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siders' lists of the most difficult senators on Capitol Hill and become a unifying leader? Can he reconcile his unstinting support for the war in Iraq with his unsparing criticism of the Bush administration's execution of it--and with the electorate's evident yearning for a new approach? Would he be, at 72--more than two years older than the oldest man ever to assume the presidency, and more battered by old injuries than most men who have held it--too damned old to do the job?
But the biggest questions of all are whether, by forcing himself to become some kind of something he just isn't, John McCain can win the presidency to begin with, and would he consider himself to be worthy of the honor if he did.
Some of McCain's oldest friends and supporters confess that they don't know the answers, but that they worry about the questions. Will McCain's understandable effort to bend a little here and bow a little there--to placate the most conservative elements of his party, who play a disproportionate role in the nominating process--get him all twisted up before he ever gets to face the general electorate that polls suggest admires him so?
Torie Clarke first went to work as McCain's press secretary when he was a freshman congressman, in 1983, and she remains a devoted friend. When I caught up with Clarke one afternoon just after the Republican rout last November, the conversation came round to the toll that the Confederate-flag controversy had taken on McCain's political prospects and his psyche. "What you see now is variations on that," Clarke says. "I think he's a unique, special soul, and I worry about what life is going to be like for him the next couple of years."
Dancing with Coyotes
In a thousand and one ways, John McCain remains irresistible--to anyone who ever screwed up in school, fell short of expectations, blew his stack, or gave his all to a losing cause. He is a born rebel, who once confessed that he had spent the bulk of his time at the Naval Academy "being made an example of, marching many miles of extra duty for poor grades, tardiness, messy quarters, slovenly appearance, sarcasm, and multiple other violations of Academy standards." In his third year at Annapolis, he was so fed up he considered joining the French Foreign Legion, until, he said, he realized it required an enlistment of eight years. In prison in North Vietnam, where he spent more than five years after being shot down in 1967, he led a social-studies class for fellow inmates based on the subject he has always loved best--"The History of the World from the Beginning"--in an exercise to keep their sanity.
In an age of pre-fab, blow-dried, plasticized politicians, McCain remains palpably, pungently human. I saw him up close at intervals over a period of many weeks of campaigning last fall, often with almost unlimited access, and his preferred means of controlling his image is by abandoning all the typical modern efforts at control. He is the kind of person who comes alone, without a single aide or handler, to a dinner with a dozen New York Times editors and reporters, and tells stories of the long-ago days in flight school in Pensacola when he dated an exotic dancer known as "Marie, the Flame of Florida." He unself-consciously nurses a vodka Gibson on the rocks in an age when Diet Coke is the safer choice.
In mixed company, he does not shrink from a good "goddamn" or two, and in male company, considerably coarser discourse comes easily to his lips (cocky jet jockey that he once was). He is a man of strong opinions, strongly expressed. "Most current fiction bores the shit out of me," he says in a small plane somewhere over New England. In front of an audience of Republican worthies in Appleton, Wisconsin, he calls the leader of North Korea a "pip-squeak in platform shoes," and in seconding my view that Islamabad has limited charms, he volunteers that the Pakistani capital "sucks." At a nascar race in New Hampshire, he introduces Bobby Allison, "the greatest driver in the history of racing," to one of the journalists following him that day, declaring, "This is Adam Nagourney, New York Times. They're a Communist paper, but he's O.K." He introduces his friend Senator John Sununu, of New Hampshire, son of the famously bumptious former White House chief of staff, to a group of supporters by saying, "You can be very proud of him, and thank God he inherited his mother's temperament." To a gathering of businessmen he says, "I want to keep health-care costs down until I get sick, and then I don't give a goddamn," and to a group of college kids waiting to have their pictures taken with him, he growls good-naturedly, "All right, you little jerks!" On a charter jet above Iowa, he reads aloud a headline from USA Today: actor [wesley] snipes faces indictment on tax fraud charges, then mutters, "All our childhood heroes--shattered!"
Moments like these help explain why the constituency that McCain sometimes jokingly refers to as his base--the press--has not already tried to derail him by highlighting the politically expedient positioning that would be re
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