A book tour or whistle-stops?

It was easy to see how the people who turned Sen. John McCain’s book tour appearance into a heartland celebration of his victory on the torture amendment began to feel as if they were at a campaign rally.

McCain, introduced as “the man of the hour in Washington,” got a standing ovation. When the Arizona Republican promised the packed crowd at the restored Uptown Theatre a little “straight talk,” they roared with nostalgia for the Straight Talk Express of his 2000 presidential campaign. People engaged him in detail on Iraq, education and human rights, in a seeming replay of his campaign’s unscripted town halls.

It was Clarence Simmons, a retired, blue-jeaned 64-year-old former air traffic controller from Shawnee, Kan., who first asked what seemed to be on everybody’s mind: “Are you going to run for president?”

At moments like this, you had to remind yourself McCain is on a book tour. Such a popular book tour that a seasoned media advisor for President Bush, Mark McKinnon, who once worked for liberal Democrats, joined McCain at book signings in three Texas cities earlier this month and has told McCain he might be available to help with a presidential run in 2008, according to McCain staffers.

The wind was blowing fiercely in Kansas City, bringing an overnight snowstorm. But that didn’t deter the hundreds of people who bundled up and drove in, many from little towns in Kansas and Missouri, to get their copy of “Character Is Destiny” signed by McCain.

“I would like to be able to vote for him for president,” said Consuelo Orrison, a 57-year-old training manager at Whiteman Air Force Base and a mother of three. “I am a staunch Democrat, and he is a Republican I will listen to.” The new McCain book, cowritten with Mark Salter, is a sort of “Profiles in Courage” collection of people -- Mohandas K. Gandhi, Joan of Arc, Nelson Mandela, Abraham Lincoln and their “Inspiring Stories Every Young Person Should Know and Every Adult Should Remember,” as its subtitle declares. Its deep blue cover was very much in evidence when more than 800 people, drawing numbers to hold their place in line, held their book out to McCain like a talisman so he could sign it.

But McCain’s publisher, Random House, is not actually picking up all the cost of McCain’s book tour. Random House publicist Jynne Martin said that when McCain also attends fundraisers and “private meetings,” as he has throughout the tour, he picks up some of the tab. Martin offered no further details.

So it’s fair to wonder if McCain is engaging in a little literary multitasking in Missouri, the so-called bellwether state for presidential elections.

“You have to assume he’s a candidate and he’s testing his candidacy,” said Betsey Solberg, former chairwoman of the metropolitan chamber of commerce of Kansas City. “You have to presume that this book was timed at a very interesting time in the campaign. You have to presume he’s testing the waters very seriously for running. You want to see how the people in the Midwest feel about him and the questions they have.”

McCain said the town hall-style book events let him get around the country and find out what’s on people’s minds. What do they ask him the most? “If I am running for president,” McCain replied -- and, for the record, he says he’ll decide after next year’s midterm elections.

Telling his story

For politicians, books can also provide a branding opportunity, broadcasting the values for which they wish to be known. John F. Kennedy’s “Profiles in Courage” won a Pulitzer Prize and helped him raise his own profile for a political climb to become the first Roman Catholic president of the United States.

It was a book that first catapulted McCain to the forefront of the national imagination. His bestselling “Faith of My Fathers,” also cowritten with Salter, told the story of his military family. But its most enduring account was of how he was shot down over North Vietnam, captured, held in a POW camp and tortured. His ordeal left him with multiple injuries and the moral authority to face down the Bush administration on the issue of torture without being easily characterized as unpatriotic or soft on defense.

“Faith of My Fathers” made McCain a magnet for veterans, from his 2000 campaign to the present.

In Kansas City, McCain lamented that many Vietnam vets couldn’t “make it all the way home” because of domestic turmoil over the war. He lambasted the Swift Boat Veterans attack ads against Sen. John F.Kerry (D-Mass.) in the 2004 presidential campaign as “dishonest and dishonorable.” He urged people who see soldiers “on the street, go up and say, ‘Thanks for serving.’ ”

McCain made that a mantra. “Thank you for serving in Iraq,” McCain said a few minutes later to Al Pierron, 30, who was a military security escort in Babylon in 2003, as he signed Pierron’s book.

“I’ve always felt like he was one of the few people I could trust,” said Pierron, a husky, earnest Republican who lives in Lenexa, Kan. “I felt like he was giving me his straight opinion. I’m hoping to have the chance to vote for him. It killed me in 2000 when he didn’t get the Republican nomination.”

The torture amendment debate, in which Bush capitulating to McCain last week, drew praise from many Democrats and Republicans who said they felt McCain had walked the line and reaffirmed American values. “Thank you for your integrity,” people at the signing repeated, shaking his hand.

But there was much in McCain’s gray-suited delivery that was familiar from his campaign. There were self-deprecating quips offered with the same deadpan delivery that seems to channel Humphrey Bogart.

There were the stock jokes he repeats so often that whoever writes them should get residuals. Like the one he used when a man in Kansas City asked about how he felt when he was the victim of a smear campaign in South Carolina in 2000 (many tied the whisper campaign to Bush operatives) just before a key primary there. McCain lost and subsequently dropped out of the race.

“I slept like a baby,” McCain told the man. “I’d sleep for two hours and wake up and cry, sleep two more hours and wake up and cry.”

McCain still packs the bipartisan appeal that seems to unify partisan-fatigued Democrats and Republicans. “How do we bring our country back together?” asked one young man.

“There are pressing issues that require us to work together. The best way is to reject extreme elected leaders who refuse to work together to address the issues of their constituents,” McCain said, as cheers rose from the audience.

Will Bush loyalists in the Republican Party ever forgive McCain for upstaging Bush early in the 2000 primaries? Or, more recently, for forcing Bush to yield to his amendment spelling out a ban on torture, after reports that CIA operatives were running secret detention centers overseas?

Some Bush camp followers apparently found forgiveness in their hearts. As McCain moved through Texas, media strategist McKinnon accompanied McCain to book signings in Austin, San Antonio and Houston, a McCain aide said.

Interesting entourage

McKinnon helped arrange a dinner in Austin that included James R. Huffines, chairman of the University of Texas System Board of Regents and a senior advisor to Texas Gov. Rick Perry; rock singer Sheryl Crow; and her fiance, Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong, according to the Austin American-Statesman.

McKinnon, who puzzled some of his oldest friends when he went to work shaping Bush’s media campaign for 2000 and again in 2004, has told McCain staffers he would be interested in assisting a McCain run in 2008, provided that a candidate preferred by Bush doesn’t run, a McCain aide said.

The aide said McKinnon was an “informal advisor” to McCain; McCain said he considers McKinnon a friend.

“I told the senator, as I’ve told the president, that if McCain chooses to run, and if people close to the president don’t run, specifically Jeb Bush or Condi Rice, then I would be inclined to support him,” McKinnon wrote in an e-mail, when asked about his relationship with McCain.

“I got to know the senator [McCain] when he campaigned for the president in 2004. I admire him, I respect him and I like him,” McKinnon wrote. “I was glad to help facilitate a recent book-signing trip through Texas.”

During his book tour, McCain has also arranged to appear at fundraisers, something other elected officials -- most recently Democratic Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barbara Boxer -- have also done, according to the Capitol Hill newsletter, Roll Call. The newsletter called the “Character Is Destiny” tour a “fund-raising whistle-stop” that could earn $2 million for McCain’s Straight Talk America political action committee.

McCain said stops for his tour, like the Rainy Day Books event at the Uptown Theatre, were chosen by Random House, which favored bookstores that report to bestseller lists. (He will appear at 6 tonight at Warwick’s bookstore on Girard Avenue in La Jolla.)

Is McCain’s book tour a Trojan horse for a possible presidential run?

McCain managed a wry smile, with as much amused tolerance as he could muster, as he signed 200 more books assembly-line style while the clock ticked toward midnight. He had a busy week behind him and a late-night plane ride ahead.

“I’ve written four books,” he said. “I enjoy writing books.”

A Kansas City Star reporter asked him if he was becoming a de facto presidential contender, repeating the adage that if “it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, it is a duck.”

“I’ve been quacking for many years,” McCain said, as he signed another book.

“But he’s not a quack,” interjected Rainy Day Books’ Roger Doeren, reaching for the book and adding it to the stack.