Robert Draper on the Arizona Republican Senate race: John McCain vs. J.D. Hayworth
Robert Draper John Ritter Cam Wolf Chris Black Brittany Loggins Michael Nolledo Gerald Ortiz Avidan Grossman Tyler Chin Condé Nast
Deep in the desert Southwest, a battle is raging between an ex-maverick presidential nominee and a defeated congressman with a checkered history (and a penchant for bad jokes). In any other election cycle, this contest would be a laugher. But this year: Arizona's voters are royally pissed! Robert Draper goes inside the most entertaining race of 2010
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The television studio is J. D. Hayworth's natural habitat, and in the greenroom of the Yuma, Arizona, NBC affiliate he's happily primping for an interview in which he'll defend his state's controversial new immigration policy. But right now he's chewing on his other favorite topic, Senator John McCain, whom Hayworth seeks to upset in the August 24 Arizona Republican primary—which, as a visceral paean to the far right, has become an emblematic brawl of the 2010 election year.

Hayworth is telling me about how McCain—"the patron saint of campaign-finance reform," he snorts—is exploiting a campaign-funding loophole. "He always does that," says Hayworth. "It's always, 'It's cool for me but not for thee.' " While condemning his opponent's lack of authenticity, Hayworth is self-applying a layer of Pan-Cake makeup with the casual dexterity of an opera diva. The red silk handkerchief in his blazer pocket perfectly matches his red necktie. His hair is short, full, and immobile.

Being a former sportscaster and talk-radio personality, Hayworth knows how to deliver a line, and this election year he has been treating Arizona audiences to an attack on his opponent that is both precise and devastating. McCain, he says, criticized the TARP bailout, but only after he voted for it. McCain, the Reagan Republican, voted against Bush's tax cuts. And on the white-hot subject of immigration, the former congressman lingers like a buzzard on desert carrion: "While my opponent five years ago was co-authoring an amnesty bill with the late Senator Ted Kennedy, I was introducing in the House of Representatives the Enforcement First Act."

Closing in for the kill, J.D. then intones, "Whether it is Barack Obama or Janet Napolitano or, yes, even John McCain, here's the fundamental problem. So many in Washington, D.C., view illegal immigration as a political problem to be managed, instead of seeing it for what it is: a national-security threat, an economic-security threat, and an invasion that must be stopped!"

Hayworth's immigration shtick came fairly late in his twelve-year congressional career, which ended when he was voted out of office in 2006. Other than his association with disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, the congressman's chief distinction was as a bombastic floor speaker who used his offensive-lineman's girth to intimidate Democrats. Soon after arriving in Washington, he picked a fight with Representative Steny Hoyer by passing out a flyer that said things like "Hoyer = sex training for federal employees" and "Hoyer = illegal drug use" and "Hoyer = New Age cult training."

These days, the 52-year-old Hayworth has both slimmed and toned down. Indeed, among this year's conservative agitators, he's surprisingly well-mannered, and his disapproval of abortion, gun control, and gay marriage play only bit roles in his windy denunciations of Big Government. He has a Rotarian's joviality and feathers his monologues with historical references and ten-dollar words—"He wanted you to know he wasn't a dummy," says congressional analyst Charlie Cook—yet his face is always red as if fighting back a primal scream. To rally the Tea Party faithful, he travels the state in a beige pickup truck à la Scott Brown, though not by choice: He has raised maybe a fifteenth of the McCain campaign's war chest and has no more than a half-dozen paid staffers. Wry and seemingly well-read, Hayworth nonetheless has, like other right-wing insurgents this season, the air of someone who's gotten a little ahead of himself. In the greenroom, I ask him a question about a hot-button issue among conservatives: whether he believes individuals who appear on terrorist watch lists should be permitted to buy firearms.

Hayworth looks pleasantly puzzled. "I haven't even taken a look at that right yet," he says.

I point out that the subject came up after the disclosure that the alleged Times Square bomber had purchased a rifle. Hayworth responds by orating generally on "how you preserve liberties and at the same time deal with security threats." In other words, he has no idea how to answer the question.

In any other year, J. D. Hayworth's campaign would merit little more than a few jokes on The Daily Show. Yet McCain, at 73, is regarding the congressman as an existential threat, burying the underdog on the airwaves while relentlessly challenging his conservative purity—and intelligence. In one notable exchange, after Hayworth's remarkable assertion that the United States had never formally declared war on Germany during World War II, the McCain operation circulated online ads mocking the claim, adding, "J. D. Hayworth—is it any wonder he was voted among the dumbest members of Congress?" The senator's operation has never subjected any opponent, including Barack Obama, to such a carpet bombing. When I ask McCain's communication director, Brian Rogers, about the daily savaging, he says, "It's not about Hayworth. It's really about the environment. When you have this massive anti-incumbent sentiment combined with issues about the economy, it's a devil's brew. And look, he's a very vigorous guy who has his lines down. He's gonna get noticed. So you confront him directly."

But McCain has done more than confront—he has converted, shape-shifting in the time-honored manner of a politician who fears his days are numbered. In the past few months—as his lead in the polls fluctuated from twenty-two points to five and, by press time, back to twelve—the senator has lurched to the right. He has backed away from his call to close Guantánamo and threatened to filibuster the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell." He has also voiced his support of Arizona's notorious statute 1070, a bill that permits local police to stop an individual they have "reasonable suspicion" to believe is an illegal immigrant; if unchallenged, it will go into effect July 28. Even some of McCain's Republican friends, including former state attorney general Grant Woods and Senator Lindsey Graham, call the law unconstitutional and mean-spirited. "I think it does a lot of harm in the community," Woods says. "We're talking about doctors, lawyers, firemen, housewives, who were born here, whose parents were born here, and they already have that sinking feeling that they're being watched. And that's not right."

The senator's conservative shift, says Arizona State University professor emeritus and political guru Bruce Merrill, is not without risk. "Conservative ideologues tend to have long memories," he says. "I think that far from attracting their support, McCain's latest moves to the right are likelier to make them more suspicious." Hayworth agrees, of course. "You can see national trends, but ultimately what we're finding anecdotally is a feeling that John has had his time," he says. "He was the party's nominee for president. His position in history is secure. All these contortions to try and morph into my positions, that I hold, appear to be inauthentic and don't reflect well on his legacy."

As such, says J. D. Hayworth, "It's time to have a consistent conservative"—implying quite plainly that he is the man.

Nearly every night during the election year of 1994, Hayworth's maiden voyage for political office, the telephone would ring at the home of Bruce Merrill, and he or his wife would say, "That's J.D." Hayworth would be calling seeking highly specific advice on how to get out his message and organize a staff. Back in 1991, the sportscaster had taken Merrill's class, Public Opinion Political Communication, and had been an apt pupil. "The class was about creating reality," recalls Merrill. "Something can be true, but people don't have time to keep up on all the issues. So they believe what's presented to them. J.D. grasped that. As a broadcaster, he understood the media and how to manipulate it. He understood that controversy sells."

To rustle through John David Hayworth's life story is to learn that there are as many people out there who find him lovable and bright as there are who regard him as a bully and buffoon. But even among his admirers, the word authentic is never uttered. Born in High Point, North Carolina, he nonetheless "never acted or sounded like a southerner, even though he'd been one all his life," says Kenn Sparks, who anchored the Greenville, South Carolina, TV station where Hayworth spent the early '80s as a sportscaster. N.C. State awarded the offensive lineman a football scholarship, and in Raleigh he found work at a TV station, won election as student-body president, and never looked back. Hayworth was—like Reagan, whom he campaigned against in 1980 but would lovingly quote in years thereafter—a born performer and a politico, camera-ready. "J.D. wanted to be president, there's no doubt about that in my mind," recalls Sparks. But, he adds, Hayworth's political role model was a moderate: "I think he must've sprung from his mother's womb quoting Eisenhower." Back in the Greenville days, according to two of his former colleagues, a favorite Hayworth line was "I'm a liberal Republican and a drinking Baptist!" His signature phrase, however, was nonpolitical; when describing a home run, the sportscaster would invariably boom, "It's VAPOR!!!"

In 1987, Hayworth and his black Corvette convertible departed Greenville for the larger market of Cincinnati, where he spent much of his time discussing politics with then anchorman Jerry Springer and contemplating a run for some office or other. His search for a political springboard intensified upon moving to Phoenix in 1988. Though an actual newsman would have been obligated to maintain a public pretense of objectivity, a sportscaster like Hayworth could regularly ercise his freedom to speak at local GOP "Trunk Tusk" gatherings. And sure enough, after a relatively unknown progressive was elected to Congress in 1992 in his very district, J. D. Hayworth began assembling staff for a run in '94.

With the full support of Newt Gingrich, who flew out to campaign on his behalf, Hayworth won the race in a landslide. And when John McCain called to congratulate him, the senator offered this advice: "Pick out one or two things to focus on. Because when you get there, you're gonna feel like a mosquito at a nudist colony—there are so many targets of opportunity." In fact, Representative Hayworth would focus, as always, on the camera, becoming the C-SPAN Shakespearean that Speaker Gingrich could rely on to unleash screeds against Clinton and "our good friends in the minority."

When he wasn't advancing the Gingrich revolution, Hayworth took time to speak his mind on issues as varied as campaign-finance reform and the environment. Charlie Cook remembers Hayworth arguing against expanding preserves for Arizona's endangered spotted owls. "Y'know, the way I figure it," the congressman told him, "if two teenagers can reproduce in the backseat of a car, why do spotted owls need a thousand acres apiece?"

Though other House conservatives would grow disillusioned by Newt's willingness to abandon strict term limits, disciplined budgets, and other precepts of the Contract with America, Hayworth "was a loyal vote for whatever the leadership wanted," recalls fellow Arizona congressman Matt Salmon. "I remember he ended up voting for the transportation bills when we thought they were full of pork. He was very anxious to develop a long-term political career." Indeed, when I contacted Club for Growth spokesman Mike Connolly to ask why Tea Party groups have been reluctant to underwrite Hayworth's Senate campaign, Connolly would reply, "He didn't vote like a Tea Partier when he was in the House."

Hayworth's loyalty to Gingrich paid off with an assignment to the elite House Committee on Ways and Means—though a former House colleague remembers, "I witnessed Hayworth crying in front of Gingrich, his face swollen and red, saying, 'If I don't get on this committee, I won't be able to raise the kind of money I need to win in my district.'" Hayworth's constituents, meanwhile, soon grew tired of the congressman's floor antics. "Entertainment is a big part of J.D.," says his former campaign manager, Scott Hildebrand. "That's his Achilles' heel—learning when it's time to turn down the volume. And that's hard to do for a guy who's spent so many years in front of a television camera."

Hayworth's showmanship seemed specifically designed to offend the sensibilities of John Character Is Destiny McCain. Though the senator gamely campaigned for Hayworth in 1998, the congressman's press secretary at the time, Jim Heath, recalls that "they'd get out of the plane and hug each other, then get back on and never once say a word to each other." In 2001, Hayworth publicly took umbrage with McCain's campaign-finance-reform position, calling it a violation of free speech. After that, "there was a huge freeze-out," recalls Hayworth. During the 2006 cycle, McCain was only too happy to tell people that Hayworth's ties to Jack Abramoff (which included $101,000 in campaign donations and frequent access to Abramoff's sports skybox) would sink the congressman that November. McCain was right. Hayworth lost his seat to Democrat Harry E. Mitchell. And though the Department of Justice never pressed charges, he was forced to return to Arizona and to the airwaves—this time as a talk- radio host whose chief target was…

"J Mac," Hayworth bellowed during a typical rant on his drive-time show on KFYI, "is bound and determined to institute some sort of worker program that involves amnesty…in the midst of double-digit unemployment!" Like most right-wing radio personalities, Hayworth focused his ire on the White House and Nancy Pelosi, but the immigration debate made McCain a ripe target. "McCain is out of touch!" callers said. "Please run for office. The country needs you!" Hayworth would often respond with a creaky imitation of the senator—"My friends, thank you for your support."

And was McCain aware of Hayworth's withering impression? "Oh yes," says campaign spokesman Brian Rogers. By April, the McCain campaign had filed an FCC complaint asserting that the candidate was electioneering on his show. Soon after, Hayworth left the airwaves to focus on campaigning full-time.

"I'm proud of my record—not being Mister Congeniality. I'm proud to have investigated Jack Abramoff, who certain congressmen stood along with.… And if I sound a little angry? I'm angry because you're angry!"

John McCain indeed looks angry, and for the precise reason he specifies. An American hero turned away twice by voters across the nation, he must now in his declining years be content with another six-year turn on the senatorial dance floor, only to come home and find that Arizonans are royally pissed…at him! Not just at him, of course, and maybe far less angry at him than at everyone else in Washington. Nonetheless, here he is, forced to remind his own people that he's the one guy who should not be blamed for all the mess, that he's the Maverick…oh…except that he told Newsweek he's never thought of himself as a Maverick…and God damn the liberal media! No more interviews! (My request was denied.)

He's red-faced and pacing the stage of a rec center in Sun City West, Arizona, while a hundred or so Anglo senior citizens listen to their senior senator go batshit about the border: "Now, I don't know how often you go down to the southern part of the state. But when you meet the ranchers, they'll tell you their livelihood is not safe.… And why is it? Because their borders are not secure!… Complete the fence, complete the fence, complete the fence!… We have to secure the border!"

But the audience is not with him. Immigration, as a McCain adviser has told me, "is his one weakness," and the senator's overcompensation is a discomfiting spectacle. When a woman asks how he's going to come up with the money to pay for his elaborate new ten-point border-security plan, McCain replies tartly, "I could find you 5 billion in funds tomorrow—from [eliminating] earmarks. That's not a problem, finding the money." When the woman wonders aloud how McCain is going to persuade Congress to give up the practice of earmarks, the senator mumbles, "Listen, I'm not saying it'll be easy."

A man stands up and interjects, "Just a small correction on your speech about immigrants. I don't particularly consider them illegal immigrants. I consider them illegal aliens."

The crowd murmurs its approval. "Thank you, thank you very much," replies the senator. This would have been the moment for him to say—as he once did with regularity, and as he did just this morning to a smaller, less inflamed gathering—that these people, whatever one wishes to call them, are "God's children." That moment passes.

Then comes a somewhat dissenting voice, from a man with a cane who stands up and wonders what, realistically and humanely, can be done about the millions of Hispanics who have crossed the desert at great peril to do honest work and who have raised families here in America. It sounds like the kind of question the senator himself might have posed, not so long ago. Taken aback, McCain jokes, "I thought you were gonna ask me, 'Why are you such a great American?' Look, we have to address this in a nuanced fashion.…" Having blurted out the dreaded N-word, McCain scrambles back to the right: "But the fact is, we're a nation of laws. And they broke these laws. So I would be glad to sit down and discuss that, once we get the borders secured. But certainly not until then."

To the skeptical expressions in the audience, McCain adds, "Some people say this is a change in my position. The last three years, the smugglers and drugs have dramatically increased. Twenty-two thousand Mexican citizens have been killed. In 2007, when I saw this coming, I said we have to secure the borders first!" This, as anyone who followed McCain's campaign in 2007 knows, is more than a little untrue. What McCain "saw coming" was not a darkening picture on the border but instead a growing resentment among Republican voters toward illegal immigrants—and toward McCain's comprehensive immigration-reform bill, which he thereupon disavowed.

A woman stands up and says, "Senator, I've voted for you every time since I moved here to Arizona. But I'd suggest that when you talk about Hayworth, that you be careful. Because I'd hate to see, if you're not nominated, that you'll be out there saying anything bad."

McCain snaps, "I'm not saying anything bad. I'm just pointing out his record. And that's what I'll continue to do. So thanks for the advice."

"You don't sound that grateful for it," the woman says with a smile.

He replies, without a smile, "I will not allow anyone to define me and my record. And that's what I will do. Listen, I know that we're out of time…"

I later ask the woman, whose name is Stephanie Elitz, if she was satisfied with the senator's answer. "Not at all," Elitz replies. "I've always voted for Senator McCain. But I thought he was a bit arrogant."

J. D. Hayworth, she added, could now count on her vote.

The week i spend in Hayworth's orbit takes me through all corners of a border state roiled by the passage of Arizona's immigration statute, Senate Bill 1070. State senator Rebecca Rios, whose electoral base is part of Hayworth's former district, believes that racial profiling will inevitably result from the bill, then adds, "People clearly want to address the increase in illegal immigrants, border violence, and drug and human trafficking. Politically speaking, it's a hot-button issue that can very quickly rally folks behind you. I'm frankly disappointed to see McCain try and reinvent himself in this tough-on-immigration image. Hayworth, clearly that's what we expect of him."

Hayworth often chides McCain for his "conversion" on immigration. But the seal-the-border stalwart tells me he experienced one of his own, which occurred with a visit to an Arizonan's ranch in 2003. By 2005, the congressman was sponsoring the Enforcement First Act, a bill similar to SB 1070, and as his spokesman Mark Sanders says today, he "literally wrote the book on this subject"—which is to say, he wrote a book titled Whatever It Takes in 2006. In the book's opening chapter, the author says that when "I was first elected to Congress," flight crews frequently told him that their red-eye flights were full of illegals. They asked him, "Where is the Border Patrol?" Writes the author, "The real question is: where are the politicians?" Which, back then, would have included Hayworth.

Hayworth's sizable audiences are uniformly white, and on the immigration issue he fields an array of rather edgy questions. But I find that, when pressed in private, Hayworth often backs away from his most extreme rhetoric. For example, I ask what he means by his statement that "we need to stand up for our culture." Well, explains the candidate, "there's a concern about, for lack of a better term, a Balkanization. There's not assimilation anymore." I later ask him how assimilation can be legislated. "Uhh…that's an interesting thought," he says. He suggests that perhaps "the community sector, like YMCAs" or even Tea Party activists, can offer courses in English the way they're now doing on the Constitution. Then Hayworth says, "Of course, those people who play by the rules and want to come here—man, they're eager to learn!"

When discussing Spanish-speaking voters, Hayworth speaks often of "the myth of the Hispanic monolith," a unified voting block. And so I ask him what Hispanic groups are likely to support him. The candidate—who does not speak Spanish, other than when he refers to the "Hayworth hacienda"—mentions a single supporter, a Fountain Hills, Arizona, man who appeared with him on a Fox show, but confesses he's not sure about the guy's name. Maybe Rodriguez. I was a little surprised he didn't mention Pee Wee Maestas. Back in his C-SPAN days, Congressman Hayworth more than once praised the little Hispanic lady who operates the Wayside Café in Holbrook, Arizona: "She came to this nation legally. Her mother applied for a visa…was willing to work and play by the rules." I decide to drop by the restaurant, and a diminutive woman emerges from the kitchen and offers me a lemonade.

Pee Wee recalls visiting with her former congressman a few times—though she says she never voted for Hayworth, as she is a staunch Democrat. She says he didn't bring up the immigration issue with her, perhaps because her mother was born in the United States. Had Hayworth ever done so, Pee Wee likely would have shared with him the memory of having been one of the only Hispanic children at school and of having been punished by the teacher for an offense that one of the white students committed. Over a half century later, the recollection still pains her. "She wanted to make an example of me," Pee Wee Maestas says. "And how do you think that made me feel? People being singled out for their race—there's no worse feeling than that. Have you ever been prejudiced against? If you haven't, then you can't understand."

Pee Wee mentions John McCain's now notorious "build the danged fence" ad, in which the senator walks the borderlands with a beleaguered county sheriff and lists the issues associated with the border. "Remember how it starts?" she says, referring to the senator's first line—"Drug and human smuggling, home invasions, murder." "He should've said that they're not all criminals. He made it sound too harsh. There are a lot of good people that are coming over, just trying to feed their families."

Were she to make this point to McCain, he might well agree—or he might snarl, as he did at the Sun City West town hall, "Thanks for the advice." It's already evident that J. D. Hayworth will not be the biggest loser on August 24. All but obliterated from memory is the John McCain who once declared that he "would rather lose a political campaign than lose a war," who praised champions of unpopular causes in his book Hard Call, and who promised in his 2008 concession speech "to do all in my power to help [Obama] lead us through the many challenges we face."

Though the incumbent's campaign aides like to describe their candidate as "a competitive guy," in the end McCain is no longer competing against another politician or against a new strain of conservatism. He is now competing only against his own legacy as a statesman—which would be of no concern to us, were the very ranks of statesmen not already so badly depleted. Meanwhile, the legacy of J. D. Hayworth may be that he did his part in persuading the Republican Party to renounce everything that John McCain and its finest standard-bearers once stood for. If that is what prevails in 2010, then let's see the victory for what it is:

Vapor.

Robert Draper is a GQ correspondent.