Profile courtesy of
Sen. John McCain (R) Elected 1986, 4th term up 2010
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)
Elected Office:	U.S. House of Reps., 1982-1986.
Military Career:	Navy, 1958-80. (Vietnam)
Professional Career:	Dir., Navy Senate Liaison Ofc., 1977-81.
DC Office	241 RSOB20510, 202-224-2235; Fax: 202-228-2862; Web site: mccain.senate.gov
State Offices	Phoenix, 602-952-2410; Tempe, 480-897-6289; Tucson, 520-670-6334
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Arizona: Senior Senator

Sen. John McCain (R)

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 considerable expertise: Vietnam. In the early 1990s McCain worked hard 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 our 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, and he obviously has a distaste for the political deal-making and log-rolling that is so common. It appears to be his view that members of Congress, like members of the military, should serve the national interest honorably and without reference to political considerations. He has a distaste for what he considers pork barrel spending, and sometimes tries to halt passage of what he considers pork-laden bills; that provides him plenty of material for his self-deprecating jokes about how unpopular he is with many colleagues. On the big issue before Commerce in the 1990s, telecommunications, he took little part in shaping the 1996 legislation and voted against it, arguing that it did not effectively ensure competition. "The whole Telecommunications Act was a disaster," he said in November 2002.

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.

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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 Trent 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; 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 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, 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.

On other issues, McCain voted with the Democrats in July 2001 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. 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. 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 took strong stands with George W. Bush and most Republicans on some issues--the nomination of his tobacco bill adversary John Ashcroft, 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 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; McCain's attempts to get Lott to appoint Rudman failed. 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 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 Joseph Lieberman to reduce carbon dioxide emissions; it got 43 votes on the floor of the Senate in 2003. In March 2004 he threatened to hold hearings on steroid use in baseball, and in December he said that he would file legislation in January to limit steroid use unless the baseball team owners and players' union agreed to do so. 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 questioned the fallback from Fallujah in April 2004. 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 Rumsfeld but did not call on him to resign--an ominous note in that McCain is in line to become chairman of the committee in January 2007. He pushed for adoption of the 9/11 Commission's recommendations for changes in the intelligence community, but failed in October to get appropriations power for the Intelligence Committee. He 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 and between the federal government over water rights. It allocated 47% of the state's Colorado River water to Indian tribes, notably the Gila River Indian Community and the Tohono O'odham Nation, who could lease it to cities in Arizona. This was the most far-reaching Indian water settlement in history. 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."

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 John 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." And he took a swipe at the "disingenuous filmmaker" Michael Moore, who was then sitting in the press section, to the delight of the delegates.

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. On immigration--a raging issue in Arizona--McCain said, "The truth is, border enforcement alone does not work." With Congressman 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 Jon 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. One week after the election McCain went to the White House to work with Bush on a guest worker bill for 2005. And he supported him on Social Security and tax changes as well.

Will McCain run for president in 2008? In May 2004 he said, "This is all so transient. It could all end tomorrow. My philosophy is to just go, go like hell. Like Teddy Roosevelt did it. Full bore." In November 2004 he told the Manchester Union Leader, "I'm not ruling it out, but I'm not ruling it in." McCain has obvious strengths as a presidential candidate, and some weaknesses. He is widely respected and has relatively few detractors, though some of them are in his own party; on many issues he is in line with culturally conservative Republicans, but those are not the issues he likes to emphasize or on which he shows the greatest fervor; his appeal to Independents and Democrats is undoubtedly greater than George W. Bush's, and his popularity with the press is very much greater, but those things may change if and when he clinches the Republican nomination. He will turn 72 in August 2008, a year younger than Ronald Reagan was when he was reelected in 1984; he continues to maintain a very active, indeed hyperkinetic, schedule. He might be entitled to argue that voters shouldn't count the five and a half years he spent in Hanoi. McCain could turn out to be a much less polarizing candidate in a general election than either Bush or Bill Clinton; in 2004, he said, "In all candor, I really don't think the country is polarized at all. We've got to stop polarizing ourselves in Washington in a vain attempt to polarize the nation." But he could be polarizing for some in the Republican primaries.

McCain's appeal in general elections, and the irritation he evokes in some conservatives, have 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 the 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 reelected 77%-21%, while Bush was carrying the state 55%-44%.

Committees

• Armed Services: Airland (Chmn.); Personnel; Readiness & Management Support; Seapower.
• Commerce, Science & Transportation: Aviation; Global Climate Change & Impacts; Surface Transportation & Merchant Marine; Trade, Tourism & Economic Development.
• Indian Affairs (Chmn.).

Group Ratings (More Info)
	ADA	ACLU	AFS	LCV	ITIC	NTU	COC	ACU	NTLC	CHC
2004	35	22	29	67	100	77	67	72	80	83	--
2003	35	--	22	53	--	72	61	75	--	--	--

National Journal Ratings (More Info)
	2003 LIB	--	2003 CONS		2004 LIB	--	2004 CONS
Economic	50%	--	49%		49%	--	48%
Social	0%	--	59%		44%	--	55%
Foreign	39%	--	54%		49%	--	49%
For National Journal's complete 2004 Vote Ratings, as well as previous ratings dating back to 1995, please click here.

Key Votes Of The 108th Congress (More Info)
1. Ban Drilling in ANWR Y 2. Approve Bush Tax Cuts N 3. Medicare/Rx Bill N 4. Bar Overtime Pay Regs. N 5. Energy Bill N 6. Support Roe v. Wade N		7. Ban Partial-Birth Abortion Y  8. Assault Weapons Ban N  9. Ban Same-Sex Marriage N 10. Ban Bunker-Buster Bomb N 11. Fund Iraq War Y 12. Restrict Missile Defense N

Election Results (More Info)
	Candidate	Total Votes	Percent	Expenditures
2004 general	John McCain (R)	1,505,372	77%	$2,140,807
	Stuart Starky (D)	404,507	21%	$12,716
	Other	51,798	3%
2004 primary	John McCain (R)	unopposed
1998 general	John McCain (R)	696,577	69%	$2,461,900
	Ed Ranger (D)	275,224	27%	$371,439
	Other	41,479	4%
Prior winning percentages: 1992 (56%); 1986 (60%); 1984 House (78%); 1982 House (66%)