Honest John, on the Loose
With McCain, you get the good, the bad, and the angry
John McCain wiggles around in the seat, leans the back of his head against the window of the bus, whips out a pair of dark, happenin' sunglasses that make him look like Sen. Blues Brother, and begins to talk about his old friend Barry Goldwater, the man he followed to the Senate, a man he truly loved. "Goldwater said to me, 'If I had been elected president, if I had defeated Lyndon Johnson in 1964, you never would have been in a Vietnamese prison camp,'" McCain says and waits as the reporters scratch this furiously into their notebooks. "And I said, `You're right, Barry. It would have been a Chinese prison camp!'"
Everyone roars. The bus rocks. And John McCain plunges into another story, this one about how when his plane was shot down and he was imprisoned by the North Vietnamese from 1967 to 1973, he was his cell's "movie teller" and had to tell the plots of movies every day to help everyone survive the crushing boredom. "I must have told a hundred movies," McCain says. "Of course, I didn't know a hundred movies. So I just made them up." But McCain's masterwork was going to be the staging of Dickens's A Christmas Carol. Using a sliver of bamboo for a pen and ink made from cigarette ash, McCain laboriously wrote out every part on toilet paper. "And then the goddamn gooks came into the cell and took three of my stars out!" McCain growls.
Strictly speaking, one does not say "gooks" anymore. It is simply not done. But John McCain says "gooks," and who is going to tell him not to? And when he starts another story, talking about how he fell in love with one of the camp cooks and is asked what "his" name was, McCain says, "Please! It was a female! I never got that bad."
Strictly speaking, McCain might want to avoid that joke, considering Barney Frank once called him "a thousand percent antigay." And when McCain enters VFW Post 1670 in Laconia, N.H., one evening and spies a couple of marines in the crowd, he begins his speech by saying, "After the Naval Academy, I tried to get into the Marine Corps. But my parents were married." Strictly speaking . . . .
"It seems to me," says campaign manager Rick Davis, showing a certain flair for understatement, "the rest of the field is not conducting their campaigns the way John McCain is." The rest of the field is not even coming close. Nobody campaigns like this. In an age when "controlling the message" has become a mania and candidates are viewed by their staffs as errant children who must be kept from the press lest they commit news, McCain is unique: He sits down with reporters, talks on the record with reporters, jokes with reporters, and just plain schmoozes with reporters. Is he eventually going to get burned? Sure. Does he care? Not much. "Other campaigns I've been on, you see this kind of almost a class thing, you know what I mean?" McCain told U.S. News. "The reporters are back there and you're up here. One out of 100 may be trying to sandbag you, but that's a risk you take." So far, McCain has gotten terrific press--the praise has been so lavish, it has been dubbed the "McCain Swoon"--and he is so open, it is easy for reporters to start feeling protective of him. On one recent five-day tour of New Hampshire, his 15th Granite State trip since he began running for president, he unexpectedly began the day by volunteering to reporters some of the terrible things he has said in the past. First there was the time he referred to the Leisure World senior citizens home as "Seizure World," and then there was the time he said, "The nice thing about Alzheimer's is you get to hide your own Easter eggs," and then there was the egregious joke that went something like, "Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Janet Reno is her father, and Hillary is her mother," and pretty soon a reporter just begged McCain to shut up and protect himself. But the guy can't help it. He was a Navy jet jockey, and while regulations required him to follow a careful checklist before each takeoff, McCain often dispensed with it. "Kick the tires and light the fires!" McCain says, recalling his motto back then. "To hell with the checklist. Anybody can be slow." Which is exactly the way he is running his campaign.
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