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Arizona: Senior Senator Sen. John McCain (R) Last Updated July 8, 2003
For many Americans John McCain is the closest thing our politics has to a national hero, a presidential candidate widely admired in 2000 and an independent leader of great force in the years after. 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. 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 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. He strongly supported George W. 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. After North Korea declared it had nuclear weapons in October 2002 he opposed negotiations and warned, "There is scant moral refuge for those accommodationists who believe even today that we can concede our way out of the crisis." McCain has been chairman or ranking minority member of the Commerce Committee since 1997. 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. 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. He tends to favor deregulation. 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 supports free airtime for political candidates--anathema to the networks--and broadband access for rural areas. He supported FCC Chairman Michael Powell's policy of removing limits on media ownership, but has been critical of cable TV rate increases. When Republicans regained their majority in November 2002, he said, "The whole Telecommunications Act was a disaster. Everybody realizes it. We need to review that." A pilot in the Navy, McCain has worked on aviation issues. He authored the law banning small airplanes from flying over the Grand Canyon. 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. "They have been deceived too many times in the last 200 years," he says. Generally, McCain has supported the tribal agenda. The issue McCain is most closely identified with 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 he had done nothing for Keating; as the one Republican involved, he thus made the scandal bipartisan. Ultimately 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 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 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 died. 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. 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. After his presidential campaign, McCain returned to the closely divided Senate determined to pass his campaign finance bill. In January 2001 he threatened to tie up the Senate unless Lott set aside two weeks of debate on the issue. In March 2001, 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. 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. (In May 2003 a three-judge federal court, deeply divided, issued 1,700 pages of opinions and upheld some of the provisions but not others). But McCain didn't rest on his victory. He was furious that the Bush administration didn't appoint a Democrat designated by Tom Daschle 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; one was to define the word "solicitation" as "ask" rather than as "request, suggest or recommend." In June he threatened to block all nominations until Bush made the appointment, but some nominations were approved anyway in August. 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 December the appointment had not yet been made and McCain was furious; finally, in March 2003, the appointment was made. In 1999, McCain 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 was asked to autograph hundreds of copies of Faith of My Fathers. He talked about defense and foreign policy issues--the only candidate to do so much--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 politicians. Only four fellow senators endorsed him (Jon Kyl, Chuck Hagel, Fred Thompson and Mike DeWine). Back home, 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. Bush predicted victory in New Hampshire, but on February 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 down to South Carolina, where both the Republican establishment and Christian conservatives supported George W. 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 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. 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; 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; 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 increasingly likely to ally himself with Democrats and oppose most Republicans, as he had on campaign finance and the tobacco bill. He voted with the Democrats in July on HMO regulation. 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 appeared in ads in Colorado and Oregon for ballot propositions requiring background checks for sales at gun shows. But he also campaigned tirelessly for Republican House candidates and tried, with some success, to get them to support his campaign finance bill. In 2002, after campaign finance regulation passed the Senate, he worked with many Democrats again. He, John Edwards and Edward Kennedy sponsored an HMO regulation bill. He supported embryonic stem-cell research. In January 2003 he and Joe Lieberman sponsored a bill to require power plants and factories to reduce carbon dioxide and other emissions. With John Kerry he proposed CAFE 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 Tom 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 he did take strong stands with George W. Bush and most Republicans on some issues--the nomination of his tobacco adversary John Ashcroft, repeal of ergonomics regulations, the May 2001 budget resolution, and allowing Mexican trucks into the United States. He took a serious part in legislation after September 11. He called for the government to run airline security and he co-sponsored a bill with Ernest Hollings 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 September 11, a proposal opposed for months by the Bush administration, and said that former Senators Gary Hart and Warren Rudman 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 get a veto over Trent Lott's appointees to the commission; but McCain's attempts to get Lott to appoint Rudman failed. In September he appeared with 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. 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. McCain has irritated some Arizona Republican politicians and some conservative activists, but his standing with the state's voters has been very strong. He won the Senate seat in 1986 by 60%-40%. In 1992, after the Keating Five investigation, he was re-elected 56%-32%. In 1998 McCain won by an impressive 69%-27%, carrying the heavily Navajo and Democratic Apache County 54%-42% and winning the Hispanic vote 52%-42%. McCain's seat comes up in 2004, when he turns 68. In 2001 some Arizona conservatives tried to get 349,000 registered voters' signatures to petition for a recall, but a vote would not have been binding and the drive fizzled out. In late 2002 and early 2003 the Club for Growth was encouraging Representative Jeff Flake to challenge McCain in the Republican primary; Flake confirmed he was considering running. But registered Republicans are a broader segment of the electorate in most states, and it was not at all clear that any politician with a reputation would dare to take on McCain. Nor is it clear whether a prominent Democrat would. If McCain does not run, possible candidates include former congressman and nearly successful 2002 governor candidate Matt Salmon and just about any of the state's six Republican congressmen. Will McCain run? "Most likely," he told National Journal in February 2003. Will he run for president again? In Worth the Fighting For he wrote, "I did not get to be President of the United States. And I doubt I shall have reason or opportunity to try again … I could leave [Congress] now satisfied that I have accomplished enough things that I believe are useful to the country to compensate for the disappointment of my mistakes." This has the same elegiac sound of the last words of his 2000 National Convention speech. At the least it seems highly unlikely that in the middle of a war on terrorism he would run against a commander-in-chief whose conduct of that war he, at this writing, strongly approves. But run or not, Citizen McCain (the title of Elizabeth Drew's admiring book) remains an important figure in American life.
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