On board the Straight Talk Express one day last month in New Hampshire, McCain was asked by NEWSWEEK if he would import the idea to Washington if elected. He didn’t hedge. Besides promising weekly press conferences, the senator said he would ask the Capitol Hill leadership in both parties to select 10 members of Congress each for a weekly televised question session. “I think it’s a great idea,” McCain enthused. “That kind of exchange would be good for America, with the full knowledge that the president would be embarrassed.”
Embarrassed? A president who welcomes being one-upped by congressional rivals? The overall effect might be electrifying accountability; it might be empty parliamentary posturing. But at a minimum, it would be truly different, a new instrument of American self-government. And if it didn’t work, you could expect to hear that too. (“President McCain admitted today to another ‘stupid’ idea…”)
As recently as last fall John McCain insisted that the word “maverick,” derived from a 19th-century Texan who refused to conform to cattle-branding standards, was the wrong way to describe him. He thought it reinforced a misimpression of him as uncooperative and explosive in the Senate. But now McCain seems to be embracing his inner maverick. And like his hero Teddy Roosevelt, he’s undertaking what amounts to a hostile takeover of the Republican Party.
The aim is audacious and, even if he loses, historically significant: to recast the GOP as the party of reform, to renew TR’s campaign against moneyed interests threatening democracy and to reclaim the word “conservative” for a new century. What makes the ride all the more compelling and unsettling is that John McCain is operating as he always has–by the seat of his pants.
As a Navy flier, McCain repeatedly cheated death. He ditched one plane in Corpus Christi Bay and flew another so low over Italy that he cut power lines and plunged part of the country into darkness. On board the USS Forrestal, he barely escaped with his life when a freak explosion killed 134 shipmates, many of them before his eyes. Shot down over Hanoi in 1967, he was so sick that his fellow POWs didn’t expect him to survive.
McCain’s presidential campaign relies on the same confidence that he’ll somehow emerge from uncontrollable situations alive. In truth, his storied spontaneity is not always so spontaneous, but it works, anyway, with crowds that have tired of the usual packaging. Most public officials introduce dignitaries at their events with fulsome praise; McCain jokes that the assembled grayhairs are “Spanish-American War veterans.” Most candidates are scared to josh with reporters; McCain teases them publicly as “Trotskyites.” And most presidential contenders repeat the same old stump speech until reporters want to scream; McCain moves quickly from short canned remarks to unpredictable questions from the audience. He usually answers with startling directness, and instead of feeling the pain of the questioner, he often smiles and tells the voter to get to the point. The crowd, delighted that the war hero is more Don Rickles than Douglas MacArthur, eats it up.
So do the media, in part because of an inspired innovation the campaign developed out of necessity last summer, when McCain was a political nobody: the backstage pass. For years McCain has been exceptionally open to the national press corps. But now the campaign has created an unprecedented–and for the press, perilously intoxicating–level of access. Each day a rotating group of a half dozen or so reporters talk endlessly on the record with a cheerful McCain aboard his bus (or plane) between stops. The group chats about what’s in the newspapers or listens to McCain describe how hard it was for him to quit smoking. They see Cindy McCain applying hair spray to her husband’s white strands (war injuries prevent him from lifting his arms above shoulder level) and hear the candidate joke that his media adviser looks like he’s out of prison on work release. When McCain runs into trouble, he can’t hide behind aides or push the press behind rope lines, as other candidates do. He has to answer any question the reporters ask for the rest of the day.
For most politicians, this is a description of hell. But just as Bill Clinton draws energy from shaking hands, McCain gets a buzz from mixing it up. At first it seemed that McCain’s love of talking might be connected to his nearly two years (out of five and a half in Hanoi) of solitary confinement, where he could communicate with fellow POWs only through an elaborate knocking code or by whispering through cups held up against the wall. But then old friends insisted he has always been this way. His press relations go back at least to 1967, when as a young naval aviator in Saigon he made friends with R. W. (Johnny) Apple of The New York Times.
McCain’s open-mike strategy violates all the rules developed by political consultants in recent years for “controlling the story of the day” and “staying on message.” It also occasionally violates the candidate’s sense of privacy; last month McCain clearly regretted answering a question about what he would do if his 15-year-old daughter got pregnant.
But overall, the political payoff has been huge–the most positive press coverage of any Republican presidential contender since Dwight Eisenhower. McCain’s puckish charm also fits well with the entertainment culture that is increasingly encroaching on politics. And his good humor helps take the intimidating edge off his life story. That saga is so overpowering and, at times, excruciating, that it has needed a fresh kind of human interaction to show that the hero isn’t made of marble.
McCain’s critics say this is all just another act, and in a sense, they’re right. “He’s manipulating the press into not thinking they’re being manipulated,” says one GOP operative. But so far, the political theater McCain has constructed looks surprisingly sturdy. As president, McCain’s unsubtle style might make him a walking diplomatic incident–and prevent him from getting much done with Congress. But as a candidate, he seems to have found the right emotional key.
Bill Clinton is supposed to come from the Oprah-style confessional school of politics, yet he couldn’t even admit the real meaning of the word “is.” McCain, by contrast, says at almost every stop that he has made many mistakes and will continue to make them. He inoculates himself with pre-emptive apologies. (This, too, would bring a great change to the White House, where most presidents have thought that being a powerful nation means never having to say you’re sorry.) It also puts the media in a box. How can the press make a scandal over the way McCain cheated on his first wife after returning from Vietnam or sullied his reputation as part of the Keating Five savings and loan fiasco when he so openly volunteers these sins himself?
On the bus and off, McCain is restless, irreverent, coiled. The same quintessentially American qualities might be accurately applied to Bush, but the Texas governor, through no fault of his own, has not lived an eventful American life. Despite his parentage, he seems curiously unmoored from history and evokes no American archetypes. McCain does. His pictures resemble the older Charlie Chaplin; his life as a “scamp,” as his own mother calls him, is part Huck Finn, part flyboy-recruitment poster, part Johnny Carson.
Then there’s Vietnam and the mythic status it affords him, especially with pampered baby-boomer males who know in their hearts that they should have sacrificed for something somewhere along the way, as their fathers did. The shorthand talk-show line resonates with them: McCain survived prison camp; Bush survived summer camp.
More important, McCain’s life story can be told to their children, an important selling point for women voters too. The whole “straight talk” campaign is predicated on McCain’s being the ultimate anti-Clinton. Instead of the blue dress, there’s the tattered wash rag that for years was prisoner McCain’s only possession. Instead of Ken Starr, there’s “The Cat,” McCain’s wily and vicious North Vietnamese interrogator. Instead of Clinton’s selling off the Lincoln Bedroom, “as if he were the bellhop at a Motel 6,” in McCain’s words, there’s the image of McCain himself in the grimmest “hotel” imaginable–“The Hanoi Hilton.”
None of this is ever made explicit in the campaign, and that gives it more power. While his ads pound away on the veteran angle, McCain himself wears his mantle lightly and, despite the American flags festooning every campaign rally, without the usual patriotic corniness. Of course, when he says in answer to questions that he was no hero, that “it takes no talent to be shot down,” he just looks like more of a hero. When he says he couldn’t have possibly taken Hanoi’s offer of early release from prison–offered as a propaganda ploy because his father was a top admiral–it reinforces the honor of his choice.
And while he believes the war could have been won and that Henry Kissinger is a great man, his close friendships with some former antiwar protesters symbolizes the healing of national wounds. This April marks 25 years since the fall of Saigon. McCain’s appeal across ideological lines may be proof that the war is finally over.
At 63, he is not a baby boomer but the product of the 1950s ethos of John Wayne (he was even once nicknamed “John Wayne McCain”) and James Dean. Yet he connects with a certain boomer remorse about the leaders its cohort has sent to higher office. And if he wins, McCain would represent a bridge between the World War II generation and its argumentative children, championing service and rebellion simultaneously. This easy mix of the 1950s and 1960s works now as retro cool.
McCain is trying to meld the older values of duty and honor with the messier, quirkier, more ironic style of today’s kids, the grandchildren of the Greatest Generation, who are showing up in increasing numbers at his rallies. His basic reason for running–to “inspire young Americans to sacrifice for a cause larger than their own self-interest”–is still vague. Will he engender a new kind of American patriotism by mobilizing a (low-cost) volunteer army for service to the needy at home? His aides leave tantalizing hints that something like that might be on the way.
The whole premise of McCain’s campaign is character. “You have to figure out how the president will run the country rather than focus on specific issues, which are always changing,” he says one day on the bus. And how to figure that out? Clues to McCain’s character are scattered through his best-selling book, and they are not always flattering:
“When I was disciplined by my teachers, which happened regularly, it was often for fighting,” he writes of his early years.
“I was an arrogant, undisciplined, insolent midshipman who felt it necessary to prove my mettle by challenging authority. In short, I acted like a jerk,” he writes of his Annapolis years.
“Resisting, being uncooperative and a general pain in the ass proved, as it had in the past, to be a morale booster for me,” he writes of his relationship with North Vietnamese prison guards while in solitary.
McCain brought some of these same traits to the U.S. Senate in 1986, and it helps explain why–despite a reliably conservative voting record–four fifths of his GOP Senate colleagues prefer a Texas governor they barely know for president (Sens. Jon Kyl, Fred Thompson, Mike DeWine and Chuck Hagel are the exceptions). While his staff is one of the most loyal and long-serving on Capitol Hill, McCain’s temper has taken its toll on his relationships with fellow Republicans.
Inside the GOP caucus, the Arizonan has often tongue-lashed his colleagues for selling out conservative free-market principles in order to bring pork to their states. Most of these senators are accustomed to being coddled and flattered all day, and they have not responded well to McCain’s bluntness. Democrats like Bob Kerrey and John Kerry, who worked with McCain on diplomatic recognition of Vietnam, have much kinder words for him.
McCain’s fight for a tough tobacco bill and campaign-finance reform have brought his breach with the GOP leadership into the open–a perceived assault on the survival of Republicans everywhere who depend on soft money from Big Tobacco and other special interests. The drama ahead may be whether some Republicans would rather lose the election than nominate McCain.
In the meantime McCain has opened himself up to charges of hypocrisy. The senator decries the power of special interests but has raised more of his money from Washington than the other candidates. He attacks lobbyists but his campaign manager, Rick Davis, is himself a former lobbyist, and two of his closest advisers–Ken Duberstein and Vin Weber–continue to peddle influence. He says he’s an outsider but has spent the past 17 years in Washington, where his friends are a Who’s Who of Beltway fixtures.
McCain’s aides defend him by producing letters he has written to regulators that are hostile to the interests of some of his big contributors–proof, they say, that he is not in their pocket. More important, no one can convincingly accuse McCain of being insincere about campaign-finance reform. As practically the only Republican in the Senate to favor it, he could hardly have viewed it originally as a horse to ride to the GOP presidential nomination. Instead it grew out of his own mortification over being implicated in the Keating Five scandal.
For all his reformist rhetoric, McCain still often follows a conventional path. He is baldly pandering to South Carolina voters by muting his earlier criticism of the Confederate flag. He often gives the impression of being less than a straight shooter on his real feelings about banning abortions. His oft-stated “adherence to principle” dissolves on various domestic issues, where his lack of interest has left him with little sense of the policy choices. By contrast, he is extremely well informed on foreign and defense policy, which he considers the primary responsibility of the president.
In the 20th century only two men–Warren Harding and John F. Kennedy–went directly from the Senate to the presidency. McCain has never run anything larger than a Senate office, a point that Bush will hammer home. His temperament when holding real power is unknown, though it’s a good bet he’d throw his weight around.
Until last week the press could cover John McCain as a charming long shot, without much claim on the presidency. Now all that has changed. Even reporters who find his act refreshing are likely to launch their own more tough-minded “Question Time,” with an eye toward how the straight talker would actually govern.
