campaign had boasted that it could raise $50 million in the all-important first quarter of 2007, an amount that might have intimidated the opposition. Instead McCain raised $13 million, less than either Mitt Romney or Rudy Giuliani.
Rick Davis, manager of the 2000 campaign, had not been exiled altogether; he had just been pushed aside, told to talk up the donors and handle what was called “the Mrs. McCain stuff”—seeing to it that Cindy McCain got whatever she needed. In the winter and spring of 2007, what Mrs. McCain got from Davis was an earful about how badly the campaign was going.
Cindy McCain had never loved politics. She understood that she had to be a “Navy wife” and put up with her husband’s frequent long absences, but that didn’t mean she liked to play the stoic. The daughter of a wealthy Arizona beer distributor, Cindy had been pampered by her father, and sent to school at the University of Southern California (USC, which, John liked to tease, really stands for University of Spoiled Children). On the campaign trail, her platinum blond hair pulled back in a sleek but severe style, she was a notably unsmiling presence. During the 2000 campaign, she had been reduced to tears when Republican dirty tricksters started putting out the word that she had been addicted to painkillers (true, but successfully kicked) and that McCain had fathered a love child with a black hooker (the smear artists used photos of the McCains’ daughter Bridget, adopted from a Bangladeshi orphanage by Cindy). Cindy had blamed the Bush operation, and she bridled against “those Bush people” now surrounding her husband. Davis did not discourage her complaints.
The crystal palace, in the winter of 2007, turned into a snake pit. The Weaver-Nelson camp blamed Davis’s people in fundraising for not drumming up enough money; the Davis camp blamed the Nelson-Weaver management for spending money they didn’t have. Davis whispered to Cindy that headquarters was filled with résumé padders and mercenaries who weren’t really there out of loyalty to John McCain. The candidate seemed irritated and slightly bewildered. Hearing that the communications shop had just attacked Mitt Romney again, he would ask in genuine bafflement, “Well, why did we do that?”
McCain was an inveterate cell-phoner. He was constantly on the phone pressing his staff and his advisers—present and former—for information. “What’s going on?” he would begin the conversation. “What’s happening?” As the discussion seemed to finally wind down, he would push, “What else?” McCain had no use for chains of command, and he used his cell phone to set up back channels into the campaign hierarchy. His calls to dissidents against the campaign leadership stirred up so much confusion and anxiety that his friend the former senator Phil Gramm finally advised him to stop.
The candidate looked unhappy and his performances were lackluster; the money was not rolling in; no one was talking about the “inevitability” of John McCain. By the late spring of 2007, McCain’s campaign was at best adrift, if not sinking. The problem was not Nelson and Weaver or Davis, the new Bushians or the old McCainiacs. The problem was McCain.
To the many reporters who had ridden McCain’s bus in 2000, the Straight Talk Express, the candidate was a charming, winning man. He liked to tease and joke, and he could talk for hours—on the record—about almost any subject. Reporters who spent time with him sensed that beneath the bluffness there was a sense of grace—that McCain, tortured in prison, possessed an unusual depth of character, that he was capable of profound forgiveness of sin, his own and others’. He occasionally held grudges, but usually he dropped them. He could admit to his faults and often did. He was disarming: “He wore his flaws like a badge of honor and jealously guards his demons,” recalled Carl Cameron, a Fox News reporter who had traveled many miles with him. To say that McCain was not like most politicians was an almost laughable understatement. Who else was so open and accessible? McCain, for his part, loved reporters: at the 2004 Republican convention, he had invited 50 A-list journos to a fancy French restaurant in New York and toasted them, only half kidding, as “my base.”
But McCain’s closest friends knew a more complicated man, more human, not necessarily less heroic, but whose virtues were also his flaws. They observed his restlessness and noted that he seemed incapable of serenity, that he could never really relax (except, perhaps, to watch a football game). One Arizona friend observed that he always seemed to be in a rush, as if he were making up for the years he’d lost in prison. McCain seemed to have an almost pathological desire not to be left alone, a hangover, some aides surmised, from his many months in solitary confinement as a POW. He seemed to need to be on the bus sparring with reporters; he was bored by staff briefings on the minutiae of polling and tactics. At one point, when the campaign was talking to charter companies about airplanes, someone suggested a plane for the candidate and staff and a separate plane for the press. The response from several other staffers was, are you kidding? McCain would dump the staff and take the reporters on his plane.
Even his top aides, who tended to be close personal friends as well, sometimes had uneasy feelings about the candidate. Because McCain seemed to live in the moment, because he had no regrets and could move on without looking back, one of his most intimate advisers confessed that he feared he might be dropped at any second, cast off, without warning or much second thought. McCain was loyal, he loved to talk about the band of brothers … and yet he could be secretive and evasive. He could be blunt, sometimes scorchingly so … but did anyone know what he was really thinking?
For all his gregariousness, McCain was at heart a loner. He was a pilot, a solo fighter jock, not an admiral of the fleet; in the Navy he had relatively little command experience, aside from running an air wing of replacement pilots after he returned from Vietnam. A military brat who moved around with his family, McCain had never been in any one place for long. Called a carpetbagger when he first ran for Congress from Arizona in 1982, he snapped back sarcastically that he would have appreciated the luxury of “growing up and living and spending my entire life in a nice place like the First District of Arizona, but I was doing other things. As a matter of fact, when I think about it now, the place I lived the longest in my life was in Hanoi.” But with his aides, he rarely talked about those five and a half years in prison in the Hanoi Hilton. […continued on page 2]