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February 17, 2000
ESSAY / By WILLIAM SAFIRE
Political 'God's World'
WASHINGTON -- Picking up an armload of mail early this week, I noticed an unfamiliar magazine in my box.
"World" was its title; full color, slick paper, 38 pages. On the cover was a glowering, threatening, almost satanic John McCain. The headline was "The McCain Craze . . . a campaign platform that should give Republicans pause."
Inside was a hatchet job. On tax policy, the critic wrote, "He makes his case with liberal, even Marxist, terminology." On campaign finance reform, "McCain would essentially suspend the First Amendment for 60 days prior to any federal election." On Social Security, "he goes beyond even Franklin D. Roosevelt." Unnamed detractors call him "a calculating and conniving politician."
Then World gets nastily personal. The writer notes how, 20 years ago, "the 43-year-old former P.O.W. quickly fell in love with the 25-year-old cheerleader. She was rich, attractive and well connected." He won election "despite charges of carpetbagging and buying the election."
Cindy McCain's family stock, we are told, "pays her more than $1 million in dividends, and she owns more than $1 million worth of stock in Anheuser-Busch." McCain, charges the professedly "God-centered" magazine, "has not attacked alcohol companies as he has the tobacco industry" because he is "awash in beer money."
Even more scandalous: "Yet for all his dependence on his wife's money, Mr. McCain doesn't appear to be a particularly attentive husband." To get a barbiturate fix after an illness, Mrs. McCain stole pain relievers: "The offense was serious enough to merit jail time," but she got off, and her husband "claimed not to know about Cindy's addiction. . . ." With that sly "claimed," the writer implies that the senator did know, did not care, and is now lying about it.
The morally disapproving author of this repugnant anti-McCain campaign document is Bob Jones IV, son of the present head of Bob Jones University. That is the educational institution prohibiting interracial dating that offered its facilities to George W. Bush to launch his political campaign in South Carolina -- and pointedly did not invite his opponent.
The Bob Jones connection is not the only tie that binds the Bush campaign to this attack on a fellow Republican in contravention of Ronald Reagan's "Eleventh Commandment." The editor of World magazine is Marvin Olasky, a professor of journalism at the University of Texas in Austin. He is the revered intellectual guru of Governor Bush and an author of "compassionate conservatism."
This caused me to wonder: What caused this magazine, edited by a Bush adviser who says he recuses himself, and with a Bob Jones scion as its star reporter, and featuring the sinister portrayal of McCain on its cover, to appear in my mailbox a few days before the South Carolina primary?
In tiny type is the source: God's World Publications Inc., of Asheville, N.C. The marketing manager says that -- by sheer coincidence -- somebody decided that this was the one issue that would be sent gratis to all 535 members of Congress and 130 moving and shaking members of the media in Washington, all of whom apparently needed to get God's World's word at this moment about McCain, that "conniving politician" and not "particularly attentive husband."
God's World, a not-for-profit organization with a turnover of about $18 million a year, receives tax-deductible contributions under Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code. According to Joel Belz, the publisher: "We cannot endorse candidates or legislation. In 58 years, we have never backed any candidate."
As a card-carrying right-wing seditionist, I defend God's World's right to excoriate any candidate, fairly or not.
But when its editor is Bush's trusted Austin adviser; when its reporter bears the name of the school being abused as a Bush tool in the campaign; when its not-for-profit's funds are used to print, illustrate and distribute a hatchet job on a political opponent to a list of officials and media biggies on a primary election eve -- then such backdoor backing of candidate Bush strikes me as religio-political sleaze in action.