Mccain Looking For A Slingshot Gop Upstart Seeks Win In Washington To Propel Him Into Super Tuesday

John McCain rode his upswing in the Republican presidential roller coaster through Washington state Wednesday, looking for a slingshot victory to propel him through the next few weeks of primaries.

Talking to students and Spokane residents at Gonzaga University, Rotarians in Seattle and veterans in Bremerton, the Arizona senator tried to reach out to some of the groups his campaign is starting to call “the McCain coalition.”

It’s a group that includes more reformers and independents than bedrock conservative Republicans. But it’s a group that helped him win a primary victory in Michigan Tuesday after a stinging loss in South Carolina Saturday.

As his campaign bus, the Straight Talk Express, rolled up Interstate 5 toward downtown Seattle, an admittedly tired McCain said he tries to “cut off the highs and lows” of the last month of campaigning. He did not bask too long in the early victory in New Hampshire and “I didn’t get real depressed after Saturday.”

“Twenty-four hours ago, 48 hours ago, we were seeing large enthusiastic crowds in Michigan,” he said.

A television on the bus was tuned to CNN, and analysts were dissecting his latest wins over Texas Gov. George W. Bush.

“They say you are a magnetic figure,” his wife, Cindy, said, tapping his knee. Some of the same analysts were all but writing off his campaign a few days earlier, he reminded her.

Later in the day he took his campaign across Puget Sound on the Spirit of Seattle cruise boat, renamed the S.S. Straight Talk for the day, and stood on deck with other prisoners of war from Vietnam to address a crowd at a fund-raiser.

Wes Schierman, a St. John, Wash., native who was shot down in North Vietnam in 1965 and released with McCain in 1973, said he was an enthusiastic supporter because he believes the senator continues to have “the honesty and integrity he showed in Hanoi.”

McCain’s day ended with a minor mishap, when the plane his campaign chartered turned too sharply onto the runway at Kitsap County airport, a wheel went off the pavement and stuck in the mud. The candidate, his wife, staff and traveling press corps were bused to Sea-Tac Airport to take another plane to California.

At stops throughout the day, McCain cited statistics from exit polls in Michigan which show more than 300,000 new voters cast ballots in that primary. Many of them were young, and most of the new, young voters cast ballots for him.

He beat Bush among minority voters, especially Hispanics, and among blue-collar workers.

Bush won among Republicans.

The winning coalition McCain needs will include veterans as well as “Libertarians and vegetarians. … people who are dissatisfied with government, those who are not involved, but want to be,” he said.

“I promise I’ll fight to give the government back to you ‘til the last breath I draw,” he told an estimated 2,500 who gathered on the dock in Bremerton in an evening sprinkle.

Reaching out to Hispanics and other minorities means supporting legal immigration, and taking steps to stop illegal immigration, he said. The people whose jobs are most at risk by illegal immigrants are the recent legal immigrants, he said. It also means supporting bilingual education programs only if they are successful at teaching new residents English.

“I’m for English plus, not English only,” he told a crowd of about 400 packed into the Gonzaga COG during his town hall meeting at the start of his day.

McCain also said he has stopped referring to his former captors in North Vietnam as “gooks,” a term that many Asian Americans - a key voting bloc in Washington and California - find offensive. He insisted that it was a term he used only for his captors whom he considered brutal and sadistic, and not all Asians. His other words for his captors are not printable, he said.

“I do not consider it a misstep,” he said during the flight from Spokane to Seattle. “I have stopped using it because it was only fanning the flames.”

It’s clear he won’t be courting conservative Christians in Washington state, who in some previous elections have mustered forces to elect delegates to nominate the presidential candidate. He criticized Pat Robertson, who won the state’s caucuses in 1988, and the operators of the conservative Christian Bob Jones University, where Bush spoke during the South Carolina campaign.

The university has a policy against interracial dating, which Bush did not criticize during his speech. McCain said they should have been denounced as “cruel idiots,” for a policy he called medieval.

If his criticism of Christian conservative leaders causes those Republicans to rally behind Bush for the March 7 precinct caucuses, “that’s the decision the people of Washington will have to make - but it won’t carry throughout the nation,” McCain said in the airplane interview.

Washington Republicans have an unusual two-part process for nominating a president this year. One-third of the state’s delegates will be awarded based on the results of Tuesday’s primary, but only by those voters who say they consider themselves Republicans and take a GOP ballot.

Independents can opt for an unaffiliated ballot, but those votes won’t count toward the Republican nomination.

Secretary of State Ralph Munro, a McCain state chairman, predicted a challenge to the delegate selection if Bush wins a majority of the votes cast by people who identify themselves as Republicans, but McCain has the largest total when the GOP and unaffiliated ballots are combined.

McCain aides say the next two weeks are about votes and delegates, but they’ll be able to claim victory if he collects more votes overall than Bush. That will give him a “slingshot” into the California primary and the Washington precinct caucuses on March 7.

Thurston County Auditor Sam Reed, a candidate to replace the retiring Munro, said the crowd at Gonzaga showed McCain could appeal to the disaffected voters.

“There’s a certain 695, anti-establishment quality to this,” said Reed, referring to last November’s initiative that rolled back auto license taxes and forced a vote on any new tax increase.

Much of the GOP establishment backed I-695, but they may prefer Bush over McCain.

As Reed left Gonzaga, he said he experienced some of the potential division just a few hours earlier at his campaign breakfast in Spokane.

Reed is staying neutral in the presidential race. But Munro stopped by the breakfast to invite the crowd to the McCain meeting at Gonzaga.

Some longtime Republicans in the crowd “visibly cringed,” Reed said.