamed in some quarters for Republicans’ reversals in the midterm elections. This primary was their bid to prove to the party that they were not political paper tigers.

What followed next became infamous: one of the most vicious campaigns in modern history. “I make a lot of things happen behind the scenes,” a Christian Coalition operative who later became its president boasted with false modesty. “We had some fun during that primary.”

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-11-05-garbagegate-with-a-twist-trump-media/