Game Change

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Game Change Page 30

by John Heilemann


  McCain’s advisers viewed the devastation as a bad news/good news story. On one hand, a poisonous environment would greet whomever the party chose as its nominee. On the other, those circumstances made it all the more likely that the nominee would be their boss.

  Since 2000, when McCain waged a spirited but doomed challenge to Bush to become the Republican standard-bearer, the Arizona senator had been an icon. With his war heroism, famously independent streak, and reformist stances on matters such as campaign finance, McCain’s maverick image was sterling. He was, as Weaver liked to put it, “the Good Housekeeping seal of approval in American politics.” A familiar presence on the late-night talk show circuit, he was wry and funny; his winking irony and accessibility made him a favorite of the press. And though he’d spent years collecting Republican enemies by defying party orthodoxy—even flirting with the notion of becoming John Kerry’s running mate—he had more recently embarked on a determined, and not unsuccessful, effort to redeem himself with the GOP Establishment. He had put aside his feud with Bush, supported the Iraq War, and built ties to conservative activists and donors. In a party governed by primogeniture, he was now the presumptive front-runner.

  A front-runner’s operation was very much what his advisers had in mind. McCain’s bid in 2000 had been a ragtag affair, more cause than campaign. In 2008 his team proposed the polar opposite. They would build a battleship that was sturdy, well funded, disciplined, imposing. Outsider romance would be sacrificed for insider clout. The model they were mimicking was the one that beat them. They were aiming to create a McCainiac emulation of the Bush machine.

  The architect of that approach was Weaver, the forty-seven-year-old Texan strategist who’d been McCain’s political guru for a decade. Lanky and laconic but intense, Weaver had temporarily left the Republican Party in a huff, disillusioned by the Bush campaign’s dismantling of McCain. But Weaver was convinced that McCain belonged in the White House, and he had come to see the Bush model as the best means of making it happen. To that end, Weaver had imported Nelson, who in 2004 had served as the Bush team’s political director, to be campaign manager. He and Weaver were all about going big: big endorsements, big donors, big spending.

  Bigness didn’t sound too bad to Davis, either. A Washington lobbyist by trade, Davis, also forty-seven, had managed McCain’s last run. He was loyal, fleet, droll, and aimed to please. Despite McCain’s expressed disdain for the culture of Beltway banditry, he always wanted Davis on his team. The guy got things done, and Cindy loved him. He would be McCain’s campaign chief executive.

  The planning for McCain’s run had been slowly building for months; this meeting, in a way, was both a culmination and a launch. Davis talked about operations, everything from budgets to office space to a proposed logo. Weaver presented a strategic overview, discussing the calendar, organization, and McCain’s competitors. The field hadn’t fully taken shape, but it was looking weak. There was Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City, whose universal name recognition put him at the top of the national polls, but whose social liberalism would make him a hard sell in an ever-more-conservative Republican Party. There was Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, who was handsome, rich, and successful—but unknown across the country and a Mormon, a faith regarded by many Evangelicals and Catholics with suspicion and distrust. The rest were a collection of the anonymous, the toothless, and the marginal. Certainly there was no one on the horizon who possessed the attribute that was making McCain look so good to so many Republicans, even those whose instinctive reaction to him was to balk: he was the only GOP candidate who appeared capable of beating Hillary Clinton, the odds-on favorite for the Democratic nomination.

  Through the whole presentation, McCain sat there looking vaguely bored, saying almost nothing. His detachment was striking, but not entirely unusual. If all candidates fall along a range from micromanagers to hands-off delegators, McCain deserved a category all his own: ultra-laissez-faire. In his rational brain, he knew that a serious presidential effort required scores of staffers, high-priced consultants, polling, advertising, policy development, and more. But he really just didn’t give a shit. The details made his head hurt. A fighter pilot through and through, McCain liked to follow his instincts. He envisioned himself getting in his jet and taking off; whatever he left behind on the carrier deck ceased to exist in his consciousness. All that mattered was him, the plane, and the mission. His approach to political combat was the same. Wherever he was, whatever he was saying, whoever was listening—that was the campaign. The rest was noise. As far as McCain was concerned, he could win the election with a roster of events, a few Meet the Press appearances, and a sheaf of airplane tickets.

  Even so, this was a pretty important meeting, his advisers thought. Yet McCain seemed absent, as if he didn’t want to be there. When Weaver finished laying out plans for the months ahead, McCain finally opened his mouth and said, Do we really have to start this early?

  Nelson gazed on in disbelief. He’d been on board only a couple of weeks, after McCain, wearing a dress shirt and his boxer shorts (a favorite outfit of his), offered him the job in a hotel room somewhere.

  Now, for neither the first time nor the last, Nelson looked at his new boss and wondered, Do you really want to be president?

  THE TRUTH WAS, MCCAIN had a lot of reasons to dread the start of the race. For all his progress in making himself more acceptable to the Establishment, he knew that winning his party’s nomination would be no cakewalk. Conservative activists still distrusted him for his apostasies on taxes, campaign reform, interrogation techniques, and judges. The religious right would never warm to him. And there were plenty of Establishmentarians who saw his legendary temper as a problem of no small consequence. Some worried his hotheadedness made him unsuited for the Oval Office; others, that he might blow his stack in public and blow up his candidacy. Though he’d been better in recent years at keeping his petulance at bay (or under wraps), McCain was still prone to outbursts of profanity—sometimes in front of campaign volunteers—that made his advisers wince.

  Iraq, too, had become a problem for McCain, politically and emotionally. He was a military man, from a family of officers. He worried about the safety of the troops, including his own sons, two of whom were in the service. Long before the campaign began, McCain burned over what he saw as the Bush administration’s mismanagement of the conflict, and he was carrying that anger into the race. “Just incompetent,” he’d say. “Just terrible.”

  McCain had been outspoken in pressing Bush to commit more U.S. forces to Iraq, even as Americans had turned decisively against the war and favored a timetable for withdrawal. His advisers warned him that his stance was damaging him politically, hurting him with voters as well as donors. He didn’t care. “You’re not gonna get me to change my opinion on Iraq,” McCain would say. “I’d rather lose the campaign than lose a war.”

  By late 2006, McCain had another vulnerability, and an unexpected one. Suddenly, out of nowhere, his status as a media darling was fading. He was losing the constituency he had proudly, and only half-jokingly, called “my base.”

  Once, McCain could do no wrong in the eyes of the press. Now, when he engaged in a rapprochement with the Reverend Jerry Falwell or favored tax cuts, the media scalded him for what it deemed transparent efforts to curry favor with the right. When he embraced the Iraq War more fervently than Bush, columnists didn’t praise his adherence to principle, they scorched him for being out of step with the country. His treatment in the blogosphere was even worse.

  The new media reality depressed McCain, and the time-honored backroom chores of politics didn’t thrill him much, either. Like his friend Hillary Clinton, he found pleading for money and endorsements about as pleasant as a hot poker in the eye. Also like Hillary, McCain took his work in the Senate seriously, especially now on Iraq.

  Through the fall of 2006, Weaver and Salter fretted over McCain’s gut. Salter, at fifty-one, was McCain’s speechwriter and the c
o-author of all his books, as well as his supremely patriotic and fatalistic alter ego. Don’t just drift into a presidential, he warned McCain. You’ve got to decide you really want to do this.

  Salter and Weaver were well aware that two other concerns were weighing heavily on McCain. The first was Cindy’s opposition to his running. The Bush campaign’s demolition of her husband had taken place in South Carolina, amid shadowy attacks that had wounded her lastingly and deeply. Most despicable was the smear campaign alleging that the McCains’ younger daughter, Bridget, adopted from Bangladesh, was John’s illegitimate child from a liaison with a black prostitute. But there were also rumors spread that Cindy was a drug addict and that John’s long captivity in Vietnam had left him mentally unstable.

  South Carolina was never far from Cindy’s mind. The thought of it being repeated made her sick. She wasn’t merely press shy, she was just plain shy, and she was worried about her servicemen sons, Jack and Jimmy—and especially about Jimmy, a Marine headed for a tour of duty in Iraq. Her fear was that he might be targeted for harm if his father were a candidate.

  As the end of 2006 approached, McCain continually told his team, Cindy isn’t ready. His advisers tried to reassure her: things would be different this time; she would be protected. But Cindy wanted guarantees, some of them impossible to offer—that the children would be able to maintain their privacy, for instance. Gradually, eventually, her stance softened. The McCains were a military family, and if John wanted to serve, Cindy wasn’t going to stand in his way. Four words defined her ethic: “I support my husband.” Yet even then she made no bones about being unhappy that John was making the race or about her refusal to play a large or public role. Smiling, nodding, shaking the occasional proffered hand? Fine. Daily events, multistate trips, full-on surrogacy? Not gonna happen.

  What gave the McCainiacs even greater pause were John’s frequent references to his age and physical condition. McCain was sixty-nine and a cancer survivor. I’m not the man I was when I ran in 2000, he said. Presented with schedules packed with events from early morning until late at night, McCain would say, “Are you guys trying to kill me?”

  There was nothing lighthearted about his tone—he was cranky, peevish. When his staff sang hosannas to his stamina, he would wave them off.

  One day, McCain asked Weaver if he was simply too old to run.

  “Only you can tell us that,” said Weaver.

  “Let’s do it . . . I guess,” McCain replied.

  THE FRONT-RUNNER’S CAMPAIGN got under way in December 2006. And just as McCain’s advisers wanted it to be, it was Bush-scale big—at least on paper.

  The initial budget devised by Davis was a monster. The fund-raising plan called for the campaign to haul in a record $48 million in the first quarter of 2007. That figure was derived largely by looking at the numbers that Bush had racked up in his 2004 campaign—as an incumbent president with the best-oiled cash-accumulating apparatus ever assembled (in the pre-Obama era, that is). Yet nobody seemed to question whether that was an appropriate yardstick.

  At the same time, Weaver and Nelson—who were responsible for spending, while Davis and Eudy handled the collecting of cash—began hiring dozens of high-end consultants and staffers, many of them veterans of the Bush team in 2004. They opened offices around the country and rented space for an enormous headquarters not far from Clinton’s, in suburban northern Virginia.

  The split structure of McCainworld was no accident. From the moment the November meeting in Phoenix ended, there were two McCain campaigns, one led by Weaver and one by Davis, two men with a long-standing history of personal enmity. No one could really explain where it had begun, but it was so profound they could barely stand to be in the same room together. Weaver had brought in Nelson partly to keep Davis from being campaign manager. By January, John and Terry were lobbying to have Rick canned.

  McCain had known all along that Weaver and Davis detested each other. His attitude toward it was studied indifference. Like Hillary, McCain valued loyalty above all else and avoided confrontation at all costs. He instructed Weaver, Davis, Nelson, and Salter (who didn’t much care for Davis, either), “I don’t want any more decisions being made unless all four of you agree.” But that was only a recipe for gridlock and feuding, which quickly became the hallmarks of McCainworld, just as they were in Hillaryland.

  There was no ignoring the ramifications when it came to money, though. While Weaver and Nelson were spending like whiskey-addled sailors, the campaign’s early efforts to raise cash through direct mail and on the Web were falling flat. Many would-be contributors were turned off by McCain’s ardent support for Bush’s just-announced troop surge in Iraq. Making matters worse, McCain spent December engaging in a passive-resistance boycott against calling donors or attending fund-raisers.

  By the start of 2007, the campaign was already more than $1 million in the red. And McCain had virtually no finance events on his schedule for the first two months of the year. The candidate was livid, but he blamed the problem not on the fund-raising, but on the campaign’s spending.

  The first sign of trouble was when McCain made his maiden visit to his campaign fortress in Alexandria, Virginia, in the middle of January. Carrying a Starbucks cup, he walked into the war room and found sixty-odd people (some of whom were unpaid interns, though he didn’t know that) gathered there to greet him. He stopped in his tracks, his mandible dropping to his sternum. He turned in a slow circle, took it all in, mumbled a few words of greeting and thanks, and then stormed off in the direction of Nelson’s office.

  “What the fuck are all these people doing here?” he yelled at his campaign manager. “Where are we getting the money to pay for all of this? What is it they do? Get rid of half of them.”

  Not long after, McCain examined the personnel lists, looking for cuts, and grew incensed. “I am not fucking authorizing these fucking hires,” he insisted to Nelson. “Why do we need all these people? Who are these fucking Bush people? Where is the fucking money?”

  McCain’s reaction to the spending was even worse on the road. When he hit the trail in the winter months of 2007, he saw evidence of excess all around him, and would call Nelson and Weaver in a fury. Why did there have to be a live band at one of his events? Why were there two boxes of donuts on his campaign bus?

  Then there was the bus itself, an upgraded version of McCain’s fabled Straight Talk Express from 2000. The sleek new rig had deluxe furnishings, satellite television, a fancy bathroom, a full kitchen, and a big private office that doubled as a bedroom. Cindy mocked it as a “rolling Ritz-Carlton.”

  As the cash crunch mounted into March and McCain’s fits became more frequent, Weaver reached a breaking point. Everyone is at fault for not vetting the fund-raising plan—including you, he told McCain.

  “We started too fucking early,” McCain replied. “We should have waited. I shouldn’t be running right now.”

  “We didn’t choose to be the front-runner,” Weaver said. “We are the front-runner. We have to conduct ourselves as the front-runner.”

  Weaver warned McCain that the first-quarter fund-raising numbers were due out soon and they were going to be bad. He wasn’t kidding. Released in early April, the figures revealed that McCain had raised a meager $12.5 million—$35.5 million shy of the campaign’s original projections. Worse, he had finished third among his rivals; Romney led the pack with $21 million, while Giuliani had raised $15 million. The press coverage was brutal.

  Weaver, Nelson, and Salter met McCain in his Senate office to talk about how to improve the balance sheet. Salter and Weaver bellowed back and forth with McCain, but they all agreed on the bottom line: if they didn’t fix their financial situation, they didn’t need to worry about laying people off. McCain’s campaign would be over before the race had even started.

  “FUCK YOU! FUCK, FUCK, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!!!”

  McCain let out the stream of sharp epithets, both middle fingers raised and extended, barkin
g in his wife’s face. He was angry; she had interrupted him. Cindy burst into tears, but, really, she should have been used to it by now.

  Cindy Lou Hensley had always looked like a beauty queen (or a senator’s wife) with her ice-blue eyes and flaxen waves and delicate mien. She first met John McCain in Hawaii, where he was a war hero still recovering from his injuries, still married to his first wife, Carol. Phoenix-born Cindy was just twenty-four, and wildly smitten with the dashing older man in his dress whites. Within a few months, she was a misty military wife, saluting and serving.

  A quarter of a century and four children later, the dazzle had faded, even as the duty and the bond remained. But for all her taut Stepford smiles, Cindy was no typical political spouse. She was the sole heir to her family’s multimillion-dollar beer distribution business and chair of the company. She loved her home in Arizona, her job, her charities, and, above all, her children. While John spent months and months in D.C., she maintained her base and raised the kids. The setup worked for both of them.

  When she was dragged back into campaign service in 2007, Cindy wanted to be an asset to her husband. But they were so fixed in their ways, so unused to compromise or relinquishing control, they could barely remain polite. John was impatient and indifferent, Cindy intent on asserting her needs. After an argument over a Secret Service detail—Cindy wanted the protection; John hated the intrusion—she flounced back to Phoenix. When you get it, call me, Cindy said, and I’ll come back on the trail, but otherwise I’m going home.

  She summoned her husband out of campaign discussions to talk about Jimmy, over in Iraq. If their daughter Meghan, out on the stump, complained to her mother about blogosphere attacks on the family or annoying staffers assigned to her, Cindy would throw a fit. She’d agree to attend events and rallies, and then cancel abruptly.

 

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