THE MEDIA'S FAVORITE REPUBLICAN
FERGUSON, ANDREW
THE MEDIA'S FAVORITE REPUBLICAN By Andrew Ferguson The United States Senate in its infinite wisdom I effectively killed federal tobacco legislation late A- on the afternoon of Wednesday, June 17,...
...The ensuing firestorm burned for 36 hours and killed 134 men...
...You're safe with me...
...When I mentioned McCain to a fellow who works in a think tank in Washington, a highly principled, deeply committed, thoroughly incorruptible conservative, he scoffed...
...This, too, is typical McCain, as typical as the candor and barbed comments he's celebrated for...
...McCain was traveling to Louisiana for a political trip—a fund-raising lunch in New Orleans for his Senate reelection campaign, and then a fund-raising dinner in Baton Rouge for the state Republican party...
...It sounds self-serving...
...John McCain of Arizona, was sitting in his office, looking happy...
...You're making up for lost time...
...He can sling it with the best of them...
...I didn't ask for this job...
...Do you want to go home...
...Sebastian...
...The changes in the country, and in us, were so dramatic...
...My view is that in the case of the military, the 'don't ask, don't tell' policy was appropriate...
...Here's the real complication in McCain's public persona, and it is more often than not obscured in the press's obsession with his status as a maverick and a hero...
...And I remembered a line from the Esquire article about McCain: "He has gathered almost by accident a national constituency to whom politics seems almost beside the point, injurious, and nearly an affront...
...At the same time, I don't believe that we should discriminate against anyone, and that includes because of their sexual orientation...
...He was very smart and he moved very quickly...
...But he could run for Congress right away...
...I asked about his preferences among the various flat-tax proposals...
...His spunk and determination win accolades across the political spectrum...
...McCain is a charming man, genuinely friendly, witty, and self-deprecating, showing neither the false bonhomie nor the Olympian vanity that politicians generally, and United States senators especially, employ in dealing with the press...
...For a lot of people, the Senate is 99 bozos and this guy...
...He has a very serious issue with his family," says Jay Smith, a political consultant who has worked with McCain since 1982...
...After twelve years in the Senate, few major pieces of legislation have borne McCain's name, and those that have, like the tobacco and campaign-finance bills, have been conspicuous failures...
...Look, it's something that happened in my life...
...We could get the best and listen to them...
...You have to do what you think is right," he often tells reporters...
...He is as close to a normal human being as a reporter has a right to expect any politician to be...
...But it was there, as it always is, in the way he approached the podium, with his arms slightly akimbo from where they were broken 31 years ago...
...About prison, and the Forrestal and all that...
...Medicare reform...
...It is impossible to underestimate the gratitude this generates in the hearts of reporters, who spend most of their professional lives on the phone making fruitless requests for interviews with important strangers who would rather attend an autopsy than talk to the press...
...This was the first delivery of what will become his campaign stump speech if he runs for president, and it was beautifully written and almost meticulously unspecific—thematic, in speech-writer terminology...
...Oh, there's a lot of things we could do," he said...
...But the suspicion seems by now ineradicable...
...A charming, likable, heroic Perot...
...The McCain-Feingold campaign-finance bill is based on a similar faith in the blunderbuss application of federal power...
...When the Forrestal made it back to port, McCain immediately volunteered for duty on the carrier Oriskany, also in the South China Sea, and four months later he was in the Hanoi Hilton...
...It is widely acknowledged that he wants to run for president in 2000, and already national political reporters are lost in love...
...Friend," McCain answered, "if I was going to die in a plane it would have happened before now...
...The "mainstream" press, after all, generally swoons elsewhere than at the feet of conservative Republicans...
...Though a former Navy pilot, for example, he has pushed relentlessly for the closing of obsolete military bases and fought to scuttle both the B-2 bomber and the Sea Wolf submarine...
...No one around McCain doubts he wants to run for president, but opinions vary widely as to whether he'll do it...
...So they beat him, starved him, hung him by his broken arms—because he wouldn't let them let him go...
...Hola Papa Mia...
...I think this happens to John McCain a lot...
...He had narrowly escaped death already, as Timberg writes, on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier Forrestal in the South China Sea, when a misfired Zuni rocket tore into the fuel tank of his A-4E Skyhawk...
...The experts are unanimous that that's not the way to go...
...So why, given the possible strain on his family, would he want to run for president...
...Of course they're for it...
...Are you ready to confess your crimes...
...It was a letter from his daughter at Spanish camp...
...Ten guards were standing by, including [the guard nicknamed] the Prick...
...This is what's important...
...Washington's professional conservatives, of course, have been rather less pleased with McCain...
...There's a pretty high divorce rate in our group," says Swindle...
...Every living surgeon general, Dr...
...Independent, nonideo-logical, with a limitless faith in expertise and a personal background that not only transcends politics but makes it look puny and mean by comparison: McCain is a thinking man's Perot, if such a thing is possible...
...As the car neared Baton Rouge, where McCain was to give a speech to Louisiana Republicans, I asked him about his domestic initiatives...
...Well, there's a three-year residency requirement for state legislators...
...A week later he was braced in a stark room before Slopehead, the camp commander...
...Why are you so disrespectful of guards...
...When I asked him about the possibility of women's fighting in ground combat, he replied, "I just have to defer to Colin Powell, Norman Schwarzkopf, the Joint Chiefs...
...She's not a political person...
...He shrugged, still smiling...
...The thing you have to understand is, this thing was thrust upon me...
...You see what I mean...
...People who know McCain well find this scenario absurd—or, as his old friend Orson Swindle, now a member of the Federal Trade Commission, puts it: "Utter bulls...
...Modernization...
...This strikes many reporters as anomalous, since they mistakenly believe that military men like warfare, just as they mistakenly believe that businessmen like the free market...
...The McCain Swoon is not merely personal, of course...
...McCain calls himself a "deregulator," and his tenure as chairman of the Commerce Committee largely bears him out...
...Yeah," he said...
...It's hard to see how such a statement would "get him in trouble," since no one, I'll bet, would be able to figure it out...
...Most people do...
...Amid laughter and muttered oaths, he was slammed from one guard to another, bounced from wall to wall, knocked down, kicked, dragged to his feet, knocked back down, punched again and again in the face...
...The ropes came next...
...The other morning at National Airport, waiting to board a plane for a trip to New Orleans, McCain was approached by a scruffy young man with a shoulder bag...
...Even so, I said, you spent three months on it...
...McCain didn't mention his war experience, of course...
...Back at the hotel I had a final few minutes with McCain...
...More recently, though, and much more famously, he has identified himself with two pieces of legislation that together would rival ClintonCare in their expansion of federal authority over previously unregulated areas of American life...
...And I said, 'Aye-aye, sir.' And we got it through on a 19 to 1 vote...
...It's a reform agenda," he said...
...You end up with a combination of tenacity and independence and arrogance...
...McCain spent several months in the hospital after his release from prison in 1973, and then became a squadron commander in Jacksonville, Florida, training pilots...
...It was an incredible chasm to try to cross...
...And they'd say, 'Look guys, this damn foolishness of transferring technology to people like Pakistan has got to stop and it's got to stop now...
...But I can't tell you how badly I want to be remembered as a good sena-tor—the guy who got the line-item veto—and not as a guy who was in prison...
...Because I know how it sounds," he said...
...Kept the process moving forward...
...McCain says he is critical of the president's waffling foreign policy, particularly in China, but it is difficult to get him to say what, precisely, he'd do differently as president...
...Just the other day they brought me a fund-raising letter they'd written for me and the opening was something like, 'I remember the nightmare of Vietnam . . .' "I said, 'Sweet Jesus, you can't use this.' I will never do this...
...Oh yeah," he says...
...Line-item veto," he said immediately, and then lapsed into silence...
...It would require a kind of perversity not to like him or enjoy his company...
...And: "one of those rare political gems...
...All of us are in a hurry, especially then," says Swindle...
...We'd have to sort them out through a process of examination, discussion, and debate...
...severely restricted an individual's right to contribute to out-of-state politicians...
...But the truth is, in most matters, he's a thoroughly conventional politician—vague, hesitant, risk-averse...
...I can't tell you how intense the pressure is to use all that stuff...
...Readiness," he said at last...
...In the wider world," Charles Pierce wrote in Esquire, "he's come to stand for something completely different—an effective politics of public conscience...
...But nothing happened...
...This kind of ideological complication is catnip to Washington reporters, none of whom smokes and most of whom believe that financial contributions are the great corrupting influence in American politics...
...If the American people thought we were serious about cleaning up the tax code, then we'd get a lot of expert advice...
...He shrugged, hands in the air...
...The weirdest provision would have penalized the industry unless consumption of its products declined over the next decade...
...His staff may call him a populist...
...Senator McCain, I can't imagine you want to get on a plane after what you've been through," the man said...
...Look," he said, impatiently, "let's go off the record for a second...
...And you act like you just got back from the beach...
...When I think about it, I guess the place I've lived the longest was Hanoi...
...Even if I don't want to talk about your issue, I'll return your call, and I'll tell you I don't want to talk about it...
...Candor, in that they know I'll tell them what I think...
...It was the most powerful response I've ever heard to a political charge...
...McCain explained to his opponent, and to voters, that with a father in the Navy he had always moved around a lot...
...Candor and accessibility," he says...
...I've got a wonderful wife and beautiful kids...
...And I hate to talk about it...
...He and Cindy moved to Phoenix the next year...
...Every living surgeon general," he repeated coldly, "Koop, Kessler, the AMA . . ." It is a trope we've heard before in politics, and as we pulled into Baton Rouge I suddenly remembered whom I'd heard it from...
...Would he increase defense spending anywhere...
...There he met Orson Swindle, who today sees in McCain an exemplar of the POW experience—my words, not his...
...As long ago as 1986, when McCain was first elected to the Senate after two terms in the House, R.W...
...In the late '80s, he led the repeal of President Reagan's catastrophic-health-insurance bill—a position that foreshadowed his early opposition to President Clinton's proposal to nationalize health care...
...He thought for a moment...
...Sometimes it is rich, gorgeous...
...In fact, it is impossible to discern a coherent set of principles that might explain the contradictory positions McCain has taken...
...And national-security issues...
...When the beating was over, he lay on the floor, bloody, arms and legs throbbing, ribs cracked, several teeth broken off at the gumline...
...See what I mean...
...This is of great concern to her," he said...
...Most of us started off pretty cocky anyway...
...No preferences, really," he said...
...See what I mean...
...asked Slopehead...
...Okay: You read Tim-berg's book...
...Koop, Dr...
...His heroism is the thing that people know about him, when they know anything about him at all...
...The leadership came to me and said, McCain, get a bill through committee, and do it with bipartisan support...
...That was the end of it," John Kolbe recalls...
...To give us, and our children, a more peaceful world," he said...
...McCain himself offers a straightforward explanation for why reporters treat him so well...
...Our wives and families went through hell...
...There are a lot of weapons we could have to modernize our force, but nobody knows how to pay for them...
...Now, McCain, it will be very bad for you...
...The tobacco legislation fashioned by McCain's committee was a classic bill of attainder...
...I'd have Brzezinski, Jim Baker, Scowcroft, Tom Pickering, Kissinger, Warren Christopher—and I'm sure others...
...We lost...
...Whether this is cynicism, I don't know—I tend to doubt it—but it sure works, on reporters and on everyone else, too...
...So why do you seem so happy...
...I didn't like it...
...So we'll end where we began, with John McCain explaining his good cheer...
...The Prick gleefully led the charge as the guards, at Slopehead's command, drove fists and knees and boots into McCain...
...McCain's standing as an orthodox Republican is secure—conservative organizations that measure such things, and are ever alert to signs of deviationism, routinely score his voting record in the eighties and nineties, and he receives correspondingly low rankings from liberal groups...
...He seems, even more than most practical politicians, to move on instinct...
...No...
...What we do is, we get the best minds," Ross Perot used to say, "we lift up the hood and we go to work and fix it...
...By then the Navy had transferred him to Washington, where he worked as naval liaison in the Senate...
...It was also, so far as I can tell, one of the few occasions when McCain has made explicit use of his POW experience for political advantage...
...And if the entire Washington press corps collapses in praise and admiration, well, then, so be it...
...If you just talk to them, and tell them what you really think, they appreciate it...
...We fought hard...
...The New York Times may call him a subversive...
...And the rest...
...A few days after we spoke, it was overturned by the Supreme Court...
...And a lot of couples didn't make it...
...Now I asked him why he'd gone off the record...
...By any rational measure, I shouldn't be alive right now...
...The McCain Swoon is one of the curiosities of American politics these days, and it's worth exploring for what it tells us about political opinion-making, and about McCain...
...These are his: "I don't know if he had these qualities before prison, the irreverence, the sense of humor...
...She lives in Phoenix with the kids"—the McCains have four, ranging in age from 13 to 6—"and she's busy with their schools and her volunteer work...
...You may not agree with me, but you can be assured that I will always do what I think is right...
...Sure, I'm disappointed," he said, "but I'm not distraught...
...A squish...
...it began...
...Reporters are so used to being spun," he says...
...And so on, and so on—it gets worse...
...And China, specifically—would he do anything different...
...I feel strongly that this bill was the best way to stop kids from smoking...
...This passage is from The Nightingale's Song, Robert Timberg's account of five Vietnam-era Annapolis graduates, including McCain, and it helps, as you read it, if you know one thing...
...made it illegal for issue-advocacy groups like the ACLU and the National Right to Life Committee to publish commentary on the voting records of federal office-seekers...
...And increases...
...One afternoon, during the tobacco floor fight, I pressed him on some of the bill's dubious assumptions...
...After that, everything's like a bonus...
...The people who come to him do so because they think they can find something they've lost...
...Accessibility—I'm going to return your phone calls...
...They speak darkly of a man in the grip of "Potomac fever," an ambitious pol turning his back on his allies as he cravenly seeks the approval of, gulp, the Washington Post editorial page...
...In the car there was a long pause...
...But he doesn't yield...
...Much of the prose is comically overheated...
...A Perot without the weirdness...
...He stared at me...
...Remember, up until recently, that was my main area of expertise...
...That was Perot's appeal, too...
...I've got a great job...
...I'm sure John gets pressured every day to do one thing or another...
...I remember wondering, Why doesn't he run for the state legislature...
...But those qualities are magnified in prison...
...He drew himself up in his seat, and spoke slowly so I would catch his every word...
...Now, campaign-finance reform—I'm passionate about that...
...But over the course of his political career he has gained a reputation for being ideologically complicated...
...You want to live life...
...Of course, if they have some cogent argument why they can't do what we expect of them, then we'll listen to their views...
...That may get me in trouble, but I don't believe that should be the case...
...She's paid for it and gotten on with her life...
...It would have targeted, and maybe bankrupted, a single legal industry with a boatload of fees, advertising restrictions, and unspecified federal regulations...
...It is a perilous thing, this act of faith in a faithless time—perilous for McCain, . . . and perilous for the people who have come to him, who must realize the constant risk that, sometimes, God turns out to be just a thunderstorm, and the gold just stones agleam in the sun...
...She is a reserved and dignified woman, uncomfortable in the public eye...
...I asked him about a McCain defense budget...
...A more maneuverable Army and Marine Corps...
...A lot of smart people...
...A lot of senators, if they don't want to talk about an issue, they won't return the calls...
...Privatizing all the depot work...
...Apple wrote in the New York Times that McCain was "now poised to emerge as a significant figure in national politics...
...In its various versions, for instance, it would have forced television stations to give free airtime to political candidates...
...asked Slopehead...
...The prose isn't always so crude...
...I'd send my best people over there first thing to talk privately...
...I mean, what are you going to do to us—throw us in jail...
...You just hit the ground like a sponge, wanting to absorb everything...
...And I also believe that gays should not be in the military, and I know that's a problem that a lot of people would have...
...You have a lot of guts, sir...
...Your name was wrapped around the bill and it just went down in flames...
...So was her husband...
...And the rules of the modern presidential campaign would probably require her to undergo any number of grotesque rituals of self-disclosure—an atonement interview with a soulful Barbara Walters, just for starters...
...When Navy pilot McCain was shot down over Hanoi in 1967 and made a prisoner of war, his father was commander of the U.S...
...When the lady in front of me rose at the end, she was crying...
...To create a more efficient and responsive government, a government that adheres to principle...
...he'd said that evening in his office, after the tobacco defeat...
...Bloody but unbowed, the brash McCain returned to the fray," wrote the left-wing columnist David Nyhan in the Boston Globe, apropos of something or other...
...He has been skeptical of the actual deployment of American power, from the disastrous Lebanon adventure in 1983 to Desert Storm...
...There are a lot of experts out there, you know...
...The McCain Swoon is now so conspicuous that NBC News, the Washington Post, and other news outlets have assigned reporters to do favorable stories explaining why the stories about John McCain are so favorable...
...I'd say, 'Look, let's figure out where we are, where we need to go, what our conceptual framework is...
...John McCain is a squish," he said...
...Pacific fleet, and the North Vietnamese offered to send the younger McCain home immediately—as a gesture of good will on their part, they said, and in reality a ploy to demoralize his fellow prisoners...
...Then McCain added, "The repeal of catastrophic care," which was in 1989...
...It gave me a certain desire for political pursuit," he says now...
...Here—" he grabbed a piece of colored notepaper from his desk...
...I read a lot about it, but it depends on who you read, because the assumptions are so different...
...He was right...
...and much, much else, all in the cause of "cleaning up politics...
...Right, right, I said...
...Then you spend five or six years not yielding, trying to keep to your principles and beliefs against this enormous pressure, and you build up an intensity that probably never leaves you...
...After all, they are an emerging world power...
...We lived all over the place," he said...
...Reading through the press clippings, you come across a man who's part Jimmy Stewart, part St...
...As a consequence, McCain has become the conservative that liberals love to love—a "maverick," it is said, who invariably stands on "principle...
...Kessler, every public-health organization, with hundreds of thousands of members— the American Medical Association, the American Cancer Society— every expert who's looked at this says this is the way to stop kids smoking...
...Here's one reason he should be happy, though he himself didn't mention it: John McCain gets the best press coverage of any politician in the country...
...He is given to statements like this one to Chris Matthews, when he was asked on CNBC's Hardball about Trent Lott's assertion that homosexuality was a sin...
...And it was there, indirectly, in the speech's per-oration—an account of the battle for the Mayaguez, the last engagement in Indochina in 1975...
...As we drove around Louisiana, I asked him what three or four accomplishments he was proudest of during his years on Capitol Hill...
...But those groups will get billions of dollars under this legislation, I said...
...No...
...Finally, though, and maybe reluctantly, he said I could put the quotes on the record...
...We did everything we could...
...She did something wrong...
...Off the record...
...I don't think he'd been here a week before I started hearing from political people, 'Gee, I just got a call from this guy McCain—what's he up to?'" recalls John Kolbe, a columnist for the Arizona Republic...
...In the several hours I'd spent with him over two weeks, he'd asked me to go off the record only once—and that was when he'd explained why he was so cheerful even though the tobacco bill had just been defeated...
...He became friendly with several senators—Bill Cohen, the current secretary of defense, served as best man at his wedding, Gary Hart as an usher—and McCain liked what he saw...
...But this has never been on my agenda...
...A congressional seat opened up months after McCain arrived in Phoenix...
...Do you...
...More silence...
...But there's a lot of places where I'd decrease it...
...For many years, McCain was the prime sponsor of legislation giving the president a line-item veto...
...Jeesh," McCain said to me one night, when I mentioned these lines, "I don't think I'm that deep...
...Of the men who died there, McCain said: "Where they rest is unknown, but their honor is eternal, and lives in our country for so long as she deserves the love of such brave men...
...You learn to laugh at death—you've just got to defy death and pain and all the rest of it...
...So they like him...
...Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor of The Weekly Standard...
...I told my guys"—the staffers who had worked on the legislation—"what would we have done differently...
...But tobacco legislation—I never would have considered it otherwise...
...Modernization...
...I reminded him—not that I needed to—of the $40 million in ads the tobacco companies had bought to denounce the bill, and to denounce McCain, too, by name: Tax-and-spend McCain, they called him...
...I've learned what's important...
...In 1994, Mrs...
...And then, off the record, John McCain told me why he's a happy man...
...For the next few days, he lived in terror, trembling at each sound in the corridor, knowing beyond question that his refusal to accept a release meant the good times were over...
...THE MEDIA'S FAVORITE REPUBLICAN By Andrew Ferguson The United States Senate in its infinite wisdom I effectively killed federal tobacco legislation late A- on the afternoon of Wednesday, June 17, and an hour or two after the final vote, the bill's sponsor, Sen...
...There's this sense among all of us that, you know, we've seen the worst...
...he gives the impression, calculated or not, of not being calculating...
...McCain disclosed her past addiction to prescription painkillers—an addiction that she had fed by stealing pills from a medical charity she had founded...
...Trident submarines, the B-2 bomber...
...Some of the heavy equipment we're acquiring now...
...You see it straight off in the headlines of the many McCain profiles written over the past 18 months: "A Question of Honor" (the New York Times Magazine), "Combat Ready: A Day in the Life of Tobacco Warrior McCain" (CQ Weekly), and, continuing right over the top, "John McCain Walks on Water" (Esquire...
...As it happened, though, the charge of carpetbagging was made only once, by a Republican rival in McCain's first political debate...
...And I believe in the cause...
...The Navy Code of Conduct required that prisoners be released in the order of their capture...
...How come he's supporting a big tax increase?'" He shrugged again...
...Now let's move on...
...Or else, I'd tell them, there's going to be no choice but that the American people will demand that our relations with you will worsen...
...John McCain is not really allergic to political cant...
...That has always been the expectation of political observers, but it has largely gone unfulfilled...
...A sense of relief began to take hold...
...Within 24 hours he and Cindy had bought a house in the district...
...The first thing I'd do," he told me, "is convene the best minds I know of in the field of foreign policy, and that would include members of previous Democratic and Republican administrations...
...Because the guards treat me like an animal," snapped McCain...
...McCain often frames his discussions of policy with an appeal to the authority of experts...
...McCain got a standing ovation from the Republicans in Baton Rouge...
...I suspect he did...
...In between were several hours of meetings with various Louisiana political operatives, at which McCain could take soundings for his possible presidential campaign...
...Reform of the tax code, i.e., a flat tax...
...I don't have the expertise really to be very knowledgeable about it...
...Yeah," he said, "when I was in Arizona, I couldn't turn on the radio without hearing, 'What's happened to John McCain...
...You can't run with your family opposed to it, and it's not at all clear that they'll want to do it...
...With McCain there is no sense of manipulation...
...So McCain said no...
...Before long, McCain's marriage collapsed...
...But of course he doesn't need to...
...McCain was in prison for five and a half years, two of them in solitary confinement...
...And then, in the third category," he continued, "I'd have to say involvement in foreign policy and national-security issues, ranging from the Persian Gulf resolution to all the other stuff I've been involved in in terms of national security...
...an ideological element enters in, as well...
...I don't think about it...
...Let's work out a cohesive foreign policy.' I'm sure that those people, with their collective brilliance and a lot of experience, could come up with a very cohesive foreign policy...
...Base-closings...
...It's an honor...
...Timberg phrases it less gracefully in The Nightingale's Song: "His time in the Senate had whipped his ambition into a lather...
...Yes, sir," the man said, with an awkward bow...
...He knows the power of his personal story, and he knows, too, that its power is intensified when he leaves it unspoken...
...You've got to figure out where your priorities are, guys.'" Or else...
...In 1980, McCain married Cindy Hensley, the daughter of a wealthy beer distributor from Phoenix...
...McCain's quick moves betrayed an ambition that seems extraordinary even by the generous standards of American politics...
...And: "He is the brightest light in the shadowy Senate cave...
...When I mentioned this possibility to McCain on the plane to Louisiana, he visibly shuddered...
...He didn't trust it...
Vol. 3 • July 1998 • No. 42
