Politics

When Push Poll Comes To Shove

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

February 10, 2000 / 5:54 PM EST / CBS

Steve Forbes may feel sad he's no longer in the hunt for the Republican presidential nomination, but he shouldn't. His more successful rivals are waging petty, vindictive campaigns whose attempts at defining policy disappear amid a welter of accusations.

At issue in South Carolina on Thursday was push polling, one of those mysterious practices which everyone professes to hate, but which persist anyway. Someone posing as a pollster calls you up, but asks slanted questions intended to make you think poorly of one candidate, and highly of the other.

After a woman named Donna Duren told John McCain her son had taken a push poll call that described McCain as a "cheat, a liar, and a fraud," the Arizona senator reacted with visible emotion. In an oddly classist appeal, he urged Bush to "Stop this now. He comes from a better family. He knows better than this." McCain also vowed to remove every negative ad he's running if Bush does the same.

Duren's tale, by McCain's own admission, had a ""profound effect" on him. When a reporter afterwards asked him to run down the main points of his education plan, he came up with one, faltered, and finally said "I can't focus on that," because he was "too unsettled."

Over in Charleston, Gov. Bush said his folks don't engage in push polling. "If anyone in my campaign has done that, he's going to be fired. I agree with the senator that this shouldn't be part of the process," Bush said. But he won't be withdrawing any of the ads McCain finds so distasteful. Bush thinks he let McCain define him in New Hampshire, and he doesn't aim to let it happen again.

So even as he denounced push polling, he argued that McCain is espousing Democratic ideas, and drawing Democratic voters over to the Republican side. That's not just Bush being paranoid; McCain won the endorsement Thursday of a conservative Democratic state senator in South Carolina.

This isn't the first time push polling has come up; both Bush and McCain have charged the other with it, both have denied it. But the latest charges brought new emotion to the topic.

A phone call so nakedly slanted in its intention doesn't help Bush. He released the script of his own advocacy calls, which certainly praise Bush and criticize McCain, but fall far short of calling McCain a liar. His staff may be entirely innocent of push polling, but there's no telling what other Bush supporters, less sophisticated or less careful, might be doing.

Maybe the intention was to knock McCain "off stride," as he confessed he was. Maybe the idea was that voters won't gravitate towards a McCain exchanging smack for smack with Bush. But that idea backfired once a 14 year old answered the phone. Donna Duren's tale gave McCain a moral soapbox upon which he stood proudly, bristling with high indignation.