McCain, Upfront and Rising

Holding her rambunctious 3-year-old son, Fiona Tibbets stood in the doorway of this crowded New England town hall recently and listened as Republican presidential candidate John McCain railed against wasteful Pentagon spending, bipartisan pork-barreling and the grip of big business on Washington policymakers.

McCain calls it like he sees it. That is the impression of a growing number of New Hampshire voters who say McCain’s candor has introduced a refreshing dose of frankness in an era when cynicism, hypocrisy and the clout of big money in Washington are at a troubling high.

“He’s so direct, and I like what he stands for,” said Tibbets, 36, a homemaker in this small town where the autumn leaves have set the woods ablaze with scarlet, orange and gold. “I’m looking for a candidate with a real moral center. I want to be able to trust the person this time around.”

Texas Gov. George W. Bush is still the dominant front-runner in the GOP presidential primary, leading all of his rivals in national polls by nearly 50 percentage points. Bush is also sitting on about $37 million, while McCain, the senator from Arizona, has a comparatively slim $2.1 million in cash in the bank.

But for the first time in the campaign, the seeming inevitability of a Bush victory has been forced into question by McCain’s growing support in New Hampshire, host of the nation’s first primary next February. Recent polls show McCain now trails the front-runner by as little as 12 percentage points in New Hampshire, a margin that Bush aides admit caught them by surprise.

Now political observers are looking closely at the reasons for McCain’s appeal in this state and wondering if it might spread elsewhere.

Riding the state’s winding back roads recently in a bus he calls the “Straight-Talk Express,” McCain drew listeners who said they admired his compelling life story as a Vietnam prisoner of war and his political reputation as a maverick underdog willing to take on even his own Republican Party.

“He’s trying to make it a more honest system so it’s not about payoff,” said Tibbets, who is a registered Republican but says she usually votes Democrat. “There’s a sense of sleazy, slimy politicians and you can’t trust them. The most important thing is someone who’s true to himself. I’m hoping [McCain] is that candidate.”

McCain’s appeal as a war hero transcends the reach of politics. The admiration won by the gritty tale he describes in a recent memoir was evident at a book-signing event in Nashua last week that generated emotion more akin to religious pilgrimages than postmodern politics.

One elderly woman told McCain she prayed every night for him to be elected president. A World War II veteran showed him a scrapbook of his Army years. A younger man handed him his own unpublished account of his Vietnam experience, telling McCain he thought he would understand.

“That means a lot to me,” McCain told the man, gripping his arm.

Among the 400 people who waited in line at the bookstore to meet McCain was Helen Maioriello, 68, a staunch Democrat who had initially planned to vote for Bill Bradley. But that was before she connected with McCain.

“I feel I’ve finally found someone who will touch the human heart,” Maioriello said. “I’ve never voted for a Republican. He’s my change. I think he’s honest.”

Caroline Stohlberg, 59, a registered Independent, had also supported Bradley, but now she is carefully considering McCain.

“I think he certainly was a hero,” said Stohlberg, 59, as she waited for McCain to sign her copy of “Faith of My Fathers.” “What he went through is amazing. He’s someone to admire. And he answers a question when he’s asked a question.”

McCain’s life story--and his shoot-from-the-hip directness--also hit home with ad salesman Steve Kenney, who recently changed his registration from Independent to Republican and plans to vote for McCain in his state’s Feb. 1 primary.

“He has done a lot and really sacrificed for his country,” Kenney, 30, said. “He is not concerned about speaking the truth. He knows his opinion may not be that of everyone, but he gives it.”

McCain bounded onto his bus at dawn one day last week, chatting easily with reporters between stops on a road that wound along lakes and ridges in New England’s fog-shrouded back country. Even reporters are not immune to McCain’s irreverent charm.

At one reception he joked that a key aide had been hired from a prison work release program.

On the bus, he amused a cable TV crew by taking their microphone and hosting a mock television segment about his own bus tour. “That man typing obliviously over there is writing another hatchet job on me,” he said, gesturing to a newspaper reporter.

He called the girlfriend of the cable show host and left a message to “dump him.”

Then he took a cell phone from the cameraman and jokingly told the man’s boss that he had “trashed the van.”

“You just can’t let these country boys out of Rhode Island with the egg money,” he said with mock paternal concern. “They run wild.”