Feb. 4  Sen. John McCain has won his ballot access battle in New York. A day after Texas Gov. George W. Bush and New York Gov. George Pataki dropped their opposition to letting McCain on the presidential ballot in several contested districts in the state, a U.S. District Court judge gave the Arizona senator everything he wanted. Judge Edward Kormans preliminary injunction all but guarantees that New York Republicans will get the chance to vote for McCain and fellow candidate Alan Keyes in the states March 7 primary. Bush and publisher Steve Forbes had already won access across most of the state.

Scheme Shut Down In his opinion, Korman said the ballot access scheme being run by the New York state Republican Party poses an undue burden in its totality on the right to vote under the First Amendment. Korman ordered that full delegate slates for Keyes and McCain be placed on the Republican primary ballot in each congressional district located in the state of New York. Though his volunteers had knocked on doors from Brooklyn to Niagara Falls, McCain was bumped off the ballot in 12 districts because he could not meet the strict standards set for prospective candidates in New York. Underdog candidates have long complained that New Yorks rules were designed to keep voters from considering candidates who had not been anointed by party leaders. I am pleased that the Republicans in the state of New York will now be able to make a choice on March 7th, McCain said in a statement that was e-mailed to reporters. After a long struggle, I am now confident that I can win the state of New York.

Keyes Wins the Lottery McCain wins his battle, but the ruling also comes as a huge windfall for Keyes, who hadnt bothered to jump through the Byzantine hoops needed to get on the ballot in the state. Rather, he merely piggybacked onto McCains lawsuit. Without collecting any signatures, Keyes can now get on the ballot by merely turning in the names of six supporters  three delegates and three alternates  in each of the states 31 congressional districts by next Thursday. Contrast that with the efforts of Forbes, who hired paid professionals across the state to gather signatures on his behalf. Im very pleased the court has made a judgment that is in the best interests of the people of New York, a jubilant Keyes said. Lawyers for all the parties had, before the ruling, agreed to acknowledge that this years GOP primary rules were unconstitutional and they waived all rights to appeal. The provisions of the New York Election Law at issue herein impose an undue burden on access to ballot in connection with the 2000 New York State Republican Presidential Primary, read a stipulation agreement, which was agreed to by lawyers representing the state party, McCain, Forbes and Keyes.

Backing Down On Thursday, Pataki and Bush gave in to rising pressure and called for the New York GOP to give in to McCain. Senator McCain should be on the ballot, Pataki said in a statement read by one of his aides. This should be a campaign of issues and ideas, not technicalities. Were confident Governor Bush will win that campaign.

Pataki spokesman Michael McKeon said the governors dropped their opposition to take the issue away from McCain, who had been loudly accusing Bush, Pataki and the state GOP of Stalinist tactics. Senator McCain has been hiding behind the ballot access issue, McKeon said. You take that away, theres not much left. Earlier, Bush had signalled that he too did not care enough about the issue to fight it any longer, dropping his insistence that McCain should be required to follow the same rules that he and Forbes had followed to get their names on the ballot.

Stephen Yesner contributed to this report.

-- Vern (bacon17@ibm.net), February 06, 2000

Answers

By ALISON MITCHELL

WASHINGTON, Feb. 5 -- It was just about this time three years ago that John Weaver, a tall, terse Texan, dragged Senator John McCain from a Senate Commerce Committee hearing to tell him he should run for president.

Mr. Weaver, a Republican political consultant from San Antonio, had worked with Mr. McCain as field director of Senator Phil Gramm's short-lived presidential campaign in 1996.

He had decided that Mr. McCain, with his compelling personal biography and maverick stances, had just the right risumi for the post-Clinton years. And perhaps more important, he thought the Republican Party had lost its way and let President Clinton emerge as the one who understood the concerns of middle-class voters.

Neither Mr. Weaver nor Mr. McCain knew what they were on their way to creating that day: a seat-of-the pants populist candidacy that has turned the Republican Party establishment on its head and is now threatening its chosen candidate, Gov. George W. Bush of Texas.

Now Mr. Weaver, 40, the constant brooding presence on the campaign bus -- Mr. McCain impishly calls him Sunny because he is not -- is one of a small band of Republican insiders who are helping Mr. McCain mount a campaign that often seems to run on gut instincts, impulse and wit.

Even Mr. McCain acknowledges some surprise at how his populist reform message is growing into something larger than the sum of its parts.

His New Hampshire primary upset -- if replicated elsewhere -- suggests that he has an appeal that stretches broadly across the political spectrum.

"It's fair to say we knew what we were trying to do," Mr. McCain said. "But we didn't realize that it was catching on."

There is still a hard road ahead of Mr. McCain, and many potential pitfalls. The senator's appeal is built on intangibles that include a public infatuation with his personality and his gripping biography. Some of the luster could fade as voters focus more on his policy positions over time. Mr. Bush is already trying to tar him as a hypocrite on campaign finance reform because he has accepted campaign donations from lobbyists.

And it may still turn out that Mr. Bush's money and organization kick in and stem the insurgency.

Mr. McCain's success so far has been a combination of some early planning, some risks that paid off and some clever off-the-cuff decision making. His gamble to skip Iowa and concentrate on New Hampshire worked out spectacularly, as did his certainty that he could generate a bonanza of media coverage through his accessibility.

Mr. McCain has also benefited from the strangely ineffective campaign that the front-runner has conducted. Mr. Bush has seemed diffident, and he has kept piling on endorsements even after signs that they were backfiring.

For now the McCain candidacy has hit a nerve.

"McCain set out to create an insurgency," said William Kristol, the former chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle and editor of The Weekly Standard, "but as often happens in these situations, it's almost bigger than him and bigger than any of the proposals. And it goes beyond his personal ambitions or intentions."

Mr. McCain said the first one in his circle to notice what was happening was Mark Salter, his speechwriter and longtime Senate administrative assistant, who saw the excitement grow in Mr. McCain's New Hampshire crowds.

"He said to me three or four times, 'Look at the look in these people's eyes,' " Mr. McCain said.

Some of Mr. McCain's themes were meticulously planned from the beginning -- the emphasis on character, national security expertise, campaign finance overhaul and the devotion of much of the surplus to Social Security.

But some of the populist tones of the campaign arose from snap decisions made along the way, like Mr. McCain's antic appearance before the Russian consulate accusing New York Republicans of acting like apparatchiks seeking to preserve a one-party state.

The stunt was dreamed up the day before by Mike Murphy, Mr. McCain's bomb-throwing senior strategist, as a way of fighting the party's effort to keep Mr. McCain off the ballot for the state's primary. The candidate loved it.

And no one quite expected Mr. McCain's campaign bus, "Straight Talk Express," to become a symbol in itself of his live-off-the-land campaign.

"The bus just kind of evolved," Mr. Weaver said. "I'm a big believer in bus tours. John wanted to have the press with him, and one thing led to another and it became a tradition that, unfortunately, I don't think we could ever stop."

Greg Stevens, Mr. McCain's media consultant, said simply, "We were trying to win. We are creating a new party in the process of trying to win." He said, "There wasn't this overt decision on the part of the campaign six months ago to try to create McCain Republicans."

What is threatening to the Republican Party is that Mr. McCain in many ways is running against its Congressional leadership, against its big-business wing and against some of its conservative allies, groups like Americans for Tax Reform and the National Right to Life Committee, which have both run advertisements against him. He tars all of them as the Washington establishment that has lost touch with the people.

There is an unlikely group of battle-scared campaign veterans from across the spectrum of the Republican Party who are helping Mr. McCain do this. And they are hardly outsiders. Rick Davis, 42, the campaign manager, is a Washington lobbyist and merchant banker known as a fund-raising whiz who has close ties to the same business establishment that Mr. McCain likes to rail against.

Mr. Murphy, 37, is known for some of the most rough-edged commercials in the business and has worked for clients as diverse as Christine Todd Whitman and Oliver North. He did not join the McCain campaign formally until Lamar Alexander had dropped out of the race because he had been with Mr. Alexander in 1996 and remained loyal.

Mr. Stevens, 51, the media consultant, began his political career as chief of staff to former Gov. Thomas H. Kean of New Jersey, and he worked for the presidential campaign of Bob Dole. Bill McInturff, 46, Mr. McCain's pollster, was Mr. Dole's pollster.

Mr. Salter, 44, is the McCain loyalist who helped write Mr. McCain's autobiography. Mr. Weaver was once the executive director of the Texas Republican Party and has counted 11 senators as his political clients.

"All of us came together for different reasons," Mr. Weaver said, "but we're unified in thinking the party has to change its way. We've lost two national elections and are in danger of losing Congress."

Mr. McCain, 63, had been intrigued by the idea of running for president ever since he accompanied his friend Bob Dole on the campaign trail in 1996, acting as what he calls Mr. Dole's designated smiler. He says his role was to sit in front of Mr. Dole in audiences and grin as a way of trying to remind the candidate not to look so dour.

He made his decision to run in December 1998. From the start his campaign emphasized his character and extraordinary experience as a prisoner of war in Vietnam to distinguish him from Mr. Clinton.

This laid the groundwork for what could have been a fairly traditional Republican campaign, appealing to conservative voters through the emphasis on a strong military and military traditions of honor and patriotism. Mr. Dole, who had been grievously wounded in World War II, had himself sometimes emphasized his biography and had certainly tried to run against Mr. Clinton's character.

But Mr. McCain also had in his quiver of issues his Senate crusade to overhaul the campaign finance law. His aides were concerned that this would not resonate with the voters and they hoped to persuade him to play it down.

But when they tested it in the polling they used to start the campaign they were surprised to find that in four critical primary states, 60 percent of Republican voters said a change in the finance system was important. Only 15 percent said it was not.

"We knew that John would talk about it," Mr. Weaver said. "We didn't think he should stress it. So we had to eat a lot of crow."

It was also Mr. McCain himself, his aides say, who decided early on that he wanted to depart from the tax-cutting wing of his party that advocated supply-side economics and put more of an emphasis on using the budget surplus for Social Security and debt reduction.

His plans to make this point last spring were disrupted when the United States bombing of Yugoslavia began and Mr. McCain decided he would not formally announce his candidacy during a military campaign. Mr. McCain returned to the Social Security issue this winter, making it a critical point of distinction between him and Mr. Bush.

Some of the nature of the McCain campaign was developed because of his comparative lack of money, which forced some unorthodox thinking. Mr. Murphy remembers gathering with Mr. McCain and a few aides in 1998 in his Senate office. He pulled out his laptop computer full of slides and data and argued for 40 minutes that the senator should save money by skipping the Iowa caucuses.

Mr. Davis, who had also been courted sporadically by Elizabeth Dole's campaign, then built an organization that was lean by presidential standards, allowing as much money as possible to be put into television advertising. The lack of staff -- Mr. McCain has 65 full-time aides compared with about 180 for Mr. Bush -- has shown at times in the campaign's inability to turn out polished position papers.

But it has also made the campaign flexible and able to change gears fast. Earlier this year, for example, after reading in a newspaper that minority journalists felt insulted that Mr. Bush had turned down an invitation to stop by their convention, Mr. McCain decided to toss out his schedule and go to the convention.

Some of Mr. McCain's populist, establishment-bashing tones have come in reaction to the Bush campaign and the establishment opposition to him. He would not have been making gleeful attacks on the New York Republican leaders if they had not tried to keep him off the ballot.

"When the establishment pushes, he pushes back," Mr. Murphy said. "Weighing in as they have they've created some of this. There's poetic justice in all of this."

On Friday, in a vindication of Mr. McCain's effort, a federal judge put the senator's name on the ballot all over the state.

At moments, members of Mr. McCain's inner circle have started to fear the populism of their own campaign. On the stump, Mr. McCain began skewering Mr. Bush's tax plan as too tilted to the rich after he read a magazine article that made that analysis. But when the campaign weighed whether to put that line of argument into a commercial, aides say there was quite a debate about whether to go forward with a class warfare tactic usually more the province of Democrats.

According to participants in the discussion Vin Weber, a lobbyist who is a member of Mr. McCain's informal kitchen cabinet, opposed the move. Mr. Davis wanted any decision to run the advertisement to be made deliberately and carefully. Mr. Weaver, Mr. Murphy and Mr. Stevens were all for it. The commercial was broadcast.

And as Mr. McCain's campaign goes on, its rebel spirit is only growing stronger. Mr. Salter joined Mr. McCain's Senate staff after working for Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, the former United States ambassador to the United Nations. He does not have the profile of a rabble-rouser. But on the night of the New Hampshire primary, when Mr. McCain promised to "break the Washington iron triangle of big money, lobbyists and legislation," Mr. Salter was in the audience shouting, "Burn it down."

-- Vern (bacon17@ibm.net), February 06, 2000.

IGuess they can let the non-bushies on the ballot now that the MIS guys down at VoteCountCentral have got everything "all FIXED up"!

-- INever (inevercheckmy@onebox.com), February 06, 2000.