Elected 1986, seat up 2004 Born: Aug. 29, 1936, Panama Canal Zone Home: Phoenix Education: U.S. Naval Acad., B.S. 1958, Natl. War Col., 1973-74 Religion: Episcopalian Marital Status: married (Cindy)

Career:

• Political: U.S. House of Reps., 1982-1986.
• Professional: Dir., Navy Senate Liaison Ofc., 1977-81.
• Military: Navy, 1958-80 (Vietnam).

DC Office: 241 RSOB 20510, 202-224-2235; Fax: 202-228-2862; Web site: www.senate.gov/~mccain

State Offices: Mesa, 602-491-4300; Phoenix,602-952-2410; Tucson,520-670-6334.

Committees:

• Armed Services (3d of 11 R): Personnel; Readiness & Management Support; Seapower.
• Commerce, Science & Transportation (Chmn. of 11 R).
• Indian Affairs (3d of 8 R).

John McCain is now Arizona's leading political figure, a possible presidential candidate and an important national policymaker whether he runs or not. His personal story is a dramatic one, told beautifully by Robert Timberg in The Nightingale's Song: he is the son and grandson of Navy admirals, a decorated Navy pilot himself who was shot down over Vietnam and who spent five years, most of it in pain and torture, in Communist prisoner of war camps; he refused to be let out ahead of those who had been in longer when he was offered release because of his father's rank. 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; 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.

McCain is chairman of the Commerce Committee and a member of Armed Services, with a mostly conservative voting record. But on two important issues in the 105th Congress, campaign finance reform and the tobacco bill, McCain took stands opposed by almost all Republicans and supported by most Democrats. He was one of the lead sponsors of the line-item veto and has been an avid pork-buster, denouncing even defense and Arizona earmarks in the October 1998 budget. He has called for requiring a supermajority of 60 votes to raise taxes and for a biennial budget to reduce pork.

He has worked to ban small airplanes from flying over the Grand Canyon. Inspired by the plethora of lawsuits inspired by this issue, he worked for a $5.5 million grant for creating an office for mediation of environmental lawsuits at the Morris K. Udall Foundation he helped set up. McCain served as chairman of the Indian Affairs Committee in 1995-96. Arizona has one of the nation's largest percentages of Indians, and McCain, like Barry Goldwater and Morris Udall, obviously feels a sympathy for them.''Never deceive them,'' he says. ''They have been deceived too many times in the last 200 years.'' Generally he has supported the tribal agenda. He cooperated with the vast expansion in the 1990s of Indian gambling. He has worked for Indian self-governance and sovereignty, but has also pushed laws on child abuse on reservations. On adoption issues, he backed limited changes in the law which allows tribes to control the adoptions even of children born off the reservation with low percentages of Indian blood.

On the Commerce Committee, McCain opposed the 1996 Telecommunications Act, passed after years of intense lobbying. ''Every major telecommunications company was protected,'' he argued later, but cable and local telephone rates went up, and as of 1998 the local telephone companies were getting no effective competition from long distance servers and vice versa. Instead, the regional Bells were merging. McCain wanted an auction, not a giveaway, of the digital TV spectrum to the networks; later he charged that the networks were not resolving key standards for switching to digital and would not be able to return their analog frequencies in 2006, as they had promised in return for free digital frequencies. In 1997 McCain led key senators and congressmen to agree not to legislate for three years if the networks would come up with code letters for violence, sexual content and foul language in their programs. He favored requiring filtering technology on computers used in schools.

In the early 1990s McCain worked hard with Massachusetts's John Kerry on the special committee investigating charges that American POWs or MIAs remain in Vietnam; they found no evidence of any. With Kerry he supported ending the trade embargo on and initiating diplomatic relations with Vietnam, and has traveled there many times. He came to Bill Clinton's side when some veterans complained of the president's presence at military ceremonies. On other defense issues, McCain has called for more defense spending but has shown a professional military officer's caution about committing American troops without a clear end in sight, most notably in Bosnia, where he opposed the use of air power alone. He called the Clinton Administration's 1994 agreement with North Korea ''appeasement'' and said sanctions against North Korean nuclear proliferation should be backed by explicit threats of air strikes. He has been extremely vocal on Kosovo, pushing Clinton to either commit or get out; in May 1999 the Senate shelved McCain's proposal to authorize ''all necessary force'' including ground forces.

In 1997 and 1998 McCain took on two fights--campaign finance reform and the tobacco settlements--in which he was aligned mostly by Democrats and frustrated by his inability to win the 60 votes needed to end a filibuster. The opposition each time was led by a Republican senator, in one case a practical-minded senator citing idealistic reasons, in the other an idealistic senator pursuing practical political goals. One cause, campaign finance, he took on himself; the other, tobacco, was thrust on him. McCain's interest in campaign finance may have come from when he was one of the ''Keating five'' senators investigated for meeting in 1987 with regulators on behalf of Charles Keating's savings and loan. McCain was kept in the case by Democrats, though he had done nothing for Keating, because he was the one Republican involved and thus made the scandal bipartisan; he was cited for nothing more than bad judgment. Vindicated by reelection in 1992, in the majority after the election of 1994, he sought out Democrat Russ Feingold, whose campaign finance bill had gotten nowhere that year. The McCain-Feingold bills have gone through several transformations; the bill that came to the floor in 1998 purported to ban soft money contributions to political parties and to limit ''issue ads'' run by independent organizations within 60 days of an election. McCain hoped that Fred Thompson's hearings on the Clinton-Gore campaign finance shenanigans would convert Republicans, but it brought only a few. Meanwhile, Mitch McConnell, chairman of the Republicans' Senate campaign committee, argued to partisans that banning soft money would hurt Republicans and to wider audiences that McCain-Feingold would violate the First Amendment by limiting political speech. Majority Leader Trent Lott yanked the bill from the Senate floor in February 1998; it returned in September, after the House passed a similar bill, but could summon up no more than 52 votes and was killed.

The tobacco issue was thrust on McCain as Commerce Committee chairman: Lott told him to put together a bill with bipartisan support, and McCain's bill passed 19-1 in April 1998. It provided for closer regulation of tobacco advertising and marketing and stiffer penalties if the teenage smoking rate did not decline, plus a $1.10 cigarette tax; the cost was estimated at $516 billion, higher by opponents. At first it had little articulate opposition. But John Ashcroft, a non-smoker thinking of running for president, forthrightly opposed the tax. And the big tobacco companies, noting that the cost was well above the $368 billion in the settlement agreed to with state attorneys general in 1997, that the McCain bill did not protect them against lawsuits as that settlement did, and that the Finance Committee raised the tax to $1.50, decided to oppose it. They ran a huge ad campaign against the tobacco tax--naming McCain in, as he noted, Arizona, Iowa and New Hampshire. Although just about everyone in Washington seemed to favor McCain's bill, an NBC-Wall Street Journal poll showed that voter opinion was about evenly divided. McCain was obviously angered by the opposition. ''Maybe we ought to remember the obligations that we incur when we govern America. Maybe we ought to remember the principles of the founders of our party. We might want to understand that our obligation first of all is to those who can't care for themselves in this society, and that includes our children.'' But the bill was dropped in June 1998 after only 57 senators voted to stop the filibuster. In November 1998, the attorneys general of 46 states reached a $206 billion settlement with the tobacco companies, which would restrict advertising and marketing but provide no protection against other lawsuits.

Many Republicans complained that McCain was acting against conservative principles on campaign finance and tobacco. But if, as Michael Lynch wrote in Reason, McCain is actuated less by abstract principle than by personal honor, his choices are readily explicable: he took the lead on campaign finance as a kind of atonement for the Keating Five, and he persevered on tobacco once he was given the mission of coming up with a conference bill in his committee.

McCain's political standing in Arizona is very strong. He won the Senate seat in 1986 by 60%-40%. In 1992 he was reelected 56%-32%, with 11% for conservative former Governor Evan Mecham. In 1998 he was opposed by Ed Ranger, an environmental lawyer in Arizona and Mexico who put 70,000 miles on a Harley Davidson and converted 1970s school bus traveling through the state. McCain raised more than $4 million, for fear of a tobacco assault, he said, and spent only about $2 million. He won by an impressive 69%-27%, carrying the heavily Navajo and Democratic Apache County 54%-42% and winning the Hispanic vote 52%-42%. He attributed that last not to his one $12,000 ad on Spanish-language radio, but to his longstanding positions on issues: ''I favor bilingual education that works, I'm opposed to 'English only,' I favor legal immigration.''

As president, McCain's great attraction is not his stands on issues (too conservative for many ticket-splitters, too apostate for many Republicans) or his scholarly credentials (though he is capable of a quiet eloquence, as in his speech nominating Bob Dole) but his forthrightness. In December 1998 he filed papers for an exploratory committee.

Update: March 29, 2000
On September 27, 1999, pledging to restore faith in government, John McCain formally launched his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in Nashua, New Hampshire. McCain attempted to contrast his own experiences with those of the Republican frontrunner, Texas Governor George Bush. During a tour to promote his memoir, Faith of My Fathers, McCain highlighted how his family's tradition of military service helped sustain him through years of imprisonment and torture in Vietnam.

McCain remained active on the legislative front for 1999. In May, the Senate rejected his legislation to close more military bases--a request by Defense Secretary William Cohen--by a bipartisan 60-40 vote. In August McCain introduced a bill that would allow U.S. cruise lines to acquire foreign-built ships until 2007 and allow limited access to U.S. routes for international vessels. At an October committee hearing on the legislation, however, he chastised the industry for reports of sexual assaults aboard ships and for continuing violations of environmental laws.

McCain had introduced the Airline Passenger Fairness Act in February 1999 and held a dramatic hearing to force airlines to respond to customer complaints, which had reached record numbers. But the industry announced a voluntary plan to improve service in June, and McCain replaced his bill with a much weaker version calling for airlines to follow their own plans, which was approved by the Commerce Committee. An October report by the D.C.-based watchdog group Common Cause, however, contended that the industry evaded stricter regulation for a different reason: The week prior to the committee's vote, airlines made $226,000 in soft money political contributions.

This seemed to speak to McCain's assertion that soft money contributions make Congress look corrupt--even when there is no evidence to prove a specific example of corruption. ''Much of what McCain calls corruption is the inevitable nature of politics under the modern regulatory state,'' wrote Washington Post columnist George Will, who points to studies that show ''contributions are influenced much more by the tendencies of legislators than legislators' tendencies are influenced by contributions.'' After the House passed a campaign finance reform bill in September, McCain and Wisconsin Democrat Russ Feingold offered a new version of their bill in the Senate, one that would ban soft money donations but not regulate issue advocacy advertising. Republicans bitterly attacked McCain during the floor debate, as National Republican Senatorial Committee Chair Mitch McConnell challenged him to offer specific corruption charges against individual senators. But McCain refused, saying it was the system that he was attacking, not individuals. A cloture vote to end debate on McCain-Feingold received only 53 votes, seven short of the 60 needed to prevent a filibuster.

McCain's compelling personal history and his penchant for quixotic causes seemed to appeal to the national media, which cast him in a large--and usually sympathetic--spotlight. One notable exception was his home-state Arizona Republic, which questioned whether McCain had the temperament to be president because of the ''volcanic'' temper he had unleashed on occasion. But McCain shrugged off the criticism as inaccurate and attributed it to the Bush campaign, which would become a common response when he was attacked during the primary season.

The issue with which he sought to win over voters was character. McCain's candidacy offered a remedy for Clinton fatigue: Here was a military hero best known for his crusade to reform the campaign-finance system. ''I will never tell you a lie,'' he told New Hampshire voters at town meetings. And in sharp contrast to both parties' frontrunners, McCain was not afraid to take risks. In fact, his entire candidacy was a series of gambles, some more calculated than others.

The first gamble was a decision in November to bypass the Iowa caucus. This established a pattern: McCain would cherry pick the states in which he wanted to compete--for example, ignoring Iowa and Delaware to focus on New Hampshire and Michigan--seemingly without penalty. In addition to conserving his resources, this tactic allowed him to adopt locally unpopular stances that would play better in states that were more politically significant, such as opposing ethanol subsidies without worrying about Iowa and denouncing the religious right without worrying about Virginia.

Bush won easily in Iowa with 41% while McCain finished fifth with 5%. But Bush's more conservative opponents--Steve Forbes, Gary Bauer and Alan Keyes--combined to win 53%. McCain understood that he could force Bush into a two-front campaign by running to the left. He struck a nerve in New Hampshire, beating Bush by an astonishing 49%-30%. While Bush's tax-cut message seemed to fall flat, McCain's message of reform tantalized independents. They made up about 40% of Republican primary voters and 60% of McCain's support in the state.

Drawing independents in states with open primaries gave credence to McCain's assertion that he was the Republican with the best chance to win the general election. It also led to a totally unforeseen phenomenon: In states like South Carolina and Michigan, Democrats began voting for McCain in open Republican primaries. But were they converts, as McCain claimed, or mischief-makers, as Bush and the Republican establishment that had invested so heavily in him asserted?

Despite a hoped-for record turnout, McCain lost in South Carolina. But he rebounded with victories in Arizona and Michigan, the latter particularly embarrassing to its governor, John Engler, who had promised to deliver the state to Bush. Again, McCain had strong support among independents and even among Democrats: Republicans made up only half the voters in the Republican primary, while independents cast 30% of the votes and Democrats cast 20%.

At this point--his high water mark--McCain appeared to be on the verge of creating a new political movement. National Journal editor-in-chief Michael Kelly defined McCain's candidacy as a contemporary manifestation of an old American political tradition, Jacksonianism, whose core principles are self-reliance, equality, individualism and courage. But Kelly noted that this movement would likely be nipped in the bud as a series of closed primaries loomed on the horizon.

The campaign rhetoric took on a more acrimonious tenor when McCain, going on the attack prior to primaries in Virginia and Washington State, criticized Bush for delivering a speech at Bob Jones University in South Carolina, a bastion of the religious right that had harshly criticized Catholics and banned interracial dating. McCain then denounced the leaders of the religious right, and later characterized Pat Robertson and the Reverend Jerry Falwell as ''forces of evil.'' But McCain suffered big losses in both states as well as in the North Dakota caucus, and the next day apologized for that characterization after coming under fire from Gary Bauer, who had endorsed him after ending his own candidacy.

The 13 primaries of Super Tuesday would be McCain's Waterloo. He won only four New England states--Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Vermont--while losing the three most populous ones: California, New York and Ohio. McCain suspended his campaign two days later, rendering moot the three-state Western primary scheduled for the following day. He congratulated Bush but did not endorse him outright, saying only that he would support the Republican Party nominee and that he was not interested in becoming Bush's running mate. Bush, in an interview with the New York Times, said he would make no concessions to his former rival, eschewing his message of reform. But after being criticized by McCain aides and supporters, Bush moderated his tone, pointing to areas of agreement between himself and McCain, saying, ''I'm confident we can work together.''

McCain returned to the Senate March 20, where he promised to once more take up the fight for campaign-finance reform. He may not face a warm welcome back by his Republican colleagues, of whom only four offered him their endorsement: fellow-Arizonan Jon Kyl, Mike DeWine of Ohio, Fred Thompson of Tennessee and Chuck Hagel of Nebraska. But seeking to mend fences, McCain said he would campaign hard to help Republicans retain control of Congress.

Group Ratings
	ADA	ACLU	AFS	LCV	CON	NTU	NFIB	COC	ACU	NTLC	CHC
1998	20	14	33	0	93	73	100	76	68	96	73
1997	5	--	0	--	97	82	--	100	80	--	--

National Journal Ratings
	1997 LIB	--	1997 CONS		1998 LIB	--	1998 CONS
Economic	24%	--	75%		29%	--	70%
Social	17%	--	72%		29%	--	69%
Foreign	34%	--	57%		29%	--	58%

Key Votes of the 105th Congress
1. Bal. Budget Amend. Y 2. Clinton Budget Deal Y 3. Cloture on Tobacco Y 4. Education IRAs Y 5. Satcher for Surgeon Gen. Y 6. Highway Set-asides Y		7. Table Child Gun locks Y  8. Ovrd. Part. Birth Veto Y  9. Chem. Weapons Treaty Y 10. Cuban Humanitarian Aid N 11. Table Bosnia Troops Y 12. $ for Test-ban Treaty N

Election Results
1998 general	John McCain (R)	696,577	(69%)
	Ed Ranger (D)	275,224	(27%)
	Other	41,479	(4%)
1998 primary	John McCain (R)	unopposed
1992 general	John McCain (R)	771,395	(56%)
	Claire Sargent (D)	436,321	(32%)
	Evan Mecham (I)	145,361	(11%)
	Other	28,974	(2%)

Campaign Finance
1998	Receipts	Receipts from PACs	Expenditures
John McCain (R)	$4,450,544	$1,146,419	$2,461,900
Ed Ranger (D)	$375,463	$25,100	$371,439