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John McCain: driven to serve, and to succeed
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Turning Point: 2008 Nov. 5: NBC's Tom Brokaw recaps the historic election of America's first black president. Produced by msnbc.com's Kevin Flynn. |
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But when his opponents unleashed anonymous phone calls and fliers spreading rumors about his family before the South Carolina primary, Mr. McCain fired back with a commercial accusing Mr. Bush of lying like President Bill Clinton. Its tone backfired, hurting Mr. McCain more than his target. Advisers pushed for a better attack but acknowledged they could not win the state. Instead Mr. McCain insisted on publicly apologizing and pulling the commercials. “So we died on higher ground,” said John Weaver, a former aide.
A few months later, Mr. McCain was back in the state apologizing for holding his tongue about his disdain for the Confederate flag to try to win the race.
“I will be criticized by all sides for my late act of contrition,” Mr. McCain declared. “I accept it, all of it. I deserve it.”
His loss in South Carolina made him a martyr: the politician too good for politics. “He came out of that primary the most popular politician in the country,” Mr. Weaver recalled.
“Is he crazy like a fox?” Mr. Weaver added. “Listen, he is a very good intuitive politician, and he is a lot smarter politically than those of us around him or he wouldn’t be where he is at.”
Former opponents marvel at Mr. McCain’s political alchemy. “He takes a past failing, hangs it around his neck, and wears it like a medal,” said Kevin Madden, who worked for Mitt Romney in the primary.
The Candidate
There is a part of John McCain that revels in his failures. “Sitting around, feeling sorry for myself” after losing in 2000 was “wonderful” he sometimes says. “Delicious,” he recalls, with sarcasm but also a certain relish.
His 2007 stint as the Republican front-runner did not go well. “I’m much better in this environment,” he said in South Carolina after his campaign was nearly broke, he had spiraled in the polls and shed much of his staff.
And winning can be imprisoning, Mr. McCain has found. For much of the summer, he had seemed merely dutiful on the trail, going through the motions. His aides have since imposed a new discipline, shielding him from the news media, scripting a daily message and reining in his tendency to improvise.
“At heart, he’s a maverick, and the maverick doesn’t like the corral,” said Mark McKinnon, a close aide to President Bush and Mr. McCain who is not involved in the campaign. “But the corral is where he is. And it’s working.”
Mr. McCain’s advisers say he hoped to pick up his 2008 campaign where his 2000 race left off — bucking convention, running against politics. He started his run against the Democratic nominee, Senator Barack Obama, with an apology. Standing on the balcony of the Memphis hotel where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot, he told a mostly black crowd that he had made a mistake years ago in opposing a federal holiday for King.
He toured the heavily black areas of the South, an unlikely trip for a Republican running against an African-American. And for awhile, he skipped over the attack lines against Mr. Obama that advisers had inserted into his speeches. When Mr. Obama declined his invitation to a series of town-hall-style meetings, Mr. McCain went solo, drawing scant attention from the news media.
“None of it got through — nothing,” Mr. Salter said of Mr. McCain’s message.
By midsummer, Mr. McCain had put the campaign in the hands of Steve Schmidt, a former aide to President Bush (and a fan of Ultimate Fighting). The campaign began a barrage of advertisements that ridiculed Mr. Obama as a celebrity, accused him of indifference to wounded American soldiers, and asserted that he put politics ahead of victory in Iraq.
If Mr. McCain has any ambivalence about the conduct of his campaign, he no longer displays it in public. Friends say he wants to become president and is learning how to get there.
“John has always seen politics as an adventure,” his friend Mr. Graham said. “I’m trying to get him to think of it as a business.”
The choice of Sarah Palin exemplified both. Her resolute opposition to abortion fired up conservative activists to get out the vote for Mr. McCain’s election. But Mr. McCain’s advisers say he sees her the way he sees himself—as an upstart outsider who shook up her state’s corrupt Republican establishment. “The ‘old McCain’ is still there — look at the Palin pick,” Mr. Salter said.
The surprise was also a glimpse of how Mr. McCain might govern. Mr. McCain promises in every speech that as president he would put country first, but his notions of honor and disregard for his popularity can make him an unpredictable patriot. He is a conservative committed to limited government, except when he sees a greater cause like global warming, campaign corruption or children’s health. He boasts that he stood by the Iraq war long after the public turned against it, but also says he would never risk American troops abroad without deep public support.
His associates say Mr. McCain has come to see the presidential race in starkly moral terms, convinced that Mr. Obama’s election would weaken America at a decisive moment for the security of the world. But Mr. McCain is also the first to confess that not all his drives are so selfless.
“I didn’t decide to run for president to start a national crusade for the political reforms I believed in or to run a campaign as if it were some grand act of patriotism,” he wrote in 2002. “In truth, I wanted to be president because it had become my ambition to be president.” He added, “I had had the ambition for a long time.”
This story, Driven to Serve, and to Succeed, first appeared in The New York Times.
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