John McCain: The Man Who Never Was
john mccain politics magazine
Todd S. Purdum Edward Sorel David Canfield Eve Batey Bess Levin Katie Herchenroeder Chris Murphy Condé Nast
Desperate to keep his Senate seat, John McCain repudiated his record, his principles, and even his maverick reputation, entrenching himself as the anti-Obama.
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Vanity Fair
It was a Friday evening in Phoenix and 110 in the shade. In the studio of a local independent television station, the compact, cocky, balding, white-haired man who, earlier in the decade, reigned as the nation’s most popular politician, and two years ago was the Republican Party’s unlikely presidential standard-bearer, was trapped in an annoying hour-long debate, sandwiched between two political pip-squeaks who wanted his job. If John McCain found the situation awkward, he didn’t show it. He just smiled tightly and took it—and he gave as good as he got.

McCain ripped into his principal challenger for the Republican nomination for what would be his fifth term in the Senate, the former Arizona congressman and conservative talk-radio personality J. D. Hayworth—dismissing him by saying that “after he was voted out by his constituents, he became a lobbyist, and after that a talk-show host, and then after that an infomercial and late-night star.” McCain was gently solicitous of his other rival, Jim Deakin, a contractor, small-businessman, and, as the debate moderator noted, “a guest lecturer at Scottsdale Community College,” who was making his first run for public office, under the Tea Party banner.

But it fell to Hayworth, a glib galoot who was twice informally ranked among the dumbest members of Congress during his 12 years in the House, to deliver the dead-on zinger that summed up where McCain has found himself in this strange and angry political season, struggling not to win the presidency but simply to hold on to the job which defines him, and which is all he has left. “It’s really sad to see John McCain, who should be revered as a statesman, basically reduced to a political shape-shifter,” Hayworth said.

So it is.

McCain would go on to trounce Hayworth in the August primary, by 24 points, but not before turning himself into an off-putting, almost unrecognizable political creature. In the face of Hayworth’s challenge, McCain flipped his position on repealing the military’s “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy for gay service members; soft-pedaled his backing of climate-change legislation; and abandoned his longtime support for comprehensive immigration reform that would recognize reality and provide an eventual path to citizenship for the 11 million illegal aliens already living in the country. Instead, he offered full-throated backing for the border fence he once mocked—“Complete the danged fence!,” he demanded in an ad—and sought political cover in the form of an endorsement by his former running mate, Sarah Palin, whose selection was surely the single most cynical decision he ever made in nearly 30 years in public life. Last January, after the Supreme Court overturned a key element of the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance bill (its limits on corporate and union contributions), McCain announced that he would not join congressional efforts to find a legislative way around the court’s decision. This spring he went as far as to declare to David Margolick in Newsweek that he had never considered himself a maverick at all, prompting that acid commentator on human foibles Jon Stewart to observe that McCain had not only sold his soul but sold it short.

The boiling anger of the Palin/Tea Party wing of the G.O.P. has undone even some of the most popular Republicans, such as Representative Mike Castle of Delaware, who lost his bid for the Senate nomination there to the neophyte Christine O’Donnell (even Karl Rove denounced O’Donnell as “nutty”), and forced Republicans far more orthodox than McCain to twist themselves into uncomfortable caricatures. In McCain’s case, the gambit worked, though.

Last year, a poll showed Hayworth within a couple of points of McCain in a prospective primary matchup. “The senator owes his victory to the pressure he received from conservatives and Tea Partiers,” the conservative guru Richard Viguerie declared after the primary. “To receive that support, he had to give up his maverick positions that have sometimes given aid and comfort to the liberals. I’m sure Senator McCain knows very well that he would not have won if he had continued his reputation as the Democrats’ favorite Republican.” McCain not only sold his soul, he went through a small fortune, spending $20 million to blow Hayworth out of the water. And far from seeing Hayworth’s challenge as a depressing indignity, McCain seemed to enjoy the opportunity. “A fight not joined is a fight not enjoyed,” as he put it after the Phoenix debate.

“He loves being the underdog, and for a certain period of time he looked like the underdog against J. D. Hayworth,” says Torie Clarke, McCain’s former press secretary, who first went to work for him in the mid-1980s. “On a day-to-day basis, I’ll bet he enjoys it. On a long-term basis, looking back on the last 40 years of his life, I don’t know.” She adds, “I think a fair number of people who’ve worked with him over the years look at him—and what he has to do to win this campaign—and say, ‘Is it really worth it?’ He seems to be sacrificing some of the principles he holds dear. He seems to be making compromises he wouldn’t have made 10 or 15 years ago.”

Only in a brief news conference with the handful of reporters who showed up to cover the debate did McCain give a small, sad, unintended insight into what he—who commanded the attention of the whole country and won the votes of nearly half the electorate just 24 months ago—must be thinking these days. He said he is confident that when they examine his record “the American …the people of Arizona” will make the right choice.

The prevailing question about John McCain this year is: What happened? What happened to that other John McCain, the refreshingly unpredictable figure who stood apart from his colleagues and seemed to promise something better than politics as usual? The question may miss the point. It’s quite possible that nothing at all has changed about John McCain, a ruthless and self-centered survivor who endured five and a half years in captivity in North Vietnam, and who once told Torie Clarke that his favorite animal was the rat, because it is cunning and eats well. It’s possible to see McCain’s entire career as the story of a man who has lived in the moment, who has never stood for any overriding philosophy in any consistent way, and who has been willing to do all that it takes to get whatever it is he wants. He himself said, in the thick of his battle with Hayworth, “I’ve always done whatever’s necessary to win.” Maybe the rest of us just misunderstood.

McCain has always lived for the fight, and he has defined himself most clearly in opposition to an enemy, whether that enemy was the rule-bound leadership of the United States Naval Academy, his North Vietnamese captors, the hometown Arizona press corps that never much liked him, his Republican congressional colleagues, the Reverend Jerry Falwell, George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Barack Obama, or J. D. Hayworth. He has always been more of an existential politician than a consequential one, in the sense that his influence has derived not from steady, unswerving pursuit of philosophical goals or legislative achievements but from the series of unpredictable—and sometimes spectacular—fights he has chosen to pick. As his daughter Meghan recently wrote, he has always been more of a craps guy than a strategic poker player. He has never been a party leader, like his old friend Bob Dole, of Kansas, or a wise elder, like his colleague Dick Lugar, of Indiana, or a Republican moderate, like Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, of Maine. He flies solo, first, last, and always, and his paramount cause has always been his own. That is the bracing reality of John McCain. It is the tragedy, too.

There is no doubt that being John McCain 2010 is a colossal comedown for a man who was described just three years ago by The Almanac of American Politics as “the closest thing our politics has to a national hero.” Beginning with his 2000 presidential campaign, which climaxed in his stunning 18-point upset victory over George W. Bush in the New Hampshire primary and cratered just weeks later in bitter defeat in South Carolina, McCain redefined the image of the Happy Warrior in politics for a generation of Americans long unaccustomed to the sight, conducting a freewheeling, subversive seminar on his campaign bus, the Straight Talk Express. He seemed, somehow, above conventional politics, if only because he wasn’t above letting the world know that he thought the game, as it had come to be practiced, was a joke. In defeat, he voted against George W. Bush’s initial tax cuts (because, he said at the time, such cuts would go disproportionately to the rich, and later because he feared there would be no compensating cuts in spending), and he was unsparing in his criticism of the administration’s conduct of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and of its embrace of torture in interrogations of suspected terrorists. Had he shown the slightest interest in his friend John Kerry’s importunings, he might well have been the Democratic vice-presidential nominee in 2004. He went to work with Democrats such as the late Ted Kennedy to bring sanity, and humanity, to the nation’s long-running debate over illegal immigration. And at a time when such a position entailed nothing but political dangers, in his own party and with the electorate at large, he was steadfast in maintaining that the country should commit more troops to Iraq, not withdraw the forces already there.

The public perception of McCain’s heresies grew so pronounced as his 2008 presidential campaign was gearing up that his political guru at the time, John Weaver, told me McCain would call him several times a day, just to ask, “How hard am I making your life?” In 2006, I watched McCain tell a group of sensible, blue-suited Republican businessmen in Milwaukee, who asked about immigration, “By the way, I think the fence is least effective. But I’ll build the goddamned fence if they want it.” His presidential campaign nearly crashed completely in the summer of 2007, when he was so low on money that he flew commercial coach with just an aide or two in tow. But McCain had campaigned diligently for Bush’s 2004 re-election, publicly, if awkwardly, hugging the man he had despised, and then for Republican candidates around the country in the 2006 midterms. Eventually, as his mother had predicted, the Republican Party held its nose and made him its nominee. It’s been downhill ever since.

There is a difference between facing a changed and shrunken external reality (which McCain surely now does) and changing one’s essential nature (which McCain almost certainly has not). He has always had a reckless streak, and he has repeatedly skated by after conduct that would have doomed others less resourceful, resilient, or privileged. As a navy pilot, he crashed three planes before being shot down by a surface-to-air missile over Hanoi. He spent harrowing years in captivity in North Vietnam, and parlayed that fame into a high-profile job as the navy’s liaison to the Senate, and then parlayed that—with the help of his second wife’s family fortune—into a political career in his adopted state of Arizona, first winning a seat in the House of Representatives in 1982, and then taking Barry Goldwater’s Senate seat upon his retirement, in 1986.

For most of the time from his first election until his 2000 presidential campaign he was a reliable conservative Republican: pro-defense, anti-tax, anti-abortion, solid on social issues and the culture wars. But he was never a team player, never popular with his Republican colleagues, with whom he publicly quarreled on the slightest pretext, which made him seem more independent. It could just as easily be that he was more selfish. In high school, McCain’s nicknames included “McNasty,” and for more than two decades, the overriding majority of his Senate colleagues, in both parties, have repaid his angry outbursts against them with active and unrelenting dislike.

After surviving his brush with shame during the Keating Five influence-peddling scandal in 1989, McCain embraced the cause of campaign-finance reform, which endeared him to good-government types and the press but to almost no one else in either party. Like other senators, McCain had taken campaign contributions and favors from savings-and-loan entrepreneur Charles Keating, and had then intervened with government regulators on Keating’s behalf. McCain’s zeal for campaign reform was an act of public atonement—ballsy, yes, but driven as much by Realpolitik as by principle. In the late 1990s, he saw in George W. Bush an unappealing lightweight unready for the presidency and thought, What the hell? Why not me?

McCain’s 2000 campaign is remembered for its come-what-may candor, but even then he tried to have his cake and eat it, too. One day in January 2000, in response to a hypothetical question about what would happen if his then 15-year-old daughter became pregnant, McCain said, “The final decision would be made by Meghan with our advice and counsel.” The response made it seem as if he had embraced the pro-choice position on abortion—anathema to Republican primary voters. He spent the next 24 hours awkwardly backtracking. In the heat of the G.O.P. primary in South Carolina, where the question of whether the state should display the Confederate battle flag had come to be seen as a crucial litmus test of conservative purity, McCain infamously shifted his position to suit the political moment, retreating from his declaration that the flag was “a symbol of racism and slavery” to say instead that he understood both sides in the debate. “The beginning of the end for John McCain was the Confederate flag,” Torie Clarke says. “That did more harm to him with the broader electorate than anything else.”

“In a campaign sense,” one former aide recalls, “his world, the campaign, is what is immediately in his line of sight. So it’s the airplane, it’s the reporters on the plane, it’s the crowd in front of him, and nothing else exists. A modern campaign is going to be a billion-dollar enterprise in the next cycle, and the candidate is the most important part, but there’s so much that lies beneath the surface that’s not visible. McCain doesn’t understand, at a fundamental level, media and communications in the modern age. All of this stuff that’s changed in very rapid fashion—the Twitter, the this, the that, or the other. For him it’s the Sunday shows, and things like that. It’s kind of like, ‘Where’s Johnny Apple?’” (R. W. Apple Jr., the late New York Times correspondent and editor, had been a friend since their days in Vietnam.)

“I think it’s very easy to chart out,” this aide adds. “He is first and foremost a creature of his emotions.” Like his idol Teddy Roosevelt, who so disdained his hand-picked Republican successor, William Howard Taft, that he ran an independent campaign against him and handed the presidency to Democrat Woodrow Wilson, McCain sees all politics as personal, and his principal goal has always been self-preservation.

McCain’s stagy “suspension” of his 2008 campaign to return to Washington to deal with the Wall Street financial crisis is a classic case in point. As related in Jonathan Alter’s book The Promise, at a bipartisan White House meeting—called solely because McCain had asked the Bush administration to hold it—he sat sullen and silent, saying “I’ll just listen” as Obama showed a detailed command of the situation. When he finally spoke, 43 minutes into the meeting, McCain acknowledged that he had not even read the Treasury secretary’s three-page outline of a proposed bank-bailout plan.

His choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate was, of course, the apogee of his hotheaded, cold-blooded self-protectiveness. Denied his own first choice, his friend Joe Lieberman, the Independent-Democrat from Connecticut, he opted instead for the only candidate his advisers thought stood a chance of reinforcing his much-dimmed reputation as a maverick. But in doing so he chose a person so manifestly unqualified for the presidency as to make him look like little more than a hack. “He picked a running mate to prove what an outsider he was,” one former adviser said, “and by comparison he wound up looking like the most conventional person around.” Making Sarah Palin into one of the most influential people in the Republican Party may turn out to be McCain’s most lasting political legacy to his country. Rather than expressing second thoughts or misgivings about his decision, he has dug himself in and defended it.

At one point last summer, J. D. Hayworth said the country was better off with Obama as president than it would have been with an unreliably conservative McCain. McCain took great umbrage, but it’s an interesting thought experiment to imagine what the first two years of a McCain-Palin partnership in the White House might have produced. There would probably have been no stimulus bill, and the country’s economic condition would be no better (and probably worse). General Motors and Chrysler would have been allowed to go bankrupt rather than helped to emerge into a state of healthiness, as they may well be doing. There would have been no significant new regulation of the financial industry. The Bush tax cuts for those Americans with the highest incomes—something McCain had opposed before reversing himself—would have been extended. There would have been only modest health-insurance reform, at best—McCain’s proposals were Republican boilerplate and meant for use in the campaign, never a serious program. Perhaps there would have been greater progress on immigration, though McCain had already abandoned that issue, and it’s easier to imagine his taking the more nativist stance he has since adopted. There would be no Supreme Court justices Kagan and Sotomayor, but there would likely be two more conservative justices, and the days of Roe v. Wade would be numbered. There would be no troop drawdown in Iraq. The United States might well have bombed or blockaded Iran in response to that country’s flawed election last year, or in response to its nuclear program. There would have been serial feuds between aides to the president and vice president, but the fact that Vice President Palin had an independent power base, far larger and more enthusiastic than McCain’s own, would have limited what President McCain could do about it. The “Ground Zero mosque” dispute would probably have arisen anyway, and McCain might have been hard put to do anything but side with the opponents. The Palin-family soap opera would now be daily fodder for the national press rather than mainly the tabloids. Like Obama, President McCain would probably have been asked to give the commencement address at Arizona State University. Unlike Obama, he would probably have been awarded an honorary degree.

In at least one very real way, McCain himself does seem different these days.

McCain is a man who has spent his life making a sport of cheating death. Two years ago, when he asked his chief campaign vetter, A. B. Culvahouse, for his bottom line on the idea of making Palin his vice-presidential nominee, Culvahouse replied, “High risk, high reward.” “You shouldn’t have told me that,” McCain replied. “I’ve been a risktaker all my life.”

But now McCain seems uncharacteristically fearful. In a commencement address at Ohio Wesleyan University in the spring, he spoke to the graduates about the inevitability of life’s disappointments. “For most people, life is long enough and varied enough to overcome occasional mistakes and failures. You might think that I’m now going to advise you not to be afraid to fail. I’m not. Be afraid. Speaking from considerable experience, failing stinks. Just don’t be undone by it.” History is full of notable examples of people who failed to achieve paramount ambitions—who fought the good fight and died disconsolate because some idea they had championed went down to defeat. Woodrow Wilson comes readily to mind. But “failure” for McCain seems not to be failure to achieve a lasting goal but simply the failure to continue being what he is.

It seems safe to say that McCain would be undone by losing his Senate seat. The men in McCain’s family have withered when out of harness. His hard-drinking father and grandfather were both admirals, and when their careers ended, so, essentially, did their lives. McCain’s grandfather John Sidney McCain was relieved of his command just before the end of World War II for his role in inadvertently steering a fleet into a typhoon. “I know how to fight, but now I don’t know whether I know how to relax or not,” he told a friend, then dropped dead of a heart attack at his welcome-home party, four days after the war ended. Due to his failing health, McCain’s father was also retired prematurely, in the middle of the Vietnam War, and the rest of his life was marred by illness and invalidism. McCain has no hobbies, beyond cooking ribs and watching birds at his cabin, in Sedona, Arizona. His wartime injuries make it impossible for him to engage in any exercise more demanding than a vigorous walk. “He’s not going to go off and set up a global education foundation,” Torie Clarke says. I once asked McCain if he missed flying, after his crash and injuries made it effectively impossible for him to continue. “I miss it like I had a great experience and it’s over,” he told me. “It never consumed me. Maybe that’s why I got shot down.” He’s now been in elective office nearly three times as many years as he was an active flier, and there is little doubt that he would miss the Senate much more. The most emotional I ever saw him get in more than 10 years of watching him off and on was when we were talking alone in a chartered jet and he recounted spending the last day of the 1996 campaign with Bob Dole, in Dole’s hometown of Russell, Kansas. Dole had resigned his Senate seat to campaign full-time, and now he was left without either the White House or the job he had always loved best. “It makes me emotional thinking about it,” McCain told me quietly, and I suddenly realized his eyes had filled with tears.

McCain and his wife, Cindy, have been living essentially separate lives for years. She has spent most of her time in Arizona while he has spent the workweek in a Virginia condominium where, he once told me, he sometimes went months at a time without ever entering the living room, simply coming home to the kitchen and bedroom late at night and leaving again early the next morning. In 2008, McCain was deeply stung by a long New York Times article about his working relationship with a lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, and its assertion that certain McCain aides feared the relationship had some years earlier morphed into an affair. To this day, McCain declines to give interviews to the paper, which was once one of his favorite outlets. While associates say the McCains are companionable, one former aide allows, “I’m not going to tell you that they have a conventionally close marriage, but I’m just not going to get into it.”

The Senate is McCain’s whole life, his reason for being. “This is what he does,” one former aide says. “He is a United States senator. This is his ecology. It’s a big job, but it’s a really small world. It’s like a killer whale born in captivity in SeaWorld; it doesn’t know any better. It doesn’t know it’s supposed to be in the Pacific Ocean.”

If the voters of Arizona return him to Washington, McCain’s immediate future will continue to be defined by one overriding reality: dealing with (or, as the case more often may be, working against) the man who defeated him, Barack Obama. They hold each other in what legislators used to describe with faux courtesy as “minimum high regard.”

Last fall, during his review of his strategy for Afghanistan, Obama met with McCain and other members of Congress. It was at a moment when Dick Cheney and other Republicans were accusing Obama of dithering. McCain undertook to lecture him, saying, in the recollection of one Obama adviser who was there, “Mr. President, you’re the commander in chief, and I hope you’re not taking your responsibilities lightly.” Obama replied tersely, “Yes, John, I am commander in chief, and I assure you I am not taking my responsibilities lightly.”

In his re-election campaign in Arizona, McCain has often seemed to be running as much against Obama as against his actual opponents. In July he began airing a campaign commercial featuring Paul Babeu, the sheriff of Pinal County, southeast of Phoenix, and the president of the Arizona Sheriff’s Association, who has endorsed McCain. “President Obama has made protecting our border incredibly difficult,” Babeu says in the ad. “But Arizona has a senator with the courage and character to stand up to a president who is wrong. John McCain. A president versus a senator: doesn’t seem like a fair fight. Unless that senator is John McCain.” In his debates with Hayworth and Deakin, McCain called Obama “an uncertain trumpet” for promising to begin a withdrawal from Afghanistan by the middle of next year, accused the president of “committing generational theft” as a result of new spending, and pronounced himself proud to have led the fight against “Obama-care,” vowing to “repeal and replace” it next year.

Indeed, on nearly every issue—not just his signature ones, such as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—McCain has been among Obama’s most relentless critics. That approach stands in contrast to the kind of support McCain was once willing to offer another young president, Bill Clinton. In 1993, the newly elected Clinton faced a firestorm of criticism for proposing to speak at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, in Washington, in light of his own well-chronicled efforts to avoid the draft. McCain wrote the White House and volunteered to go with Clinton if it would help. McCain’s distaste for Obama is deeply personal. “I think he thinks he’s full of shit,” one former McCain aide says of his boss’s opinion of the president. The relationship got off on the wrong foot in the Senate when McCain believed Obama had reneged on a proposed joint effort on lobbying reform, and McCain fired off a scathing letter, confessing to embarrassment that “after all these years in politics I failed to interpret your previous assurances as typical rhetorical gloss routinely used in politics to make self-interested partisan posturing appear more noble.” McCain’s contempt only deepened when Obama abandoned his pledge to take public financing in the general-election campaign, a move that the Obama high command saw as a pragmatic reflection of reality but one that McCain regarded as a betrayal of principle for which Obama paid no political price. (Yet McCain himself had backed away from his application for public financing in the primaries, for similar reasons of expediency.)

The Obama team is well aware of McCain’s attitude. When the president went to Capitol Hill in May to address the Senate Republicans at their weekly lunch, McCain accused the president of misrepresenting Arizona’s Draconian new immigration law (which McCain had endorsed, and which Obama’s Justice Department was preparing to challenge). “You can tell he can barely fucking stand the fact that he was beaten by Barack Obama,” says one senior White House aide who was present. “Throughout the whole meeting, he would not look at the president, even when he was talking to him.”

Some of McCain’s former aides wish he would pick his shots more carefully. One former adviser, who also worked in the Bush administration, said that McCain has let his personal distaste for Obama get in the way of actually influencing the debate. “Certainly through the Bush administration, McCain was the most credible voice on the conduct and prosecution of the war,” this adviser says. “We knew it would lead the news and people would believe him. If there’s a missed opportunity with the Obama presidency, it’s letting his personal feelings get in the way of trying to shape the policy. When he talked about Iraq or Afghanistan, we listened.” This adviser added, “I think that in some ways he’s sacrificed that to deliver messages that other people could deliver. Anything that [Republican National Committee chairman] Michael Steele could put out in an e-mail quote shouldn’t come out of John McCain’s mouth.”

After one of the primary debates with Hayworth and Deakin, I asked McCain what he made of Hayworth’s shape-shifter charge. “Wel-l-l-l,” he began, stretching the word out as Ronald Reagan used to do, and I thought I saw a wistful look flicker across his face, “I’m proud of my record; I’m proud of the support that I have throughout the state of Arizona, ranging from the sheriffs here, and mayors, Arizona Chamber …the growers …the homebuilders. You know, it’s pretty obvious that they are very satisfied with my performance and, so, I believe that what I have done is stand up for Arizona, no matter whether it’s against my own president or whether it’s against President Obama, or whoever. And again, I’m proud of my record, and I’ll stand on it.”

The sheriffs, the mayors, the Chamber, the growers, the homebuilders: these are the small-bore, self-interested lobbies that are the lifeblood of any run-of-the-mill state legislator, not the constituencies of a man who was nearly president and could still be a statesman. McCain’s influence in the Senate and his claim to significance in national life have always rested on his willingness to anger colleagues of both parties by paying attention to crucial issues that they would rather ignore, and on being a thoughtful contrarian on key party-line votes. He held out the promise that he could represent for a cynical and defeatist age something like what the Republican Arthur Vandenberg became to Harry Truman’s bipartisan postwar foreign policy, or what Everett Dirksen was to Lyndon B. Johnson on civil rights: the guy from the other side of the aisle who made all the difference. It is much harder now to sort out which instances of McCain’s inconvenient truth-telling were more a result of circumstance than they were a consequence of conviction. He has told friends he has no wish to be like his predecessor, Barry Goldwater, whose last election was a narrow victory. But the late-era Goldwater was a mellower, riper figure, whose live-and-let-live libertarian streak came increasingly to the fore. McCain seems to be on the reverse trajectory.