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, 480-897-6289; Phoenix,602-952-2410; Tucson,520-670-6334.

Committees:

• Armed Services: Personnel; Readiness & Management Support; Seapower.
• Commerce, Science & Transportation (RMM).
• Indian Affairs.

John McCain is the closest thing American politics has to a national hero, a presidential candidate in 2000 who was admired by voters of both parties. 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 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 Ranking Member of the Commerce Committee and a member of Armed Services, but he is anything but a member of the Senate club; his crusades for campaign finance regulation and against pork-barrel spending have provided plenty of material for his self-deprecating jokes about how unpopular he is with many colleagues. On several highly visible issues, he has taken stands opposed by almost all Republicans and backed by almost all Democrats--on campaign finance for several years, on tobacco legislation in 1999, on HMO regulation in 2000. He brings to his work a sense of righteousness and a conviction that what have become the normal workings of the political process--campaign contributions, backing local projects--are deeply corrupt. He has worked on difficult and complex legislation but has had, as he concedes, less than complete success in his efforts.

In his first years in the Senate he had a low profile. His first major issue was one on which he had great expertise: Vietnam. In the early 1990s McCain worked hard with Massachusetts' 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 our former enemies has not dimmed his memories of how his captors treated his fellow prisoners of war. 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 was extremely vocal on Kosovo, pushing Clinton to either press for victory or get out; in May 1999 the Senate shelved McCain's proposal to authorize "all necessary force" including ground forces.

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 sympathy for them. "Never deceive them," he says. "They have been deceived too many times in the last 200 years." Generally, McCain 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. He backed limited changes in the law that allows tribes to control the adoptions even of children born off the reservation with low percentages of Indian blood.

McCain was a pilot in the Navy, and on the Commerce Committee he has worked on aviation issues. He authored the law banning small airplanes from flying over the Grand Canyon. He has long pushed for nonstop flights from Washington Reagan National Airport to Phoenix's Sky Harbor, and sponsored the law opening up slots at Reagan National, Chicago's O'Hare and New York's Kennedy and LaGuardia airports. In 1999 he held hearings on complaints against the airlines, and proposed an Airline Passenger Fairness Act, which would require disclosure of overbooked planes and flight delays. But when the airlines announced new policies, he switched to a bill emphasizing voluntary compliance. He took little part in shaping the compromise Telecommunications Act of 1996, and voted against it, arguing that it did not effectively ensure competition; he called for an auction, not a giveaway, of the digital TV spectrum to networks. When he became chairman of Commerce 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; in September 2000 he held hearings on the marketing of violent movies, music and video games to children, which studio heads ducked but at which Joseph Lieberman and Lynne Cheney testified. McCain sponsored the Internet Tax Freedom Act and has sought its renewal. He sponsored an Internet privacy act, to require websites to disclose their privacy policies and limit disclosure of data to third parties unless it is related to products or services on the site. He was the chief sponsor of the Muhammad Ali Act, to protect boxers, and wants to ban gambling on amateur sports in Nevada--which he believes would prevent newspapers from reporting the point spread on college football and basketball games.

The tobacco issue was thrust on McCain as Commerce chairman: Majority Leader Trent 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--opponents said it was higher. At first the bill 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, argued that the McCain bill did not protect them against lawsuits as that settlement did; when the Finance Committee raised the tax to $1.50, the companies 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, 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.

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 Arizona 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 re-election 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 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 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. 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 obvious 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. Robert Bennett of Utah chimed in and demanded to know what soft money had been responsible for his own amendment, criticized by McCain as pork, to build sewers for the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. 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.

By that time McCain was already embarked on his presidential campaign. He wisely 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 talked about defense and foreign policy issues--the only candidate to do so much--and invariably called for campaign finance reform. On the 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 politicians. Only four fellow senators endorsed him (Jon Kyl, Chuck Hagel, Fred Thompson and Mike DeWine) and Arizona Governor 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. George W. Bush predicted victory in New Hampshire, but on February 1 McCain beat him by an impressive 49%-31% margin, and suddenly 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 down to South Carolina, whose early primary had been invented by the late Lee Atwater for the older George Bush in 1988, and where both the Republican establishment and Christian conservatives supported George W. Bush in 2000. There the campaigning got negative. McCain ran an ad saying Bush "twists the truth like Clinton"; a Bush ad said that McCain "will say one thing and then do another." After a tearful woman at one McCain appearance told how her son was crushed by a negative phone message about McCain, McCain promised to cut all negative ads. That may have hurt him, 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 February 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 February 22 McCain won in Arizona and, in a big 50%-43% upset, in Michigan; but Michigan has no party registration, and 20% of Republican primary voters there were Democrats (most of them as hostile toward Governor John Engler (who backed Bush) as most Republicans are to Bill Clinton) and 30% were independents--much higher figures than in any other state.

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 an interesting 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 reports. But to many Christian conservatives, a large segment of the Republican primary vote, it sounded like angry hostility, and McCain lost in Virginia and Washington on February 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, and 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. Reporters speculated that he might run again in 2004 or 2008. But the campaign was clearly a moving and unique experience for him: "I would never do this again. I think it's fun once. I don't see how it's fun twice."

Some defeated presidential candidates sulk in their tents; McCain became more legislatively active than ever. In May he sponsored the law putting Section 527 organizations under the campaign finance acts. With Bill Frist he sponsored a bill to discourage teen smoking. He voted with the Democrats in July on HMO regulation and worked with Democrat John Edwards to craft a bipartisan bill, unsuccessfully. With Charles Schumer, he sponsored a bill to make it easier to produce generic drugs. He tried in October, after the Firestone tire revelations, to impose criminal penalties on manufacturers who knowingly market defective products. He was the only Republican to vote against the water projects bill in October, charging that it contained $1.2 billion of special projects earmarked for districts. He campaigned tirelessly for Republican House candidates, and tried, with some success, to get them to support his campaign finance bill. He appeared in ads in Colorado and Oregon for ballot propositions requiring background checks for sales at gun shows.

In March 2001, the Senate again took up campaign finance reform. After two weeks of remarkably 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 and Dianne Feinstein 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 fear will be struck down by the courts as an unconstitutional ban of free speech. Just prior to the final vote, McCain saluted his nemesis on the issue, Mitch McConnell, who afterward acknowledged that the outcome was "a tribute to [McCain's] tenacity." McCain also appeared to make amends with Chuck Hagel, a fellow Vietnam veteran and his closest friend in the Senate, who had offered a losing amendment during debate to limit, instead of ban, soft money.

McCain may have irritated some Arizona Republican politicians, but his standing with the state's voters is very strong. He won the Senate seat in 1986 by 60%-40%. In 1992 he was re-elected 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 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 this 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."

Group Ratings
	ADA	ACLU	AFS	LCV	CON	ITIC	NTU	COC	ACU	NTLC	CHC
2000	5	0	16	0	98	90	82	75	81	94	91
1999	5	--	0	11	97	--	87	75	77	--	--

National Journal Ratings
	1999 LIB	--	1999 CONS		2000 LIB	--	2000 CONS
Economic	18%	--	81%		47%	--	52%
Social	33%	--	66%		32%	--	67%
Foreign	44%	--	54%		34%	--	64%

Key Votes of the 106th Congress
1. Educ. Savings Accts. * 2. Prescrip. Drug Benefit N 3. Delay Ergonomic Standards Y 4. Phase Out Estate Tax Y 5. Review Movie Violence Y 6. Gun Show Bckgrnd. Checks N		7. Ban Part.-Birth Abortion Y  8. Broaden Hate Crimes List N  9. NATO War in Serbia Y 10. Table Cuba Travel Ban Y 11. Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty N 12. Perm. Trade with China Y

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