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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."
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All of these complaints are united for McCain under a single cause: campaign-finance reform. Neither political party, he laments, will reform education, the military, the 44,000-page tax code or the wasteful spending until a genuine cleanup of political money is enacted. He and Wisconsin Democrat Russ Feingold are sponsoring the measure that would banish the soft-money scandal. He also acknowledges that public financing may be needed to offset the huge TV costs of running for office.
Campaign financing is another major issue that separates McCain from the majority of his own party. The Republican National Committee, he reports, has created a new category for donors: the million-dollar contributor. "Anyone here want to sign up?" McCain asks the crowds.
Down the road from Littleton, whether the audience is more veterans in Laconia or the Republican Women's luncheon in Nashua or students at Keene State College, McCain spends at least as much energy — usually more — deploring the behavior of the Republican Party as he does tweaking Clinton and the Democrats.
"Republicans are so mesmerized by Clinton and their desire to get him," he tells me, "they lose sight of the fact that they're supposed to be doing the public's business." At the VFW halls, the GOP's frustrations are described as cartoonish: "I equate our Republican relationship with President Clinton to that of Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner. Republicans are always just about to get President Clinton and we've almost got our arms around him, and then the dynamite goes off — where we run off the cliff or the train runs over us."
Is this any way for a lighthearted war hero to win the GOP nomination? Maybe not, but voters, including younger ones, respond to his bluntness. They seem amused by the edgy rebukes that McCain occasionally delivers to voters who have their facts wrong or simply disagree with him. McCain's lifetime voting record is rated more than eighty-five percent conservative, and he stands with the right on social issues like abortion. But the man has always been comfortable going against the crowd.
In 1983, as a new House member and retired Navy captain, he voted against Ronald Reagan's dispatch of Marines to war-torn Lebanon because he could see no clear strategy for the mission (a few weeks later, scores of Marines were killed when a terrorist bombed their barracks). This year, when Clinton bombed Kosovo, Sen. McCain called for an all-out strategy to win — sending in ground troops if necessary — when other Republicans demanded withdrawal. "It was not the Republican Party's shining hour," he says. "I do worry about the rise of isolationism within the party. I think it's significant."
For McCain, the connecting thread between those two episodes is the experience of Vietnam, a limited war of gradual escalation in which young pilots like himself regarded the civilian strategists in Washington as "complete idiots," as he puts it in his new book. He tells the audiences of aging veterans, "I do not allow the shadow of Vietnam to fall over every decision I make, but there is one lesson I will never forget: Never again will we send our sons and daughters to fight and die in a conflict unless our objective is victory."
McCain locates himself in the "reformist minority" among congressional Republicans, those who are trying to change the party's tone and direction. He's a free-trader and small government conservative but also an activist who advocates using the powers of government for larger public purposes. That naturally offends right-wingers, who smell a moderate underneath the patriotism. The pro-life movement has been pounding him for suggesting gently that abortion rights may be here to stay and, in any case, shouldn't be the party's defining issue.
Indeed, McCain identifies with a long-ago Republican leader, President Teddy Roosevelt, who enacted antitrust laws and the original ban on corporate campaign contributions in 1907. Do corporations have too much power now? "Without a doubt, without a doubt," McCain says. "I don't say that as a matter of personal instinct. I say that because I see the manifestations every day in Congress."
Teddy Roosevelt, he points out, "also had an activist view of the role of government — a conservative but an activist reformer. That's how we got the National Parks system. He was willing to take on the big banks, willing to take on the other special interests of his day."
John McCain is willing to do the same, he promises. He's essentially gambling that rank-and-file Republicans, unlike the right-wing frothers of recent years, also want activist reform on many matters. "I've had arguments with the Republican leadership in Congress, but I'm not sure that much out of step with average Republicans," he says. "My impression is that many times the party doesn't have the pulse of the mainstream of the Republican Party."
It's a roll of the dice. McCain isn't betting his life on the outcome. When a Littleton voter apologizes for expressing some doubt that McCain will win, the candidate makes another joke. "Oh, please," he joshes. "Even my wife isn't so sure."
In the straight-talk spirit, John McCain always sits in the back of the bus, surrounded by the traveling press, while his staff is up front. Every one will get plenty of face time with him — in notable contrast to the hermetic style of closely protected candidates.
"You have to remember," he says of his campaign, "it's a six-month sprint. You gotta have fun. It's not forever. So enjoy, enjoy. And don't be afraid of losing."
Reporters open their notebooks as McCain muses about himself: "How many times have I stuck my foot in my mouth, shot my mouth off negatively and regretted it?" Without prompting, the senator offers examples, like the time in Arizona when he jokingly referred to the Leisure World retirement community as Seizure World. McCain groans. "I had to go five miles on my hands and knees and beg forgiveness," he recalls. In South Carolina, another early-primary state where he's counting on the veterans, a recent wisecrack got him in trouble. "The nice thing about Alzheimer's," he quipped, "is you get to hide your own Easter eggs."
Someone mentions an abhorrent comment he made last year about Chelsea Clinton. McCain apologized to the White House and still blushes at the memory. "I try not to be as nasty and insensitive," he says. After a moment of silence, the candidate adds brightly, "I can tell you others. You ought to have fun in campaigns. Sometimes it doesn't work."
Indeed, when reporters ask whether he's lectured his own children about using drugs, McCain replies, "I told my thirteen-year-old son I would beat him within an inch of his life."
At such moments, it would help if the McCain staff held up a sign: "Just Kidding!"
While McCain continues examining his flaws, the reporters on the bus are getting a bit edgy. Will somebody tell this guy to shut up before he self-destructs? No. "This is his campaign," an aide mumbles as the candidate disembarks at Plymouth. "It's not like we sit here and try to control him. Do you think he would listen if we did?"
In addition to old veterans, candidate McCain's great asset is the friendly press. Few political reporters are convinced he will win, but their stream of flattering stories and admiring commentaries have sweetened his prospects. If you're a reporter, accustomed to getting manipulated and boxed out by campaign handlers, you're bound to fall in love — and even feel a little protective toward this decent guy who is so incautious.
McCain returns the affection. He likes to be around reporters as much as other conservatives loathe them. "Most reporters are smart people," he explains. "I enjoy the exchanges." McCain is easily bored by mechanical routines, and his speeches sometimes skip around incoherently. "I'm averse to saying the same thing every time, because I bore myself," he explains.
His character is further reflected in his collection of eclectic friends — from R.W. "Johnny" Apple Jr., premier political correspondent for the New York Times, to David Geffen, a partner of Dream Works; from conservative columnist Arianna Huffington to former Colorado senator Gary Hart; from Gen. Colin Powell to Warren Beatty, the liberal movie star who's talked about running for president this year. Warren Beatty?
"I met him years ago through Gary Hart," McCain says. "He's interested in the betterment of the country; he's not just absorbed by his Hollywood career. Yes, he's a liberal, I'm conservative, we don't agree. But his intentions are honorable."
Another element of McCain's character is not so attractive: his volatile temper. "He's short-fused, blows his top frequently, but he does it more against Republicans than Democrats," says a Democratic politician who served with him and wonders whether McCain's temperament could withstand White House pressures. "I love him on a personal level," says another associate, "but he's got a hair trigger. He snaps at people, then he gets really apologetic about it."
Back on the bus, en route to Laconia, the reporters divert him with a series of fanzine questions. What are you reading, Senator? "John Updike's Best American Short Stories of the Century." What was your favorite book as a child? "King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table." Favorite living hero? "Ted Williams: best pilot, best baseball player, best fisherman."
Favorite drink: Stoli on the rocks. Tree: cottonwood. Music: Fifties and Sixties rock&roll; "I listen to the stations my kids hate. "Favorite Beatle: "I met Ringo Starr once, so I guess he's my favorite."
As the day ends, the bus heads toward the hotel in Concord. It's dark, and the group is exhausted, but McCain is opening doors for further conversation.
"You know, people talk about how bad the POW camp was in Vietnam," he begins, "but really we had a lot of fun."
McCain starts making jokes about his role as the "movie teller" who entertained fellow prisoners by recounting plotlines from old movies. Some he'd never seen; some never existed.
"We had some good times," the happy warrior explains. The reporters get out their notebooks again.
From RS824 — October 28, 1999