From An Unpredictable Front-Runner
John McCain leaned forward, his voice low and firm. "In 1994, we became the majority in both houses of Congress in order to change government. Instead, government changed us. We began to value power over principle."
It's a theme Senator McCain pressed strongly in a recent interview with Reader's Digest and will no doubt sound often in the months ahead: The Republicans were hammered in the 2006 midterm elections because "we lost our way," corrupted by special-interest money.
His voice rose as he warmed to a prime target of his wrath -- pork barrel spending. "We had begun to believe that it's our money!" he said. "Honest to God, we believe it's our money, not theirs [taxpayers']."
This is the John McCain etched deeply in our minds, the principled straight shooter with the courage to take on anyone, even a fellow Republican, if he or she somehow betrayed the public trust. It's a reputation that has made him a front-runner for the GOP nomination for President in 2008. But being a maverick is also his biggest hurdle. Conservative activists are not at all sure that McCain is one of them, and in trying to woo these kingmakers, the Senator could alienate moderates who are drawn to his aura of independence and integrity.
Whatever else, there is nothing predictable about his coming candidacy. But then, his rise in national politics was never predictable -- much less inevitable.
The War Hero Wins the Heart of Voters
Twenty-five years ago, John McCain was a retired U.S. Navy captain living in Arizona and running for an open seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. He had a consultant's dream resume: Not only was he the scion of well-known admirals, he was a war hero himself.
A fighter pilot in the Vietnam War, McCain was shot down by a North Vietnamese missile in 1967 and locked away in the grim prison that POWs dubbed the Hanoi Hilton. For five and a half years, he was tortured and starved. Several times, the North Vietnamese attempted to use him for propaganda purposes by offering to release the admiral's son ahead of other Americans who'd been imprisoned longer. McCain kept refusing to accept his own freedom, which engendered more beatings and more torture.
By the time he returned to America a free man, his hair had turned white and he was suffering from severe wounds that persist to this day. Another casualty of war was the collapse of his marriage to Carol Shepp, mother of McCain's first daughter, Sydney.
Yet less than a decade later, there he was campaigning in Phoenix and winning over voters with his upbeat manner and infectious humor. A nagging issue dogged his campaign, though: Why was McCain running in this district at all? He'd lived in Phoenix less than a year and had almost no connection with Arizona. He put the matter to rest during a candidates' debate when a rival leveled the carpetbagger charge yet again. "Listen, pal," McCain said, "I spent 22 years in the Navy. My father was in the Navy. My grandfather was in the Navy. We in the military service tend to move a lot. I wish I could have had the luxury, like you, of spending my entire life in a nice place like the First District of Arizona, but I was doing other things. As a matter of fact, when I think about it now, the place I lived the longest in my life was Hanoi."
The audience sat for a few seconds in stunned silence, then erupted in deafening applause. McCain won the election, served two terms in the House, and then ran for the Senate from Arizona in 1986, winning by increasingly absurd margins every six years.
This ability to make the best of a bad situation is John McCain's hallmark as a public figure. From the moment he set foot again on American soil in 1973, he made it a point not to quarrel with the antiwar protesters of the Vietnam era, even the draft dodgers. In 1994, McCain and future Democratic Presidential nominee John Kerry were invited to the Oval Office by President Clinton to discuss the political fallout of normalizing relations with Vietnam. "McCain spoke for less than a minute," recalled McCain's chief of staff, Mark Salter. "He basically said, 'It doesn't matter who was for the war, who was against the war. Let's move on.' Clinton just looked at McCain and said, 'You're an amazing man.'"
McCain's Famous Temper
To be sure, he has not led a pristine public life. Three months after McCain joined the Senate, a flamboyant Arizona businessman named Charles H. Keating, Jr., asked him and four other Senators (later dubbed the Keating Five) for help with federal regulators investigating his failing thrift, Lincoln Savings & Loan. McCain -- along with Senator John Glenn -- was less involved with Keating than the others. But he wasn't blameless: His wife and her father had invested $359,000 in a Keating shopping center, and McCain had accepted, on Keating's expense, trips to the Bahamas, which he had kept quiet.
Still, he later refused to intercede in Keating's behalf (Keating called him a wimp and left McCain's office in a huff) and told federal regulators he "wouldn't want any special favors" for Lincoln Savings & Loan. In the end, McCain earned only a mild rebuke from the Senate Ethics Committee, which found that he'd violated no U.S. laws but had shown "poor judgment."
Then there's the matter of McCain's famous temper. Many is the time he has sent notes to staffers, and even fellow Senators, apologizing for one outburst or another. During the 2000 Presidential primaries, some Republicans working for Bush tried to undermine McCain's candidacy by disseminating talking points about his short fuse. The Bush people were implying that McCain lacked a proper Presidential disposition. "The issue became, Is this guy disqualified from being President because his [time as a POW] had unhinged him?" McCain biographer Robert Timberg said in an interview with Insight magazine. "I don't know who raised that, but whoever did so spat in the face of every Vietnam veteran."
The response from the McCain staff has been to try to turn a perceived flaw into an asset. One former McCain press secretary, Torie Clarke, explained it this way: "It's amazing the number of people who say, 'He's just so straightforward, he's so refreshing.' And, you know, his temper is a part of that."
McCain has his own way of spinning the temper issue: "I'm sure there have been times in the past when I have made remarks that are intemperate. But I hope I will never lose my capacity to become outraged by abuses of power and misuse of the trust of the American people. When I see $233 million for a bridge to an island in Alaska with 50 people on it, I'm angry. When I see Vladimir Putin consolidating the old Russian Empire, I get angry. When I see Hugo Chavez call the President of the United States all kinds of names, I get angry. So the question is, Do you act just out of control, or do you maintain your capacity for anger, which makes you even more motivated to carry out the responsibilities of your oath of office?"
Oh yes, there's that other potential impediment -- concerns about his health and age. During the summer of 2000, McCain was diagnosed with melanoma (which has been treated successfully, according to his doctors). Even without that grave health threat, political observers note, by 2008 he will be 72 years old -- too old, in the view of some, to seek the Presidency.
Asked how he'd answer voters who question whether he has the stamina to handle the White House job, McCain replies, "I think I would say that I'm older than dirt. That I have more scars than Frankenstein. That I've learned a few things along the way. Anyone who accompanied me in the two months before the last election, or while I was hiking in the Grand Canyon, can attest to the fact that I'm capable of keeping a very rigorous schedule."
Brave or Bullheaded?
Ultimately, his candidacy will likely rise or fall on his policy stands. And he's almost sure to disappoint some constituency he desperately needs. Enamored independents and moderate Democrats will discover that McCain is fully honest when he says, "My 24-year voting record is a consistent, conservative voting record. Socially, fiscally and militarily, I am a conservative." He is certainly pro military and antiabortion, and a foe of excessive federal spending.
But these stands won't necessarily win over the party's base. They aren't forgetting that McCain went against President Bush on his tax cuts, and that he championed federal campaign finance reform alongside liberal Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold. And evangelicals will be reminded that in 2000, McCain characterized Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson as "agents of intolerance" and "corrupting influences" in American politics. It's true that last year, Falwell reached out to McCain, who responded by giving the 2006 commencement address at the Falwell-founded Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. That led to charges that McCain was pandering to the evangelicals, even though he delivered the same speech in Lynchburg that he gave at the ultraliberal New School in New York -- all about the need for greater tolerance of others in this country.
There has been another shift, though, that's harder to justify. Clearly hoping to mollify conservatives, McCain has come out in favor of making the Bush tax cuts permanent, even though in his previous incarnation as a deficit hawk, McCain didn't support them. "A profile in courage can become a profile in unrestrained ambition," said Kenneth Duberstein, Reagan's White House chief of staff, in an interview with Time magazine. "He has to remember who his friends are and not spend his integrity on one-night stands with those who will never fully trust him."
On one issue, and it's a big one, McCain has remained constant: Iraq. And that may prove the greatest barrier between McCain and the Presidency. The Senator believes the invasion was the right thing to do, has consistently called for more -- not fewer -- troops and thinks victory is still possible. Former Senator John Edwards, who is pursuing the 2008 Democratic nomination, has taken to calling the policy of sending more American soldiers to Iraq the McCain Doctrine.
This is intended to stigmatize McCain with voters, which it may do. If that happens, McCain says simply, it's the price of patriotism. "I harbor ambitions to be President of the United States," he says. "Those ambitions pale in comparison to my view that America's national security is paramount, and I have to do what's right, even if it costs me my entire political career."
Call this brave or call it bullheaded. Either way, it's vintage McCain.