The Bush campaign had hired an out-of-state company to make about 200,000 “advocacy” calls to voters. After McCain’s criticism, the campaign released the script of those calls. The script said Bush was “working hard and stressing his message of reform with results.” It went on to say, “Unfortunately, the race has turned ugly,” and urged listeners, “Don’t be misled by McCain’s negative tactics.” It ended with more positive words about Bush. There was no mention of cheats or liars or frauds.
Nearly a week after McCain’s initial accusations, the Los Angeles Times looked into the matter. The paper found voters who had received the “advocacy” calls, but none who had received a call like the one described by Duren. “The McCain campaign has provided the names of only six voters complaining about calls from the Bush side,” the paper said. Of the voters the Times’s reporters could reach, “three described questions that, while negative, appear to have been part of a legitimate poll. Another said she heard no negative information at all.” The paper found no one who supported Duren’s accusation.
The lack of evidence, while not proof that the call story was untrue, is nevertheless telling. Republican strategists point out that in controversies over mass callings, there has almost always been a tape of the calls, usually made by the answering machines of voters who received them. When Pat Robertson made a negative call on Bush’s behalf in Michigan, for example, the story ended up on the front page of the New York Times, because someone had a tape of it. Likewise, when the McCain campaign made its infamous anti-Bush “Catholic voter alert” calls in Michigan, there was taped evidence. But there was no such evidence of the “cheat/liar/fraud” calls.
“If those calls took place, then where is the tape?” asks one GOP strategist. “You can’t make more than five phone calls and not have it end up on somebody’s answering machine. They’ve never been able to produce the individual who made the calls, they’ve never been able to produce the phone vendor who made the calls, and they’ve never been able to produce a script or a tape recording.”
The same was true of rumors of other “push poll” calls that allegedly claimed that McCain had fathered an illegitimate mixed-race child. Although later commentary has simply accepted the existence of such calls as fact—in January of this year, National Public Radio’s Linda Wertheimer reported that “mysterious callers posing as pollsters asked voters how they felt about John McCain’s black child”—there is no hard evidence that the calls occurred.
That is not to say there was no low-road campaigning. A Bob Jones University professor named Richard Hand, who had no connection to the Bush forces, sent out an e-mail containing a variety of charges against McCain, including the one that he had fathered illegitimate children. But in that case, there was evidence of the smear: the e-mail. Hand’s name quickly became public, and his message was discredited.