DATE THE MAVERICK, MARRY THE GROWN-UP:

Prisoner of Conscience: Given his popular status as a maverick war hero, John McCain has a good shot at winning the 2008 presidential election—if he can get his party to nominate him. But one minute he's toeing the conservative line (on gay marriage, say, or immigration) and the next he's telling someone what he really thinks. (Todd S. Purdum, February 2007, Vanity Fair)

In a thousand and one ways, John McCain remains irresistible—to anyone who ever screwed up in school, fell short of expectations, blew his stack, or gave his all to a losing cause. He is a born rebel, who once confessed that he had spent the bulk of his time at the Naval Academy "being made an example of, marching many miles of extra duty for poor grades, tardiness, messy quarters, slovenly appearance, sarcasm, and multiple other violations of Academy standards." In his third year at Annapolis, he was so fed up he considered joining the French Foreign Legion, until, he said, he realized it required an enlistment of eight years. In prison in North Vietnam, where he spent more than five years after being shot down in 1967, he led a social-studies class for fellow inmates based on the subject he has always loved best—"The History of the World from the Beginning"—in an exercise to keep their sanity.

In an age of pre-fab, blow-dried, plasticized politicians, McCain remains palpably, pungently human. I saw him up close at intervals over a period of many weeks of campaigning last fall, often with almost unlimited access, and his preferred means of controlling his image is by abandoning all the typical modern efforts at control. He is the kind of person who comes alone, without a single aide or handler, to a dinner with a dozen New York Times editors and reporters, and tells stories of the long-ago days in flight school in Pensacola when he dated an exotic dancer known as "Marie, the Flame of Florida." He unself-consciously nurses a vodka Gibson on the rocks in an age when Diet Coke is the safer choice.

In mixed company, he does not shrink from a good "goddamn" or two, and in male company, considerably coarser discourse comes easily to his lips (cocky jet jockey that he once was). He is a man of strong opinions, strongly expressed. "Most current fiction bores the s[**]t out of me," he says in a small plane somewhere over New England. In front of an audience of Republican worthies in Appleton, Wisconsin, he calls the leader of North Korea a "pip-squeak in platform shoes," and in seconding my view that Islamabad has limited charms, he volunteers that the Pakistani capital "sucks." At a nascar race in New Hampshire, he introduces Bobby Allison, "the greatest driver in the history of racing," to one of the journalists following him that day, declaring, "This is Adam Nagourney, New York Times. They're a Communist paper, but he's O.K." He introduces his friend Senator John Sununu, of New Hampshire, son of the famously bumptious former White House chief of staff, to a group of supporters by saying, "You can be very proud of him, and thank God he inherited his mother's temperament." To a gathering of businessmen he says, "I want to keep health-care costs down until I get sick, and then I don't give a goddamn," and to a group of college kids waiting to have their pictures taken with him, he growls good-naturedly, "All right, you little jerks!" On a charter jet above Iowa, he reads aloud a headline from USA Today: actor [wesley] snipes faces indictment on tax fraud charges, then mutters, "All our childhood heroes—shattered!"

Moments like these help explain why the constituency that McCain sometimes jokingly refers to as his base—the press—has not already tried to derail him by highlighting the politically expedient positioning that would be regarded as standard procedure for most elected officials but seems somehow so much worse in a man with such self-defined high standards. Together with Mark Salter, McCain has built a franchise of best-selling books out of his reputation for personal and public integrity. They bear titles such as Faith of My Fathers, Why Courage Matters, and Character Is Destiny, and make John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage look like a mere Hallmark card. Yet another McCain book—this one on decision-making—is due out next fall, just as the campaign is likely to heat up in earnest.

But the plain truth is that the Straight Talk Express, Version 2.008, is often a far cry from the Magic Bus of 2000.

"Let me give you a little straight talk," McCain tells the crowd at a house-party fund-raiser in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, for Senator John Thune, the Christian conservative and self-styled "servant leader" who defeated the Senate's Democratic leader, Tom Daschle, in 2004. The minute Thune was elected, McCain says, he became an important figure in the Republican Party and the Senate.

That's not straight talk. That's partisan pap. Nor, presumably, was it straight talk last summer at an Aspen Institute discussion when McCain struggled to articulate his position on the teaching of intelligent design in public schools. At first, according to two people who were present, McCain said he believed that intelligent design, which proponents portray as a more intellectually respectable version of biblical creationism, should be taught in science classes. But then, in the face of intense skepticism from his listeners, he kept modifying his views—going into reverse evolution.

"Yes, he's a social conservative, but his heart isn't in this stuff," one former aide told me, referring to McCain's instinctual unwillingness to impose on others his personal views about issues such as religion, sexuality, and abortion. "But he has to pretend [that it is], and he's not a good enough actor to pull it off. He just can't fake it well enough."

When it comes to the rough-and-tumble of practical politics, as opposed to battles over political principle, McCain's apparent compromises are just as striking. Six years ago, McCain was livid when Sam and Charles Wyly, a pair of Texas businessmen friendly with the Bush campaign, spent $2.5 million on a nominally independent advertising effort attacking McCain. He called them "Wyly coyotes," and implored an audience in Boston to "tell them to keep their dirty money in the state of Texas." This time, McCain accepted money from the Wylys. The Wylys gave McCain's Straight Talk America political-action committee at least $20,000, and together with other family members and friends they chaired a Dallas fund-raiser for the pac. (The Wyly money was later returned because the brothers have become the subject of a federal investigation.) In 2000, McCain denounced the Reverend Jerry Falwell—and others like him—as "agents of intolerance." Last spring McCain gave the commencement address at Falwell's Liberty University.

Two years ago, McCain was unsparing in his criticism of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, who slimed his friend and fellow Vietnam veteran John Kerry. Kerry felt close enough to McCain at the time to make multiple and serious inquiries about McCain's interest in running for vice president on a national-unity ticket (and McCain basked in the courtship, even if he knew nothing could ever come of it). So the alacrity with which McCain joined in demanding an apology from Kerry—whose "botched joke" last fall about George Bush's intellect came out as a slur against American troops in Iraq—was surprising, if not unseemly. Once upon a time, the two friends would have talked about the issue privately, and McCain might well have given Kerry his frank advice. As of mid-November, they had not spoken since McCain's statement condemning Kerry's "insensitive, ill-considered, and uninformed remarks"—which McCain once again read from a piece of paper, by the way. When I asked McCain if he thought Kerry was really trying to insult the troops, he answered only indirectly, and with some annoyance: "I accepted it when he said, 'I botched a joke,' O.K.?"

The battle between Bush and McCain in 2000 was bitter, with Bush supporters in South Carolina spreading rumors that McCain was insane and that he had fathered a black child. (McCain and his wife, Cindy, are the adoptive parents of a girl from Bangladesh.) Bush and McCain traded insults involving each other's moral standing. A year later, with bad feeling still so high that strategist John Weaver had been virtually blackballed from working in Republican politics, Weaver went so far as to sound out Democratic Senate leaders about the possibility of having McCain caucus with them. This would have put the Senate, then divided 50–50, into Democratic control. Aides to two senior Senate Democrats say it was never clear how serious McCain himself was about the proposal, and any possibility that it might actually happen was short-circuited when another Republican, James Jeffords, of Vermont, made the move first, in 2001.

That was then, when memories of the Bush camp's gruesome, dishonest attacks on McCain were still fresh. When I asked McCain how a rapprochement with Bush could ever have been achieved, he began by saying, "For 10 days I wallowed," then made it clear that the best balm was his realization that the campaign had raised his stature. "We came out of the campaign, even though losing, enhanced nationally, with a lot of opportunities in the Senate legislatively, with more influence, and eventually, if necessary, to be able to go at it again." Whatever the psychic or political specifics, the ultimate result was the celebrated McCain-Bush campaign hug of 2004, in which McCain found himself enveloped in a back-wrapping embrace and upside-the-head smooch. Since that moment McCain has borrowed from the Bush political playbook, aiming to make himself the prohibitive front-runner for the 2008 primaries, and happily snapping up former Bush aides and supporters from key states such as Iowa and New Hampshire, including Terry Nelson, an Iowan and political director of the 2004 Bush campaign. Nelson, now a private consultant in Washington, approved the most widely condemned negative ad of the 2006 midterms, produced by a quasi-independent group financed by the Republican National Committee and aimed at the black Democratic Senate candidate in Tennessee, Harold Ford Jr. In the ad, a sultry white actress says she had once met Mr. Ford at a "Playboy party," then cradles her outstretched thumb and little finger to her ear and coos, "Harold, call me." After the ad sparked an uproar it was taken off the air. Given the racially charged campaign of innuendo deployed against McCain by Bush supporters six years ago, and McCain's outrage at such tactics, the McCain camp's failure to condemn Nelson or the ad struck many as surprising. All John Weaver managed to say at the time was "We're pleased the ad has been pulled down." Nelson is set to manage McCain's '08 campaign.

Wait'll folks like Mr. Purdum see what the Senator does to the Mayor.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 5, 2007 5:50 PM