John McCain: driven to serve, and to succeed

By MARK LEIBOVICH and DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

updated 10:23 a.m. ET Sept. 4, 2008

ST. PAUL, Minn. - Senator John McCain’s Republican primary campaign looked all but hopeless. He had risked the wrath of his party to push for an immigration overhaul and now, just months before the Iowa caucuses, his grand compromise was falling apart on the Senate floor as well.

“Lindsey, my boy, this may bring us down,” Mr. McCain said, turning to his friend Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina. “But wasn’t it fun?”

By this spring, when Mr. McCain had astounded political handicappers by virtually locking up the nomination, the thrill of noble defeat had been replaced by an anxious discomfort about his own victory. “I refuse to believe that this is possible,” he said, curling up his face during an interview on his campaign plane. “I tend to be fatalistic about these things.”

As he accepts the Republican presidential nomination on Thursday night in St. Paul, John Sidney McCain III, of Arizona, stands at the pinnacle of a career defined by a singular ambivalence about his own ambition, and success. Time and again, he lunges for the prize, then lashes himself for letting his pursuit get the better of him — for doing favors for his patron Charles H. Keating Jr., for stooping to ugly attacks on George W. Bush during the 2000 primary, for outbursts of temper at lawmakers who get in his way.

It reflects what his brother, Joe McCain, calls a “public dialectic” between the senator’s drive to succeed and his desire to serve a higher cause. For decades his outward display of that inner conflict has proved advantageous, helping advance his career by forging his image as the un-politician, the candidate with an almost reckless disregard for his own fortunes.

His critics assert that the McCain of 2008 is not the McCain of 2000, or even 2007. He has surrounded himself with former protégés of Karl Rove, whose tactics he once denounced, embraced positions he once repudiated and initiated a series of attacks on Senator Barack Obama’s patriotism that some say resemble the rhetorical rough-housing he regretted eight years ago. “Bring Back the Real McCain!” the cover of The Economist magazine implored last week.

His loyalists, though, say such complaints hold Mr. McCain to the standard of a nostalgic mythology that grew up around his last campaign, overlooking the tough competitor that was there all along.

“He is same guy he has always been, wrestling with all the things he does trying to be the guy he believes he has to be,” said Mark Salter, Mr. McCain’s closest aide. “But we are not just going to say, ‘O.K., we’ll just lose — we will lose graciously — maybe everybody will remember him fondly.’ ”

It is his combination of lofty aspirations and hard jabs that has made him a political force.

“You can’t be above it all and accomplish all that he has accomplished,” said Bob Kerrey, a Democratic former Senate colleague of Mr. McCain and fellow Vietnam War veteran. “It’s a little like saying that Muhammad Ali was above boxing while he was doing the rope-a-dope. It’s a tactic. It’s not devious or anything. It is what it is.”

The Crowded Hour
Mr. McCain has always had contradictory impulses: he enjoys both boxing and bird watching, cites as favorite movies both “Viva Zapata!” and “A Fish Called Wanda,” and quotes his idols Henry Kissinger and Henny Youngman.

He wins admirers by boasting of the unpopularity of his views — on campaign finance reform, on the Iraq war, on immigration. An avid gambler, he is drawn to big bets and long odds — whether picking 1-against-99 fights with his fellow senators over their official perquisites, or defying convention by picking as his running mate a little-known Alaskan with a reputation as an irritant-reformer. He is the most disruptive figure in the Republican Party, and, as of Thursday night, its standard-bearer.

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Until recently, Mr. McCain was one of the few United States senators who drove himself around Washington — tailgating, dashboard-pounding and cellphone-taking. “My philosophy is just to go like hell,” Mr. McCain once explained. “Full-bore.”

He often invokes “the crowded hour,” a term from his political hero, Theodore Roosevelt, referring to the assault on San Juan Hill. In the Roosevelt and McCain lexicon, the phrase equates to a moment of reckoning, when worthy men prove themselves.

Aboard his campaign plane in February, Mr. McCain caught his breath after the four months that transformed him from a principled loser to his party’s contender for the highest office in the land. “This has been a very crowded hour for me,” he said.

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