FROM THE ALMANAC OF AMERICAN POLITICS

Sen. John McCain (R)

Arizona: Senior Senator

Tuesday, Sept. 2, 2008


Among America's most widely admired leaders, Sen. John McCain is making his second run for president at age 72. Whether he succeeds or not in attaining the nation's highest office, McCain seems like to continue to have an inordinate impact on national politics.

His personal story is a dramatic one, told beautifully by Robert Timberg in The Nightingale's Song and by McCain himself and Mark Salter in the 1999 bestseller Faith of My Fathers. McCain is the son and grandson of Navy admirals, a decorated Navy pilot himself. He volunteered for service in Vietnam and in July 1967, was injured in a flight deck explosion on the carrier Forrestal. He could have returned home but refused, and in October 1967 was shot down over Vietnam. He spent five and a half years, most of it in pain and torture, in Communist prisoner of war camps. When he was offered release because of his father's rank, he refused to be let out ahead of those who had been imprisoned longer. McCain returned to the United States in March 1973. His final assignment in the Navy was as Senate liaison. In 1980, he retired and moved to Arizona, his wife's home state, and in 1982, he ran for an open House seat. Attacked as an outsider, he responded, "The longest place I ever lived in was Hanoi." He led 32%-26% in a four-way primary, and won the 1982 and 1984 general elections and then the 1986 Senate contest easily.

In his first years in the Senate, McCain had a low profile. His first major issue was one on which he had considerable expertise: Vietnam. In the early 1990s, McCain worked with John Kerry, also a decorated Vietnam veteran, on the special committee investigating charges that American POWs or MIAs remained in Vietnam; they found no evidence of any. With Kerry, he supported ending the trade embargo on, and pressed for, establishing diplomatic relations with Vietnam. But his support for reconciliation with America's former enemies has not dimmed his memories of how his captors treated his fellow prisoners of war. On the Armed Services Committee, McCain has called for more defense spending and insisted military interventions be designed to achieve victory. He criticized the Clinton administration for using air power alone and ruling out ground troops in Bosnia and for not using "all necessary force" in Kosovo.

McCain's other major committee assignment is Commerce, which handles heavily lobbied regulatory issues. McCain's impulse on these is toward deregulation, but he took little part in shaping the 1996 telecommunications act and voted against it, arguing that it did not effectively ensure competition. In 2006, he called for relaxing franchise regulations for cable TV companies that offered programming on a per-channel, a la carte basis. Even when he served as chairman of the committee in 2003-05 he showed distaste for the political deal-making and logrolling that is common on Capitol Hill. He also disapproved strongly of pork barrel spending, which provides him plenty of material for his self-deprecating jokes about how unpopular he is with many colleagues. That has put him at odds with senators like Alaska's Ted Stevens, who after being term-limited as Appropriations Committee chairman became chairman of Commerce in 2005.

The issue McCain has been most closely identified with over the years is campaign finance regulation. His interest came from his experience as one of the "Keating Five" senators investigated for meeting in 1987 with regulators on behalf of Charles Keating's Arizona savings and loan. Democrats kept McCain in the case, though the evidence was thin, as the one Republican involved, thus making the scandal bipartisan. Ultimately he was cited for exercising bad judgment for attempting to influence regulators overseeing Keating's thrift. Vindicated by re-election in 1992, in the majority after the election of 1994, he sought out Democrat Russell Feingold, whose campaign finance bill had gotten nowhere that year. The McCain-Feingold bills went through several transformations. The 1998 bill purported to ban soft money contributions to political parties and to limit "issue ads" run by independent organizations within 60 days of an election. It was fiercely opposed as an infringement of free speech and as a threat to the Republican Party by Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. Majority Leader Trent Lott of Mississippi yanked the bill from the Senate floor in February 1998. It returned in September, after the House passed a similar bill, but could summon no more than 52 votes. In September 1999, after the House passed a similar bill again, McCain and Feingold introduced a new version that attacked soft money but did not address issue ads. The intent was to get a bill to conference and generate enough public support that McConnell and other Republican opponents would have to back down. But in October, McConnell, noting that McCain had charged that the current campaign finance system produces corruption, challenged McCain to name senators who had been corrupted. McCain refused to name names and said the system was corrupt in general. Against McConnell's filibuster a few days later, McCain and Feingold were able to summon up only 55 votes for cloture, five short of the 60 needed, and the bill was taken off the floor.

His work on campaign finance and his record of service in Vietnam provided solid credentials for the presidential campaign he embarked on in 1999. He decided to avoid the Iowa caucuses (McCain had long campaigned against ethanol subsidies as pork) and concentrated on New Hampshire, where he traveled around the state in his "Straight Talk Express" bus. At first only a few reporters traveled with him and crowds were sparse. But it soon became clear McCain was striking a chord. To increasingly large and fervent crowds, he told his personal story in self-deprecating terms, and pledged, "I will never tell you a lie." He was asked to autograph hundreds of copies of Faith of My Fathers. He talked about defense and foreign policy issues -- the only candidate to spend much time doing so -- and invariably called for campaign finance reform. On the campaign bus, McCain was always available to answer reporters' questions and banter with the press, while making fun of his aides and consultant Mike Murphy (who later called the press "our constituency"). McCain did not have much support from his colleagues. Only four fellow senators endorsed him (Jon Kyl, Chuck Hagel, Fred Thompson and Mike DeWine). Back home, Arizona Gov. Jane Hull, apparently because of abrasive treatment by McCain, endorsed George W. Bush; The Arizona Republic wrote editorials warning of McCain's "volcanic" temper. But the strength of feeling among his ever-larger crowds was palpable. Bush predicted victory in New Hampshire, but on Feb. 1 McCain beat him by an impressive 49%-31% margin. Suddenly he became, if not the frontrunner, at least the most admired of either party's presidential candidates.

From there the "Straight Talk Express" had mixed success. It went to South Carolina, where both the Republican establishment and Christian conservatives lined up with Bush in 2000. The campaigning got negative, but what hurt even more was his failure to win over self-identified Republicans. His emphasis on campaign finance reform and his criticisms of Bush's tax plan for giving too much to the rich helped with independents, but sounded like enemy talk to Republicans. On Feb. 18, Bush won 53%-42% in South Carolina, in what turned out to be as decisive a victory as his father's there had been 12 years before. The New Hampshire and South Carolina results were templates for what happened elsewhere. In New Hampshire and other Northeastern states, McCain ran about even with Bush among self-identified Republicans and way ahead among self-identified independents and self-identified Democrats. In South Carolina and other states outside the Northeast, Bush ran way ahead among Republicans and behind among independents and Democrats. On Feb. 22, McCain won in Arizona and, in a big 50%-43% upset, in Michigan, where 17% of Republican primary voters were self-identified Democrats and 35% independents.

McCain might have done better if he had emphasized other issues on which he had consistently taken stands in line with most Republicans' thinking -- defense, tax cuts (he had a tax cut plan himself, but he spent less time on it than on attacking Bush's), abortion, Social Security individual investment accounts. Instead, after South Carolina, he gave a speech in Virginia Beach attacking the religious right and in an offhand comment on the bus, called Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell "forces of evil." As he explained the next day, this was sarcastic "Luke Skywalker talk," which reporters often heard on the bus but which rarely appeared in their writings or broadcasts. But to many Christian conservatives, a large segment of the Republican primary vote, it sounded like angry hostility. McCain lost in Virginia and Washington on Feb. 29. On Super Tuesday, March 7, McCain won in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Vermont. But he lost decisively in New York, Ohio and California and "suspended" his campaign on March 9. Much attention was focused on the fact that he did not endorse Bush. When they finally met in Pittsburgh in May, reporters practically had to extract the word from his mouth. He made it clear he did not want to be nominated for vice president and said he wanted no cabinet post, making the plausible argument that he operated better as his own man than as someone else's appointee. He insisted on having his wife Cindy McCain, not Jane Hull, head the Arizona delegation to the convention, and he gave a moving, elegiac speech that ended as if in a minor key.

Some defeated presidential candidates sulk in their tents. McCain became more legislatively active than ever -- and on many issues allied himself with Democrats and against most Republicans. His first priority was the campaign finance bill. He had campaigned for Republican House candidates and tried, with some success, to get them to support it. In January 2001, he threatened to tie up the Senate unless Majority Leader Lott set aside two weeks of debate on the issue. In March 2001, after two weeks of civilized but spirited debate, during which McCain and Feingold fended off several poison-pill amendments, the legislation passed April 2 by a 59-41 vote. An amendment by Fred Thompson of Tennessee and Dianne Feinstein of California was passed to raise limits on individual contributions from $1,000 to $2,000, but the bill retained the soft-money ban and limit on issue ads prior to the election, which some senators felt would be struck down by the courts as an unconstitutional ban of free speech. The House, which twice had passed similar bills, took up the issue in June 2001. But after the Republican leadership's rule was defeated -- a very rare event indeed -- Speaker Dennis Hastert pulled the bill from the floor. Supporters tried to get the 218 signatures needed for a discharge petition. For months the number hovered just under 218, but in January 2002, the signatures were obtained. The House passed its version of the bill in February 2002 by a 240-189 vote, and the bill became law in March 2002. Initially, most of it was upheld by the Supreme Court. But McCain didn't rest on his victory. He was furious that the Bush administration didn't appoint a Democrat designated by Tom Daschle of South Dakota to a seat on the Federal Election Commission. The holdover Democrat was voting with the Republicans and passing regulations which McCain argued undercut the bill. In June, he threatened to block all nominations until Bush made the appointment, and in October 2002, he invoked the Congressional Review Act to try to overturn the new regulations and also filed a lawsuit against the FEC.

In 2001, McCain was the only Republican to vote against a water projects bill, charging that it contained $1.2 billion of special projects earmarked for districts. He appeared in ads in Colorado and Oregon for ballot propositions requiring background checks for sales at gun shows. In 2002, after campaign finance regulation passed the Senate, he worked with many Democrats again. He, John Edwards of North Carolina and Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts sponsored an HMO regulation bill. He supported funding of embryonic stem-cell research. With John Kerry of Massachusetts, he proposed fuel efficiency standards for all cars and light trucks of 36 miles per gallon by 2015. He was one of two Republicans to vote against the conference report on the tax cut in May and, after Jim Jeffords switched parties, he invited Majority Leader Daschle to a friendly visit to his vacation home near Sedona. Speculation abounded that McCain would switch parties too, and liberals writing in the Washington Monthly and the New Republic argued that he would be the strongest Democratic nominee for president. But he turned that talk aside, and later accounts by participants differed on how serious McCain was about switching. He took strong stands with President Bush and most Republicans on some issues -- the nomination of John Ashcroft for attorney general, repeal of ergonomics regulations, the May 2001 budget resolution, and allowing Mexican trucks into the United States.

McCain strongly supported Bush in the war on terrorism after September 11. In October 2001 he urged more ground troops in Afghanistan, and in December 2001 he was one of 10 members of Congress to sign a letter urging that Iraq be the next target. He called for the government to run airline security, and he co-sponsored a bill with Ernest Hollings of South Carolina that effectively decided the issue; it passed 97-0 in October 2001. But he also proposed that screeners be fireable without regard to civil service rules -- the position Bush insisted on and Democrats, to their political detriment, opposed on the homeland security bill in 2002. He called for a special commission to investigate intelligence failures before the terrorist attacks, a proposal opposed for months by the Bush administration, and said that former Senators Gary Hart of Colorado and Warren Rudman of New Hampshire should serve on it. The final version of the law provided, at the insistence of relatives of September 11 casualties, that McCain and Richard Shelby of Alabama get a veto over Lott's appointees to the commission. In 2002 he did much less campaigning for Republicans than in 2000, making appearances in tandem with promotion of his latest book Worth the Fighting For and only on behalf of Republicans who had supported his brand of campaign finance regulation. In September, he appeared with House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt in support of the generic drug bill and said it was "very, very likely" that Republicans would lose their majority in the House.

They didn't and in fact regained their majority in the Senate, making McCain chairman of the Commerce Committee again. There he promoted the bill he co-sponsored with Joe Lieberman of Connecticut to reduce carbon dioxide emissions; it got 43 votes on the floor of the Senate in 2003. On Armed Services, he persisted in his campaign against the proposed purchase of Boeing 767s as aerial refueling tankers and in his attacks on Pentagon improprieties. He also continued to call for a larger army and more troops in Iraq. "I have strenuously argued for larger troop numbers in Iraq, including the right kind of troops -- linguists, special forces, civil affairs, etc. There are very strong differences of opinion between myself and Secretary Rumsfeld on that issue." In December 2004, he said he had "no confidence" in Donald Rumsfeld but did not call on him to resign.

McCain opposed the constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage as "antithetical in every way to the core philosophy of Republicans. It usurps from the states a fundamental authority they have always possessed and imposes a federal remedy for a problem that most states believe does not confront them." On all these issues he was at odds with the Bush administration.

Two issues with an Arizona dimension on which McCain has worked are water and Indians. With Jon Kyl and the state's House delegation, he worked to pass the Arizona Water Settlements Act, resolving disputes between the state and Indian tribes over water rights. The Senate passed it in October 2004, as the presidential campaign was raging, and the House passed it in November, after it was over. McCain served as chairman of the Indian Affairs Committee in 1995-97 and became chairman again in January 2005. In February 2004, after the Washington Post reported that lobbyist Jack Abramoff and publicist Michael Scanlon, both with strong Republican connections, had received $45 million in fees from Indian tribes, McCain demanded a hearing. It was held in September and McCain was fierce in his denunciation: "What sets this tale apart, what makes it truly extraordinary, is the extent and degree of the apparent exploitation and deceit." Abramoff later went to jail on unrelated charges.

Heading into the 2004 presidential campaign, McCain was a major national figure, with high positives and very low negatives among Democrats as well as Republicans, a leading Republican who was nonetheless at odds with the Bush White House on many issues. The press, always enchanted with him, gave him plenteous coverage. As Kerry, his fellow Vietnam veteran, clinched the Democratic nomination in March 2004, there was speculation that he would ask McCain to be his vice presidential nominee. Polls showed Kerry-McCain running far ahead of Bush-Cheney. After some days of speculation and some talks with Kerry, he firmly rejected the idea. "I am a pro-life, deficit hawk, free trade Republican," he said. Bush chief strategist Karl Rove sat down for a talk with McCain's 2000 strategist John Weaver, an old adversary from Texas politics, and made peace. In June 2004 McCain appeared with Bush at Fort Lewis, Washington, and at a campaign stop in Nevada and McCain endorsed him strongly. After press stories that suggested Bush would drop Dick Cheney from the ticket, McCain made a campaign appearance with Cheney. When the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ads appeared against John Kerry, McCain called them "dishonorable" and said they should be dropped from the air. When Bush declined to join that demand, he didn't press the issue further, and conceded that, "Everybody is accountable for what they do, and certainly John Kerry is accountable for what he did after the war, and people can make a judgment." He said that he had advised Kerry to avoid mentioning the war, as he had done in his 2000 campaign, and to let others do it. In August, he asked Kerry to stop running an ad showing him criticizing Bush in 2000; Kerry did so. On Monday night at the Republican National Convention, McCain delivered another eloquent speech unequivocally endorsing Bush. "He has been tested and has risen to the most important challenge of our time, and I salute him."

McCain made common cause with Bush not only on the campaign trail but on some important issues. McCain complained that heavy spending by mostly anti-Bush 527 organizations of millions of dollars of soft money violated McCain-Feingold. The Bush campaign took the same position, filing a complaint with the FEC in March 2004 and joining McCain in a lawsuit in August to force the FEC to act. In September, McCain and Feingold filed a bill to limit the use of soft money by 527s and promised to push it forward in 2005. McCain also voted for extension of the Bush tax cuts, including some he had initially opposed.

On Iraq, McCain continually praised Bush's resolve but called for more troops, to no avail while Rumsfeld remained as Defense secretary. He said the administration's handling of the war "will go down as one of the worst" mistakes in U.S. military history. He dismissed the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group in December 2006 and called for the surge of troops that Bush ordered in January 2007. To those who said the troops were already overextended, he said, "There's only one thing worse than an overstressed Army and Marine Corps and that's a defeated Army and Marine Corps." He strongly opposed those who called for withdrawal of troops and pointed to what he said would be the consequences. "Failure means catastrophic consequences and then we are back. Maybe not in Iraq, but back in the Middle East," McCain said. To those who said that his support of the surge would hurt his chances in the presidential race, he responded many times, "I would much rather lose an election than lose a war."

On immigration -- a big issue in Arizona -- McCain has said, "The truth is, border enforcement alone does not work." With Arizona Reps. Jim Kolbe and Jeff Flake he sponsored a guest worker law, which would provide six-year temporary worker visas and three-year visas for those who are here illegally now. He also co-sponsored with Kyl a bill to fund border security measures. He recognized Arizona voters' anger. "The nation has lost control of its southern border, and Arizona is paying the price through transient traffic, violence in our streets and deaths in our deserts." But he opposed Proposition 200, cutting off public benefits to illegal immigrants, arguing that it would "delay, possibly derail, the search for a solution." It passed, but with a less than overwhelming 56% of the vote. In May 2005, he and Kennedy sponsored an immigration bill with legalization provisions; illegal immigrants could get two three-year visas and then "get in the back of the line" of legal immigrants. "Some Americans believe we must find all these millions, round them up and send them back to the countries they came from. I don't know how you do that. And I don't know why you would want to." That bill was similar to the Martinez-Hagel immigration bill that passed 62-36 in May 2006.

On ethics issues, he began working quietly with his sometime adversary Lott in January 2006 on a lobbyist gift ban, and started working on a bipartisan basis with Illinois Democrat Barack Obama on the issue. When in February 2006 Obama sent a letter favoring going through committee rather than a task force, McCain wrote back angrily. He "apologized" for taking Obama seriously. "I understand how important the opportunity to lead your party's effort to exploit this issue must seem to a freshman senator, and I hold no hard feelings over your earlier disingenuousness." Obama replied, "The fact that you have now questioned my sincerity and my desire to put aside politics for the public interest is regrettable, but does not in any way diminish my deep respect for you, nor my willingness to find a bipartisan solution to this problem." They both quickly made up. But the Senate remained reluctant to embrace some McCain proposals: an independent Office of Public Integrity to monitor both houses of Congress, private jet travel to be billed at charter-flight rather than first-class rates.

In 2005 and 2007, McCain and Lieberman introduced bills to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. The 2007 version would cap them at 2004 levels by 2012 and then mandate 2% annual reductions through 2020. It also had incentives for nuclear power development. After Hurricane Katrina showed the inadequacy of the Army Corps of Engineers' work, McCain worked with Feingold to come up with a requirement for independent peer review of Corps projects.

By mid-2006 it was clear that McCain was running for president again. In the 2006 election cycle he traveled around the country to support many Republicans, and raised $10.5 million for them. In May 2006, he delivered identical commencement speeches at Liberty University, where he was welcomed by Jerry Falwell, and The New School. His long derision of pork barrel spending became a national issue, symbolized by the "Bridge to Nowhere" in the 2005 transportation bill, a project to spend $400 million on a bridge in a sparsely populated area of Alaska. He voiced more frequently and fervently his longstanding opposition to abortion. Soon after the November 2006 elections, he set up an exploratory committee. In April 2007, he announced his candidacy.

In the beginning, he was running about even with former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in Republican primary polls and was generally considered the frontrunner. But in January 2007, Giuliani, despite his liberal stands on some cultural issues, pulled ahead. And in general election polling, McCain was running not much better than even with, and sometimes behind, Obama and New York Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. He encountered another setback in the first quarter when it turned out that his campaign had raised only $12.5 million, far behind former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney's $23 million and Giuliani's $15 million, and that it had far less cash on hand than either of his opponents. McCain announced he was reorganizing his fundraising and campaign apparatus. The same month, he delivered a fervent speech on Iraq and, a week later, another on taxes, opposing tax increases and promising to veto all pork barrel spending. As McCain continued his longstanding support of a surge in Iraq, his press coverage became less favorable. It was pointed out that he would turn 72 in 2008, a year younger than Ronald Reagan was when he was re-elected in 1984. But he continued to maintain an active schedule.

McCain's campaign struggled through the summer of 2007. His sponsorship with well-known liberal Kennedy of a bill to establish a temporary guest worker program met with fierce resistance from conservatives, who labeled it amnesty. His polling numbers and fundraising sagged, and the campaign faced high-profile departures of top adviser John Weaver and campaign manager Terry Nelson. Rick Davis was named the new campaign chief. McCain was adamant that his campaign would push on, saying that nothing less than "contracting a fatal disease" would make him drop out of the race. Strong performances in a series of primary debates, combined with his airtight credibility on foreign policy and national security issues, kept him in the game. Political analysts presciently warned against counting McCain out too early.

In the first contest of the primary season, McCain placed fourth in the Iowa caucus. But he hadn't expected to win there, based on lingering resentment in the state over his criticism of federal subsidies for ethanol development. So the real test of McCain's fortitude was the New Hampshire primary five days later. McCain and Romney were neck-and-neck in the polls, but McCain stayed focused on the kind of retail campaigning he knows best and that is appreciated in a small state. He wound up repeating his 2000 victory in New Hampshire, besting Romney by 13,000 votes. Giuliani and Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee were distant thirds.

In South Carolina, McCain avenged his 2000 loss, narrowly beating Huckabee by 3%. Huckabee led in the more conservative, evangelical Upstate areas, while McCain dominated the Midlands and Low Country. Then, Romney edged out McCain in Romney's native Michigan, but McCain scored a pivotal victory in delegate-rich Florida. After that, McCain led in the delegate count through several more primary contests, including the 22-state Super Tuesday balloting. He finally clinched the nomination on March 4 with wins in Texas, Ohio, Rhode Island and Vermont.

Still, McCain continued to confront questions about his management style and his ability to efficiently run a modern presidential campaign. His fundraising paled in comparison to Obama, the likely Democratic nominee. And McCain was slow to win over religious voters and cultural conservatives, who distrusted his commitment to opposing abortion and gay marriage. Economic conservatives were dubious as well, hesitant to embrace a Republican who had opposed President Bush's tax cuts and who favored restrictions on industry to curb global warming. McCain also struggled to separate himself from unpopular Bush, given his staunch support for the war in Iraq. His best asset was his deep experience in government in comparison to Obama, who had been elected to the Senate just two years earlier after a stint in the Illinois Senate. McCain emphasized his "maverick" streak to appeal to the independent voters who made up a third of the electorate and who would be pivotal in November.

McCain's appeal in general elections has long been apparent in Arizona. He won his Senate seat in 1986 by 60%-40% and in 1992, after the Keating Five investigation, he was re-elected 56%-32%. In 1998 he won by an impressive 69%-27%, carrying heavily Democratic Apache County 54%-42% and winning the Hispanic vote 52%-42%. In late 2002 and early 2003 the Club for Growth encouraged Congressman Jeff Flake to challenge him in the Republican primary; Flake decided not to. In November 2004 McCain was re-elected 77%-21%, while Bush was carrying the state 55%-44%.

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