TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

Times' Article Gets Conservatives To Defend McCain

ADVERTISEMENT

By ELISABETH BUMILLER, The New York Times

Published: February 23, 2008

Sen. John McCain declared the battle over on Friday morning, but by then his lieutenants believed he had won the war.
Conservative radio talk show hosts who had long reviled McCain, the Republican presidential candidate from Arizona, had rallied to his defense.

Bloggers on the right said this could be the start of a new relationship. Most telling, McCain's campaign announced Friday afternoon that it had just recorded its single-best 24 hours in online fundraising, although it declined to provide numbers.

Both sides traced the senator's sudden fortunes to an unusual source, The New York Times, which published on its Web site Wednesday night an article about McCain's close ties to a female lobbyist who did business before the senator's committee.

That evening, two of the senator's top advisers, Mark Salter and Steve Schmidt, flew to an emergency strategy session in Toledo, Ohio, where McCain was campaigning.

By Thursday morning, when the article appeared in the print edition of the Times, the McCain campaign had begun an aggressive attack against the newspaper, calling the article a smear campaign worthy of The National Enquirer.

Many conservatives who had long distrusted McCain on a variety of issues, including his peculiar fondness for talking to reporters for hours on end, rallied to see him at war with a newspaper they revile as a voice of the left.

"They wanted you to come to a conclusion, and that is that Senator McCain had some kind of relationship with a female lobbyist and did special favors for her," Sean Hannity, the conservative talk show host, said Thursday about the Times' article. "It is beyond disgusting and despicable."

Later that afternoon, the McCain campaign began using the Times in a fundraising appeal sent by e-mail to supporters.

"Well, here we go," the letter from McCain's campaign manager, Rick Davis, began, then outlined what it characterized as the newspaper's smear campaign.

Davis quickly got to the point: "We need your help to counteract the liberal establishment and fight back against the New York Times by making an immediate contribution today."

By Friday, the campaign was tracing its jump in fundraising directly to the article in the Times. "Thank you," said Schmidt to a Times reporter on McCain's campaign plane as it headed back to Washington from Indianapolis.

"I wouldn't say that this has turned the tables as far as McCain convincing the base to vote for him," Matthew Sheffield, the executive editor of the conservative media-watchdog site NewsBusters, wrote to a Times reporter in an e-mail message.

"However, this was a terrific opportunity to get that dialogue started. The general sentiment seems to be more of a defense of McCain against an unfair attack rather than a positive reaction to his candidacy."

Share this:

Loading Comments...

Email Print

ADVERTISEMENT