Despite His Maverick Appeal, McCain’s Home Base May Need Bracing The senator’s style fits Arizona’s independence. But his hot temper and the perception of his rival’s dominance are handicaps.

If any place fits the unorthodox political style of John McCain, it is Arizona--the cactus-studded desert frontier where independent-minded voters turn partisan politics upside down and many winning candidates have cross-over appeal.

The demographic mosaic of veterans, retirees, developers and ranchers who have settled here since World War II has made Arizona a sagebrush hybrid that elects governors as diverse as liberal Bruce Babbitt and conservative Evan Mecham. It’s a state that was shamed into establishing a Martin Luther King holiday and now has women in the top five elective state offices.

It is here that the veteran Republican senator forged his trademark maverick style and learned to prevail in a place where politics, like the temperature, can run to extremes.

“This is a state of rugged individualists,” said Bruce Merrill, an Arizona pollster who has worked for McCain. “They admire what he’s done.”

Now that McCain is emerging as a major GOP contender for the White House, Merrill believes he is winning support in New Hampshire for some of the same qualities that resonate in Arizona: Voters find him engaging and he campaigns tirelessly, his shoot-from-the-hip independence suits those who view Washington from a distance and his history as a Vietnam prisoner of war is a dramatic tale.

Arizonans have elected McCain five times in the last 17 years--twice to the U.S. House of Representatives and three times to the Senate, including a 1998 landslide that drew nearly 70% of the vote. His political support stretches from the Republican right to a remarkably loyal following in the state’s traditionally Democratic Latino community.

So some find it strange that McCain, who has become a potent threat to Republican presidential front-runner George W. Bush in New Hampshire, is in a dead heat with his rival in Arizona just three months before his state’s Feb. 22 GOP primary.

In New Hampshire, McCain is a novel upstart. But though he is better known in Arizona, experts say his support from his home state’s typically transient voters is actually broad and shallow. About 40% of the state’s 4.9 million people lived elsewhere 10 years ago. And since Texas Gov. Bush is treated as the GOP’s presumptive nominee, Merrill said, even some of the voters who like McCain choose Bush because he appears more electable.

McCain also loses some votes in Arizona because his well-known temper and independent politics have ruffled Republican leaders in his home state just as they have in Washington.

Winning the Arizona primary is essential for McCain because it falls in the crucial weeks between New Hampshire on Feb. 1 and California on March 7. McCain is predicting victory, and aides say they are “not particularly worried.”

“Bush’s greatest strength has been the perception of his inevitability,” said McCain campaign spokesman Dan Schnur. “When that perception goes away, so does a lot of support, especially in the state that elected John McCain in five consecutive elections.”

Even McCain’s critics are impressed with his reputation for determined outreach to moderate or non-Republican voters.

That started with his first campaign for Congress in 1982, when he made a longshot appeal to Latino voters. Today, people still talk about his painting community centers and picking up trash as a freshman congressman. And in his most recent reelection, McCain won support from 55% of the Latino vote.

Latinos make up about 18% of Arizona residents, while 6% are Native Americans. Today, grass-roots activists from both communities say McCain has been a good friend for a long time.

Tony Espinoza, a leader of the National Council of La Raza, a political advocacy organization in Washington, says he was the first Democratic Latino to endorse McCain’s House run in 1982. Espinoza was president of a grass-roots Latino organization in Arizona at the time and said he joined McCain in support for bilingual education.

Espinoza went on to co-chair McCain’s first Senate campaign in 1986. McCain has consistently opposed English-only legislation and came out against California’s Proposition 187, which sought to deny government services to illegal immigrants.

McCain “has been painted as a very conservative Republican,” Espinoza said. “But when it comes to many of the Hispanic issues we face, he’s been very sensitive.”

Guadalupe Mayor Frances Osuna, whose overwhelmingly Latino and Democratic town of 6,000 lies on the outskirts of Phoenix, is the most recent Democrat to endorse McCain, and she has plans to appear at his fund-raisers and campaign events.

“I think he will help with the problem of people from Mexico,” she said.

McCain has also been embraced by Arizona’s traditionally Democratic Native American tribes. His work on casinos, shopping malls, reservation landfills and sovereignty issues persuaded one prominent Navajo leader to register Republican so he could vote for McCain.

“There are a lot of people in Congress who pay lip service to our issues, but we’ve had few real advocates like McCain,” said Ivan Makill, president of the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian community on the outskirts of Phoenix. “He’s an aggressive advocate of legislation that helps tribes be self-sufficient.”

Jesse Arreola, another Democrat, credits McCain with restoring his faith in government. He didn’t trust politicians until he wrote an angry letter in 1983 asking McCain, his new representative, why he had to drive his son three miles to his district’s junior high when he lived a half-block from another school.

Within days, his son was walking to the corner school. Arreola, a lifelong Democrat, was so impressed he registered Republican and has voted for McCain ever since.

“I know McCain will be there if we need him. He’s our boy, and we’re going to back him up,” Arreola, 69, said, at his sprawling outdoor Mexican crafts market.

Much of the criticism of McCain comes from leaders within his own party.

Some say he is hypocritical in casting himself as an outsider when his own history--from his arrival in Phoenix as the husband of a wealthy Arizona heiress to his onetime associations with roguish plutocrats like former Gov. Fife Symington and financier Charles H. Keating Jr.--seems that of a consummate insider.

In 1991, the Senate Ethics Committee named McCain as one of the “Keating Five,” saying his association with the prominent Arizona banker and major political contributor was improper at a time when federal authorities were investigating Keatings’ savings and loan. McCain was mildly disciplined. He denied any wrongdoing.

McCain’s most recent criticism from Arizona started with Gov. Jane Dee Hull. The fellow GOP governor drew national attention earlier this fall by endorsing Bush over McCain and citing stories about the senator’s hot temper. Days later, the Arizona Republic newspaper questioned in an editorial whether McCain was temperamentally suited to be president.

The controversy has continued into this week, when McCain’s campaign said it will release his medical records as proof that he is mentally fit for the White House.

In Arizona, tales of McCain’s temper are as common as big hair and golf shoes.

Longtime Arizona political operative Rick De Graw said he once watched McCain reduce a 19-year-old campaign volunteer to tears after the youth failed to set up a podium properly.

“He just lost it and yelled at this kid in front of everybody,” said De Graw, a Democrat. “I was embarrassed for both of them.”

On the campaign trail, McCain casts his anger as impassioned outrage at government malfeasance.

“There are things that make me mad,” McCain said in a recent interview. But he admits: “I do everything I can to keep my anger under control. I wake up daily and tell myself, ‘You must do everything possible to stay cool, calm and collected today.’ ”