On Big Stage, McCain Couldn’t Live Up to His Own Billing

John McCain was supposed to be one more longshot candidate on an underfunded trip to a couple of early Republican primaries. Instead, his campaign captivated the country, sent the party on a quest for self-discovery and unearthed a trove of new, reform-minded voters certain to be courted for years.

Wrapped around simple, unexpectedly timely notions of honesty at any price, campaign finance reform and a more welcoming party, the senator’s run will be remembered as an inspiring political adventure that lured so many new voters to the polls that turnout records were broken in nine Republican primaries.

“My friends,” he would tell every audience, “I will say things you agree with and some things you don’t agree with. But I promise you this: I will always tell you the truth, no matter what.”

In the end, that was perhaps too grand a promise in this post-impeachment era of political word-mincing and daily polling, when every subject, most especially “truth,” is open to interpretation.

Tactical Errors Cost Him in the End

Although the former fighter jock’s insurgent campaign made a series of tactical errors, especially in the crazy waning days of the race, the story of McCain’s fall may be that over time he was revealed as a politician--a good one, with a remarkable biography and incalculable charisma--but a politician with flaws who could never live up to his own billing.

Along the way, however, he also turned the primary process on its head. Then he shook it. What fell out may hold lessons for future candidates and voters alike.

“It’s going to be kind of quiet now,” Jack Pitney, a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College, said wistfully Thursday morning. “The circus has left town.”

The 63-year-old former Vietnam War prisoner was just another senator with big ambitions and little support when he made his first, seminal break from primary tradition. He decided last year to skip the Iowa caucuses and spend his tiny war chest in one place: tiny New Hampshire.

McCain all but relocated to the state, holding 114 town hall meetings and shaking hands with an estimated 5% of New Hampshire residents. On Feb. 1, they rewarded him, and punished the seemingly aloof George W. Bush, by delivering McCain an astounding 18-point victory over the Texas governor.

A few days later, strategist Mike Murphy stepped onto McCain’s “Straight Talk Express” bus and held up the fresh edition of three major news weeklies. McCain’s triumphant face was on the cover of them all.

The first major primaries, in New Hampshire, South Carolina and Michigan, were open, meaning independents and Democrats could vote Republican if they wanted. And last fall, Murphy and senior political advisor John Weaver made some critical calculations. If McCain could win crossover voters and take those primaries, they figured, he could get the ball rolling.

The 18-point drubbing in his pocket, McCain rolled through the countryside in South Carolina, the next state on the primary calendar, chattering with previously unseen glee to reporters in the back of his bus.

The “Straight Talk Express” was another of the campaign’s half-thought-out miracles, an icon so seemingly charmed that a South Carolina trooper once pulled it over for no better reason than to meet the senator. (He was instead greeted by two dozen reporters and photographers; McCain was on another bus in the fleet.)

The anachronistic idea of allowing reporters full-time anything-goes access to the candidate was born over the summer, when advisors recognized the handful of journalists were providing media exposure the campaign could never afford.

Reporters filling two trailing buses even tried to bribe aides with doughnuts for a spot on the “Straight Talk Express,” where McCain pontificated for hours about everything from his plan for the budget surplus to military options in Kosovo. He mimicked, badly, one reporter’s Australian accent, kidded another one, a newspaper veteran, that he didn’t want him dying of old age on the bus and suggested he sit, not stand.

Nearly as much was written about the McCain coverage as about McCain, with critics lamenting softball stories by reporters they presumed had been struck dumb by the senator’s powerful presence.

As much as anything, though, the coverage was what it was because McCain flicked on nearly all the lights in his campaign and allowed anyone to see almost anything. And, while the highest-level meetings took place at night or in private, reporters had extraordinary access to off-the-cuff strategy sessions, which only added to the sense of an honest campaign.

Bush emerged from a post-New Hampshire overhaul at his home in Austin with a new slogan for South Carolina: “A reformer with results.” And he came out swinging.

McCain, a senatorial scrapper of the highest order, appeared improbably unprepared for the scrap.

“His first stumbling block, and it was odd for a military man, was his incomplete strategy,” said Pitney. “After winning New Hampshire, they were just making it up as they went.”

McCain’s captivating image as a straight-talking, politically muscular reformer began slowly to suffer as he dived headlong into a bitter, boyish back-and-forth fight over campaign etiquette and fairness in advertising--a fight that would grow nastier and, for McCain, more distracting, right up until the end.

The two candidates started out by sparred over who had first violated “The Handshake,” a pledge they had made during a January debate to forgo negative campaigning.

“McCain solicits money from lobbyists with interests before his committee and pressures agencies on behalf of contributors,” declared one Bush ad, referring to McCain’s chairmanship of the powerful Senate Finance Committee.

The Texan’s ad “twists the truth like Clinton,” cried McCain’s response ad. “We’re all pretty tired of that.”

Bush hammered at McCain endlessly. But McCain’s replies came off as mean, vicious even, and sometimes unfair.

“The candidate appeared angry,” said Stuart Rothenberg, editor of the Rothenberg Political Report. “The message was lost.”

So was South Carolina. Bush took the conservative stronghold by 11 percentage points, carrying 70% of Republican voters.

Negative campaigning tends to depress voter turnout; few but the party stalwarts go to the polls. A record turnout was one of the keys to McCain’s landslide in New Hampshire. So, following his loss in South Carolina, McCain vowed to eschew negative ads.

But as his advisors sought to keep him on message, the famously temperamental McCain, it seemed, could not help himself. He complained and complained, leaving less time for his message of reform--a message that had resonated exceptionally well with voters.

“It was McCain, simply McCain, recruiting people from outside the party and some disaffected Democrats,” said Curtis Gans, director of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate. “He had this biography of a hero. He seemed to talk in less programmed language. He was generally appealing.”

But he began to give his audiences dozens of reasons not to vote for Bush, fewer reasons why they should vote for him.

Still, on Feb. 22, McCain found himself on top again, winning Michigan despite the efforts of Gov. John Engler, a powerful Bush supporter, as well as his home state of Arizona.

As the first exit poll numbers began to trickle in, though, the Bush campaign directed journalists to voters who said they had received “Catholic voter alert” calls publicizing Bush’s visit to Bob Jones University.

Throughout the evening, the McCain campaign denied having any knowledge of the calls. By the next day, the campaign acknowledged having organized the calls, but McCain insisted they were true and therefore not negative campaigning.

The campaign’s most devastating single blunder, however, may have come the day before the Feb. 29 primary in Virginia. Clearly needing to court party regulars, McCain instead unleashed his now infamous Holy War against several leaders of the Christian right, dubbing such figures as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell as “agents of intolerance.”

They were dividing the party, McCain argued, though Republican unity is an issue voters have never registered as a top 10 concern in national polls.

Not only did the speech fail to attract its intended target--the moderate Republicans, independents and Democrats who proved a successful coalition in New Hampshire and Michigan--it seemed to energize Christian conservatives, who voted 8 to 1 against McCain in Virginia.

Ironically, McCain helped raise turnouts again, even if this time it was by unintentionally prompting a protest vote against himself.

After his Feb. 29 loss to Bush in Virginia, North Dakota and Washington State, McCain acknowledged that he had gotten off track. Issues, he pledged yet again on March 2, would come first.

“We’ve made a lot of mistakes in this campaign, primarily because we haven’t got the most brilliant candidate,” McCain said, poking fun at himself. “I’m going to try to keep it on the issues and not get bogged down in this tit-for-tat kind of thing.”

The very next day in New York, however, McCain was greeted with two new television ads. One, by Bush, accused McCain of not supporting breast cancer research. (McCain’s sister, Sandy, is a breast cancer survivor). A second, funded by two wealthy Bush supporters from Texas, accused him of having a dubious environmental record.

For the next several days, he talked of little else, even as 13 states prepared to hold Republican contests on March 7.

Campaign’s Lofty Goals Aided Its Collapse

By late afternoon on Super Tuesday, it was all but over for McCain. He canceled his evening talk-show appointments. He canceled a flight to Colorado, where he had already purchased advertising time. And on Wednesday, he flew to Sedona, Ariz., where, after a day and a half of meetings, he decided to call it quits.

If McCain’s collapse was in part due to his own shortcomings and the lofty goals of the campaign--against which any candidate might have a tough time measuring up--it was also due to the fact that he faced an opponent considered nearly invincible just a few months ago.

While students of political strategy will dissect the McCain run, his former adversary, Bush, as well as Vice President Al Gore, are already mimicking it, from his hours-long question-and-answer sessions to his openness with the media.

More than anything, both want the vote of McCain’s supporters come November. And the man who earns the most may well win.