Happy Warrior

Sen. John McCain of Arizona arrives on a late-August evening in Dixville Notch, New Hampshire, a town of twenty-nine voters. Here, just after midnight on the next presidential Election Day, the first ballots of the nation will be cast. As he wades into the crowded "ballot room," McCain picks his way through a cordon of reporters and TV camera crews, looking for authentic voters. They're lined up against the wall, outside of the glare.

One of them asks if the bar is open yet.

Like so many concoctions in media-driven politics, the Norman Rockwell image of rustic democracy is not quite real. The "ballot room" where Dixville voters assemble is actually located in a pricey Victorian-era getaway called the Balsams Grand Resort Hotel. The twenty-nine voters are all hotel employees and their families. The bellhops, orchestra leader, ski instructor, managers and groundskeepers happily serve as props for the promotional gimmick.

"More reporters than voters," mutters Sen. Fred Thompson of Tennessee, who's there to support his friend.

McCain plays the gimmicks, too, but he is strangely authentic himself. This is his thirteenth visit to New Hampshire in the past six months and his second to the Notch in preparation for the country's first primary, in February. He's gaining traction — up from zero to sixteen percent in a recent state poll — but is still far behind GOP front-runner George W. Bush's forty-plus percent. New Hampshire is the slog of retail politics, where supporters are collected one at a time.

Alongside the towering Tennessean, McCain looks small and retiring. He turned sixty-three the day before, and his hair is wispy white. Thompson and retired New Hampshire Sen. Warren Rudman are accompanying him on a five-day swing, exchanging playful put-downs and florid introductions. A homemade sign, "Gain With McCain," prompts Sen. Thompson to ask if it shouldn't read "Rogaine With McCain."

The senator's own campaign poster evokes a shock of recognition. The sunny-blond Navy fighter pilot pictured on the poster — smiling cockily, garbed in flier's harness and casually unzipped jumpsuit — is the same guy standing in the shadows, looking like a gray ghost, as Thompson introduces him. Character, integrity, patriotism.

The pilot, we are reminded, spent five and a half years of his youth in a North Vietnamese prison camp, tortured and abused like other American fliers captured during the long war in Indochina. At thirty-one years old, McCain was bombing a Hanoi power plant in October 1967 when his A-4 was shot down. Both of his arms and one leg were broken when he ejected from the plane; the injuries never properly mended. On the tour bus before campaign stops, an aide will brush the senator's hair, since he cannot do the chore for himself.

Running for president, he is cast as the hero in waiting — waiting for a few good breaks and for the front-runner to stumble. His just-published book, Faith of My Fathers, recounts the harrowing years in prison but stays far away from political talk.

"In prison, I fell in love with my country," he writes. The details of what he went through — and what he missed about America — are riveting. To cynical rivals, his story may seem like part of a political strategy — old-fashioned patriotism offered to this era of cool disengagement.

Except that the candidate himself also, always, deflates the hero talk. He knew some heroes in the war, McCain says, but he wasn't one of them. At the Balsams he jokes, "I have to remind you that it doesn't take a lot of talent to get shot down. I managed to intercept a surface-to-air missile with my aircraft."

At every campaign stop, the senator will make so many self-deprecating wisecracks that one accepts his sincerity. The book is studded with tales of "daredevil clowning" as a hot-dogging pilot (McCain's low-flying plane once severed electrical lines in Spain) and a mocking description of "my image as an I-don't-give-a-damn nonconformist."

At the podium, McCain makes brief remarks, then invites "questions, comments, insults" from Dixville's celebrity voters. When the Balsams' 100-year-old owner rises unsteadily to praise the senator, McCain teases the hotel employees: "That might just have gotten me several of the twenty-nine voters." In a slightly goofy conclusion, the candidate invokes the memory of Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley, urging the Notch Twenty-nine voters." In a slightly goofy conclusion, the candidate invokes the memory of Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley, urging the Notch Twenty-nine to "vote early and vote often."

In other words, he's having fun. The McCain candidacy involves the usual political calculations but with a generous splash of young fighter pilot. He is a reform-minded conservative Republican, with substantive differences from the breed. His gimmick, one might say, is running as himself. It's high-risk politics, also very appealing.

The Straight Talk Express, a medium-size tour bus with bunting, heads south the next morning for a meandering tour of New Hampshire and some two dozen small town encounters. Like the candidate himself, the morning is slow-starting.

At the first stop, Howard's restaurant in Colebrook, the senator nibbles on a doughnut and tries to make friendly chatter with people preoccupied by huge plates of potatoes, eggs and sausage. He mentions the five moose that tour members saw the night before at a roadside moose wallow. The restaurant hostess, named Crystal Ball, spurns an advance-man's plea to make a primary prediction.

At the next crossroads, called North Stratford, Sen. Rudman insists on an unscheduled stop to view the village war memorial. McCain marvels at how many Stratford men died in the War of 1812. When the two politicians enter the general store looking for voters, it's empty. The bearded clerk draws back sullenly and won't say a word. "I hate politicians," he tells a TV soundman.

Down the road in Lancaster, McCain finds his audience and comes to life. As the bus parks at a village green across from the Coos Country Courthouse, he is greeted by a swarm of pudgy old veterans wearing Veterans of Foreign Wars service caps and COMRADES IN ARMS T-shirts. The vets are McCain's not-so-secret stratagem for winning New Hampshire. Nobody has really courted them here before, his aides explain, and the majority actually voted for Bill Clinton.

Mounting the village bandstand, the senator works through familiar complaints about the deteriorating armed forces — the 11,000 servicemen and -women who are on food stamps, inadequate heath care for veterans and the president's "feckless photo-op foreign policy." Yet even as a war hero, McCain declines to embrace the Republican position on defense budgets — the call for massive increases.

"We're spending a great deal of that money incorrectly," he demurs. "We still have an Army deployed to fight a war on the plains of central Europe. We're still buying a lot of equipment we don't need. We could save $4 billion by not building the Sea Wolf submarine, another $4 billion by eliminating the pork-barrel items from defense appropriations."

So are you for more or less, one man asks. "I think we could spend about the same," McCain replies, "but I'm not sure, because we still need to develop a missile-defense system and other improvements. But we wouldn't need to spend much more if we eliminated a lot of wasteful spending."

Restructuring the armed forces, instead of devoting billions more to armaments, is McCain's reform strategy, as he regularly lectures colleagues in Congress. "Much as I respect the Pentagon," he adds, "the Pentagon can't reform itself. There are too many institutional pressures. It has to come from outside."

The old soldiers and sailors do not throw their hats in the air. But they do appear enthused by the "straight talk." Later, in an interview aboard the bus, McCain dismisses the current defense debate as bipartisan posturing. "The president's proposed increases involve a lot of phony accounting," he says, "but the Republicans didn't make a big deal out of it because they're not that committed either."

Forty-five minutes later, McCain is in a crowded VFW hall in Littleton, where his ridicule of politics as usual gains fervor and broadens to other subjects, from health-care reform to the recently passed Republican tax cuts. What would he actually do, he is asked, to stop the pork-barrel spending?

"If I were president, I would veto it. If they overrode my veto, I would make them famous — go on the radio and tell the people what their representatives and senators did, and who did it. One of my greatest disappointments is that since 1994 [when the GOP won control of Congress], we Republicans have not stopped the pork barrel; we've continued it."

The Republican party's $790 billion tax-cut bill, the senator further warns, contains ugly surprises for ordinary voters (though he fails to mention that he voted for it, too). Huge tax breaks for corporations and other special interests become effective immediately, but taxbreaks for families are postponed until 2003. The bill was a meaningless partisan charade, he explains, since everyone knew Clinton would veto it. "I ridiculed the bill on the floor of the Senate the day I voted for it," he confides later with quirky satisfaction.

McCain moves on to the patients' bill of rights for HMOs and explains why Congress doesn't pass it, despite the popular support. "We Republicans are gridlocked by big money from the insurance companies," he says, "and the Democrats are gridlocked by big money from trial lawyers." He can't resist a couple of shaggy lawyer jokes. "What's the difference between a catfish and a trial lawyer? One is a scum-sucking bottom dweller and the other is a fish."