McCain’s on a Joy Ride With the Boys on the Bus

It’s 7:15 a.m. when Sen. John McCain climbs onto his campaign bus, the “Straight Talk Express.” He fills a paper cup with coffee, walks past the doughnuts and heads to the rear, where 10 California reporters await him in a horseshoe. He takes a middle seat.

“I enjoyed my hours of sleep last night enormously,” McCain says dryly. “Both of them.”

The presidential candidate’s chartered plane had gotten stuck in the mud off a Bremerton, Wash., tarmac, delaying his flight here by four hours. He didn’t get to the hotel until 3 a.m. Now, it’s a 45-minute ride through crawling commute traffic to a town hall meeting at Cal State Sacramento.

So why isn’t he relaxing alone? What’s he doing in the back of the bus with a bunch of pushy reporters? “Waiting for the opportunity to say something stupid in the next 45 minutes,” he replies.

Actually, it’s his everyday MO--what the candidate does virtually nonstop, except for an afternoon nap, as he travels from event to event. In this, McCain is unique among presidential candidates, past or present.

Most candidates guard their space. Only occasionally during the day will they briefly venture near the traveling news media to banter and perhaps answer a serious question or two.

McCain talks with reporters for four or five hours on the bus and spends additional hours answering their questions after campaign events, according to Times staff writer T. Christian Miller, who has been covering the unorthodox maverick. “I’m boggled about when he does his strategy.”

That’s a problem, says McCain advisor Ken Khachigian. “I’ve complained he has no time to strategize and think. He’s got reporters sitting there all the time asking anything they want to. He’s totally exposed.”

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McCain thinks being accessible to reporters is good strategy.

“It helps me to get my point of view out, my philosophy,” the Arizonan explains. “Look, the media have a job to do--that is to report a campaign. If they are around a candidate, then they can report the candidate.

“And I enjoy it. I apologize for enjoying being around a group of Communists and Trotskyites.”

McCain is sensitive to his adversaries’ moaning that he is the darling of the news media. If he is the candidate of “the liberal media,” right-wingers insist, he certainly cannot be a true conservative. “It’s a very clever campaign some people are waging,” McCain says.

“I tell ya, every time I’ve screwed up and I deserved it, I got it [in the media]. When I don’t screw up, I don’t get it.”

The anti-abortion candidate got it when he told reporters last month that if his 15-year-old daughter were pregnant, the “final decision” about an abortion would be hers. After leaving the bus, he “clarified” his statement: It would be a family decision. Both statements were reported and he pleased nobody.

The former POW more recently got it after referring on the bus to his North Vietnamese captors--”a small group of sadists and murderers”--as “gooks.” The epithet drew criticism from some Asian Americans and he later apologized to anybody who was offended.

“But I think it’s really stupid,” McCain comments as the Sacramento bus trip ends, apparently alluding to the flap. What’s stupid? he’s asked. He’ll go no further.

“Nothing’s stupid. Me. I’m stupid. Just as I’m pulling up [to get off the bus], too. I’m stupid.”

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No, not stupid. Being open earns McCain “good press” on balance. (Conversely, he’ll likely get “bad press” after pulling out of a Times/CNN campaign debate slated for Thursday. His staff cited the old dodge, “scheduling conflicts.”)

Reporters tend to respond favorably to a candidate who doesn’t cower behind sterile prepared statements, who is accessible and spontaneous. They see self-confidence.

But what reporters mostly see in McCain--and what will attract them to anybody--is a great story. Journalists are storytellers. And stories don’t get much more compelling than McCain’s.

There’s the character story: Navy fighter pilot, son and grandson of admirals, is shot down over Hanoi. His limbs are broken and he’s tortured. He’s offered release to embarrass his father, but rejects it; that would violate the POW Code of Conduct. So he spends 5 1/2 years in hell.

Then there’s the current combat story: Feisty, outspent underdog challenges the establishment-anointed Republican prince in an exciting duel, perhaps a nomination fight for the ages.

Reporters may like and admire McCain. Most probably don’t subscribe to his conservatism. But that’s all secondary to the story.

McCain understands this better than most politicians. It’s why he’s willing to make the storytelling a little easier and suffer reporters on two hours’ sleep.