McCain was targetted by other Republicans in 2000 for adopting a non-white child. The spread rumours that he'd had a child out of wedlock with a non-white partner.
> In his first presidential campaign, Sen. John McCain was successful in nabbing the New Hampshire primary, beating George W. Bush there. McCain then turned his focus to the South Carolina, a state that political analysts thought McCain would win. Instead, he was met with the nastiest of rumors.
> According to reporting in The Nation magazine, a push poll (a ploy to disseminate information rather than collect it) called voters to ask, "Would you be more or less likely to vote for John McCain…if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?"
> The push poll implied that John and Cindy McCain’s 9-year-old daughter Bridget, whom they adopted from an orphanage in Bangladesh, was actually the Arizona senator’s love child.
> And that wasn’t all: Rumors also circulated that McCain was a traitor when he served in Vietnam and that his wife was a drug addict, according to The New Yorker magazine.
> McCain lost the South Carolina Republican primary to George W. Bush, whose campaign denied being responsible for the rumors. Bush said at the time that he would fire anyone on his staff if he found out they were involved.
