The Fox News story that nearly sank a Bush presidency before it began

One of the overlooked details of the forever-fight over the widely-debated conservative leanings of the Fox News Channel (besides the fact that a third of its viewers are Democrats) is that it was Fox that broke the then-shocking story in 2000 of candidate George W. Bush's 24-year-old DUI charges.

Why, you wonder, would an old Maine story matter, regardless of the source?

The breaking story of Bush's unrevealed 1976 DUI charges in Maine came just four days before the 2000 election. The Bush-Cheney ticket was tied then in national polls with the Democrats' Gore-Lieberman ticket and was, in fact, ahead in Maine.

Bush ended up losing Maine to the Democrats the next Tuesday and several other states by narrow margins. Had the Republicans won those electoral votes, there never would have been any Florida recount, hanging chad controversy or Supreme Court case. Florida's electoral votes wouldn't have changed anything.

Mike Allen over at Politico reported Thursday night that in an upcoming memoir -- "Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight" -- Bush's chief strategist Karl Rove writes that getting that bad news out earlier in that political season is the single biggest thing he would do differently about that controversial campaign.

No kidding. Controlling the timing of bad news is campaign strategy rule No. 1A. Knowledge of the  old arrest was so closely held among a few senior Bush aides that campaign spokesmen had no idea what to reply when the initial Fox News call came in. The story knocked the Bush and Cheney team off-message for days, much as the Rev. Jerremiah Wright revelations did to the Obama crew during the Democratic primaries of 2008..

In the new book, due out next week, Rove speculates that the Fox News story prompted enough changed votes or disappointed social conservatives to not vote that it cost the GOP ticket other states like New Mexico and Iowa.

-- Andrew Malcolm

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Photo: Associated Press

Comments

[Terry]

It's incorrect to say the Republican-leanings of Fox are "widely debated." We all accept that it is in fact Republican and *only* Republicans or employees of Fox contest otherwise.

[jo]

Of course the left wing hacks won't acknowledge this.

[R.I.P GOP]

So bush is a dullard and a drunkard. This is a fair example of how the Bush administration attempted to withhold the truth from the American people even before he stole the election.

[Orion]

Not even close. The DUI story hurt but what hurt 10x as much was the networks calling Florida for Gore before the polls closed in the western part of the state. Even Democrat pollster Stan Greenberg admitted at the time that bad call cost Bush ~25,000 votes in Florida alone. The ripple effect cost him thousands of votes in every state whose polls hadn't closed yet. For example GWB only lost New Mexico by 450 votes: the polls there were a good hour from closing when they were told the election was over. It's extremely unlikely that 451 more NM Democrats than Republicans heard the election was over, Gore had won, and got so discouraged they decided not to bother voting.

[New Yorker]

I couldn't care less if a candidate had a DUI 24 years before running for office. It does bother me that someone that wealthy didn't call the family chauffeur, the car service, or (shudder) an ordinary cab.

I do care that he gave every sign of being a brain-damaged former drug addict after assuming office.

I include GW's well-known alcoholism as a drug addiction; it is a legal drug which is addictive and brain-damaging when abused, not different in those regards than whatever is sold on a street corner.

Fox's leadership is a fact not a matter for debate: the original and current CEO of Fox News and now Fox Television Stations Group is Roger Ailes, who was a top campaign manager for Nixon, Reagan and Bush I.

This is like speculating whether a network run by Susan Estrich just might be biased in favor of the Democrats.