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nessmen, McCain had been asked how debate over the immigration bill was playing politically. "In the short term, it probably galvanizes our base," he said. "In the long term, if you alienate the Hispanics, you'll pay a heavy price." Then he added, unable to help himself, "By the way, I think the fence is least effective. But I'll build the goddamned fence if they want it."
"I'm willing to negotiate anything," McCain tells the breakfast crowd in Sioux City, explaining that there is no way the millions of illegal aliens now here can be sent back to their countries of origin. But he acknowledges that anything seen as amnesty for illegals is "totally unacceptable, particularly to our Republican base." Later, McCain tells me that Congressman King "really knows this issue," but he sounds as if he is trying to persuade himself as much as me.
A couple of hours later, McCain is in an S.U.V., bound for a tour of an ethanol plant in Nevada, Iowa, just north of Des Moines. He knows the visit will be a stretch: he opposes ethanol subsidies. Six years ago, he all but skipped the Iowa caucuses, in large part because his scornful opposition to ethanol was a nonstarter in a state where making corn into fuel is a big and lucrative business. He turns sardonic, asking the members of his small traveling party if they have had their morning glass of ethanol.
We barrel along past the flat fields. Chuck Larson, a bright young Iowa state senator, Iraq-war veteran, and former chairman of the state Republican Party, has signed on to shepherd McCain's already well-organized presumptive 2008 campaign in Iowa. He asks McCain to make some calls to local party leaders. Juggling a sandwich and his cell phone in the front seat, McCain obliges. A couple of times, he gets voice mail and leaves an upbeat message, saying he is in the state and hopes to catch up soon.
Then McCain connects with Darrell Kearney, the conservative finance director of the Iowa Republican Party. Following Larson's instructions, McCain tells Kearney, a former Steve Forbes supporter, that he'd love to go to the party's next Lincoln Day dinner. But his words come out sounding as if he's inviting himself, and the conversation seems strained. "I see," McCain says. "Well, sounds exciting." From my perch in the backseat, it doesn't sound exciting at all. It sounds as if Kearney has ticked McCain off somehow. McCain flips the phone closed and tells Larson, "That's enough!"
A few minutes pass and Larson asks how the conversation with Kearney went. "Fair," McCain says, in a tone that invites no further discussion. "Fair."
If this awkward little day of straddling feels familiar, it is because McCain has tried it before. In the 2000 campaign, he waded straight into the hottest controversy in South Carolina, not long before his crucial primary showdown with George W. Bush, by offering his unvarnished opinion on whether the Confederate battle flag--the Stars and Bars--should continue to fly over the state capitol. "As we all know, it's a symbol of racism and slavery," McCain said. After John Weaver and others did more than whisper in his ear, McCain took to reading aloud from a piece of paper with a statement that began, "As to how I view the flag, I understand both sides," and went downhill from there.
For better or worse, McCain's campaign was never the same again. And no one is more aware of this than John McCain himself. In Worth the Fighting For, his second memoir, written with his longtime aide Mark Salter in 2002, McCain reflected on what he had done:
By the time I was asked the question for the fourth or fifth time, I could have delivered the response from memory. But I persisted with the theatrics of unfolding the paper and reading it as if I were making a hostage statement. I wanted to telegraph to reporters that I really didn't mean to suggest I supported flying the flag, but political imperatives required a little evasiveness on my part. I wanted them to think me still an honest man, who simply had to cut a corner a little here and there so that I could go on to be an honest president.
I think that made the offense worse. Acknowledging my dishonesty with a wink didn't make it less a lie. It compounded the offense by revealing how willful it had been. You either have the guts to tell the truth or you don't. You don't get any dispensation for lying in a way that suggests your dishonesty.
As he embarks on his second presidential campaign, a campaign he once assumed he would never get the chance to run, there are many questions for John Sidney McCain III. Can he bank the fires of temperament that routinely put him atop in
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