Where's the Real McCain?
Presidential campaign staff shake-ups are as predictable as sunrise, but leave it to Sen. John McCain to provide one with a flourish. Picture this: The senator, just back from a trip to Iraq, has the political world on edge as he takes to the Senate floor to announce whether he still supports the president. (He does.) Yet just as McCain asks the country to have more patience on the war, his campaign announces that the candidate's own patience—with his stalled presidential bid-has run out. (He's mad.) Two top aides are gone, with more changes to come. The candidate, says one close aide, "hit the roof" before his trip abroad when he learned the details of an undeniable disaster: He's broke, with less money than GOP presidential contender Ron Paul. Ridiculous.
The story of the imploding campaign is not just a tale of mismanagement and political miscalculation, although it is that. It's also about McCain himself—the fiscal conservative who paid too little attention to his own bloated operation. The experienced candidate who should have known better than to believe in his own inevitability. The outsider who became the pinup for the GOP establishment—a status quo candidate in an election about change. Like most things with McCain, says a close friend, the turmoil is "all complicated and conflicted." And emotional. So emotional, in fact, that both his wife, Cindy, and Sen. Trent Lott—who has, by one account, become the "single-most-influential elected official in McCain-world"—had to intervene. Top advisers Terry Nelson and John Weaver had to go, they told the candidate. For McCain, parting with longtime friend and political ally Weaver was hard, like firing his alter ego.
Lapsed reformer. But it's just as hard to find the real McCain these days. The very brilliance of McCain circa 2000 was rooted in the reformer with a gut connection to voters because he was willing to defy his own party—or just about anyone, for that matter. Yet after losing, the iconoclast was somehow lost, too, and mired in a premature national campaign. We need conservatives to win, the consultants said. Go directly to Liberty University and hug the Rev. Jerry Falwell! Then it got worse. No matter where McCain turned, he was up against it: Conservatives still hated both his devotion to campaign finance reform and his pro-immigration stand. (Bye-bye, small donors.) Liberals and independents hated his steadfast support for the war. (Bye-bye, electability.) And so, the candidate went into free fall—in the polls, in the fundraising, without a clear message or a plan to win. Instead, "McCain became a legislator in chief, and the issues didn't work for us," grumbles one McCain ally. "We need to get back to what makes McCain an interesting person and a candidate."
Here's the problem: It's one thing to become an anti-establishment maverick, which McCain did brilliantly in 2000. But it's a feat worthy of a contortionist to join the establishment, then leave it again—and expect voters to follow through every detour. "Last time around, he was independent-minded," says GOP pollster Tony Fabrizio. "This time, he became scolding, even annoying. He used to be charming." Charm aside, there is something that hasn't changed: McCain does have beliefs, despite the occasional urge to pander. Sure, support for the war helps him with the Republican base, but that's not what it is about. McCain may be irritating all kinds of constituencies, but at least we know he's not pretending. "Nobody can ever suggest to McCain that he change what he believes," says a close aide. "Nobody would ever think to go there."
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