By all rights, Senator John McCain should have won the Republican presidential nomination in 2000. After McCain surged in the New Hampshire primary, however, something unseemly took place:
"What happened has taken on the air of an unsolved crime, a cold case, with Karl Rove [George W. Bush's chief political advisor and a master of negative campaigning] being the prime suspect. Bush loyalists claimed in parking-lot handouts and telephone 'push polls' and whisper campaigns that McCain's wife, Cindy, was a drug addict, that McCain might be mentally unstable from his captivity in Vietnam, and that the senator had fathered a black child with a prostitute. Callers push-polled members of a South Carolina right-to-life organization and other groups, asking if the black baby might influence their vote. [After McCain met with a group of gay Republicans, fliers were distributed calling McCain the "*** candidate."] "Now here's the twist, the part that drives McCain admirers insane to this very day: That last rumor took seed because the McCains had done an especially admirable thing. Years back they'd adopted a baby from a Mother Teresa orphanage in Bangladesh. Bridget, now eleven years old, waved along with the rest of the McCain brood from stages across the state, a dark-skinned child inadvertently providing a photo op for slander. The attacks were of a level and vitriol that even McCain, who was regularly beaten in captivity, could not ignore. He began to answer the slights, strayed off message about how he would lead the nation if he got the chance, and lost the war for South Carolina. Bush emerged from the showdown upright and victorious... and onward he marched."
arty: 
