McCain goes from heckler to deal maker

Once, a party loyalist
Mr. McCain, 71, acquired the sobriquet “maverick” about a decade ago. When he was first elected to the Senate in 1986, after two terms in the House, he was in the mainstream of his party. He even made a credible, though unsuccessful, run for a party leadership post.

But his popularity did not last. First, there was his “truculent nature,” as he calls it. His Republican colleagues call him aggressive, brusque and abrasive. He later adopted the habit of publicly scolding other senators about their special privileges, from pet spending projects to airport parking spots. What Mr. Lott called his “cuddling up” to the Democrats has further strained Mr. McCain’s relations with Republicans.

“I suppose over the last 10 years he has passed more significant legislation than any senator around,” said Senator Judd Gregg, a conservative New Hampshire Republican frequently at odds with Mr. McCain. “But that doesn’t necessarily entail being liked.”

Some call him aloof. Former Senator Lincoln Chafee, a soft-spoken Rhode Island Republican, said, “I always imagined that I was the plebe and he was the senior at the Naval Academy: you knew your rank and you were supposed to respect that.” (Mr. Chafee is now supporting Mr. Obama.)

But his heroism as a prisoner of war in Vietnam has given Mr. McCain a special prestige, and he has made a point of cultivating junior members in the Senate, whether Democrats like Russ Feingold of Wisconsin or Republicans like Susan Collins of Maine, unaccustomed to the attention of a senior lawmaker. “He is smart enough to know that in the Senate every vote counts the same,” said Ms. Collins, now a close friend.

Before the 2008 campaign heated up, Mr. McCain would go to dinner about twice a month in Washington — he favors spicy Vietnamese food, the movie “Borat” and trading jokes about colleagues — with a small group of Republicans that included Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Senator Michael DeWine of Ohio and the actor and former Senator Fred D. Thompson (who briefly jumped into this year’s Republican primaries himself). Entertaining guests at his property in Sedona, Ariz., he invariably drags them for long walks to indulge his passion for bird watching. “If you took all the people at Gitmo, put them in the cabin for a weekend and made them listen to John talk about the birds, they would all spill their guts,” Mr. Graham said.

Mr. McCain’s friends say his ideology has always been ad hoc — limited-government conservative by default, but open to expanding government authority if the goal seemed important. But aside from pushing various campaign finance overhauls, he was a reliable Reaganite until around 1998 — his first big break from his party — when the Republican leaders chose him to negotiate a bill that would address tobacco lawsuits and finance public health programs.

As conservatives outmaneuvered him on the floor, Mr. McCain lashed out at his fellow Republicans, accusing them of turning a cold shoulder to children’s health. The Democrats rose in a standing ovation.

Three years later — the Monday after President Bush’s first inauguration — Mr. McCain held a news conference that amounted to a declaration of his independence from either political party.

He would respect the new president’s agenda, but not because he was a Republican, Mr. McCain said. He would have respected a Democrat’s just as much. “But,” he added, “I also have a mandate.”

He returned from the 2000 campaign full of new motivations. Although he had spent 18 years in Congress, Mr. McCain’s advisers say the campaign was his first face-to-face confrontation with domestic issues like global warming and health insurance costs.

“He had been in the Navy or the Senate his whole career, and he hadn’t had a lot of chance to get out there and find out what the American people are thinking,” said former Senator Warren B. Rudman, Republican of New Hampshire, who said he had watched Mr. McCain revise his views as he moved through scores of town-hall-style meetings.

Mr. McCain’s assessment of his political prospects had changed, too. The 2000 Republican primary had cemented Mr. McCain’s maverick image. He had made overhauling campaign finance the cornerstone of his campaign and started attacking upper-income tax cuts, corporate greed and Christian conservatives. Returning to the Senate, Mr. McCain wondered if he had alienated his former base.

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