Game Change

by John Heilemann

  The McCains fought in front of others, during small meetings and before large events, to the amazement and discomfort of the staff. Things could escalate quickly. She cursed him; he cursed her. She cried; he apologized. Cindy fought back, too. I never wanted you to run for this, she said. You ruined my life. It’s all about you. When it came time to film campaign videos of the couple, the camera crews had to roll for hours to capture a few minutes of warmth.

  There were moments of tenderness, to be sure. When Cindy was depressed or overwhelmed, John was able to cheer her up or calm her down. He implored his staff to accommodate his wife, and refused to make any major decisions without her input. They were aware of each other’s quirks and needs, crazy about their children, and they talked to each other by phone all day long. They looked after each other’s health, and often served as staunch mutual protectors.

  But there were also rumors. In the spring of 2007, whispers from Arizona reached Salter and Weaver that Cindy had been spotted at a Phoenix Suns basketball game with another man. The man was said to be her long-term boyfriend; the pair had been sighted all over town in the last few years.

  Members of the McCain senior staff discussed the unsettling news, amid their growing concerns that Cindy’s behavior had been increasingly erratic of late. Weaver and others suspected that the Cindy rumor was rooted in truth. It was upsetting, Weaver believed, but not a threat. The legitimate press would never write about a spouse’s personal life—unless that spouse was Bill Clinton.

  Then the campaign heard that a supermarket tabloid was working on the story. It could blow up at any time. At a meeting in mid-April, Team McCain prepared a full-bore media plan to deal with the fallout if the story broke. Soon after, Weaver delicately approached McCain. Did he know about this? Could he talk to Cindy?

  McCain appeared distraught, but not surprised. He seemed aware of the situation, and, incredibly, suggested it was a matter he preferred be dealt with by the staff.

  This is something a husband needs to do, Weaver told him.

  McCain called his wife. She denied an affair. You’ll have to come out on the road with me, he told her. You’ll have to travel more now. People will need to see us together.

  So she did. Davis, who’d always gelled with Cindy, was assigned to spend more time with her, and for a while she was by her husband’s side at rallies and town halls, just in case the story bubbled up—or bubbled over.

  THERE WAS SILENCE ON the small charter flight from New York to New Hampshire on April 24. McCain was on his way, finally, finally, to officially kick off his candidacy the next day. Weaver, Salter, and Nelson were steaming mad. With no money, a feuding staff, and the stench of loserdom setting in, they’d been working for weeks on an idea for the announcement that would jolt McCain’s campaign back to life. The candidate had signed off on it—but now, just hours beforehand, he had changed his mind.

  “I don’t want to do it,” McCain said to Weaver. “And I don’t want to argue about it.”

  “This far down the road, you owe us a chance to discuss it,” Weaver angrily replied. But no discussion was forthcoming.

  The idea was as simple as it was radical: a one-term pledge. McCain would promise that if he won the White House, he would spend four years in residence and then step down. The pledge would embody the theme that McCain cared only about solving the country’s problems and not about indulging his ambition. It would say that he was going to tackle the hardest issues—Iraq, immigration, ethics, entitlements, runaway spending—with no regard for reelection. It would mitigate what the campaign’s polling showed was his most significant liability: his age. It would be a bold statement about political sacrifice, a larger-than-life, maverick move.

  Salter and Weaver had come up with the pledge and pushed it hard. McCain had reservations, but knew his campaign needed electroshock. His advisers plotted the rollout, taking extraordinary steps to keep the idea quiet, fearing that the loose-lipped McCain would spill the beans himself. The announcement speech was written. The press release was drafted. All systems were go.

  But not everyone thought the pledge was a good idea. Some considered it crazy, in fact. One of them was Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican senator who was one of McCain’s closest friends; another was Rick Davis. They told McCain that the pledge would marginalize him and the office of the presidency. That it would make him a lame duck from day one.

  A few hours before the flight to New Hampshire, McCain was with Cindy in New York at the Mandarin Oriental hotel, looking over his remarks. When Salter and Brett O’Donnell, McCain’s speech coach, arrived, McCain startled them by saying he was having doubts about the pledge. Meghan McCain entered the suite and trashed the idea, saying it was lame. Her dad now apparently agreed.

  The next day, it was damp and chilly in Portsmouth for the kickoff. Dressed casually in a sweater, looking grim and awkward, McCain stood next to Cindy. His speech, having been hurriedly purged of all references to the pledge, was a disjointed mess. Later, in Manchester, McCain gave it again at Veterans Memorial Park downtown. Weaver looked around at the vast space and said, “You could have a fucking Rolling Stones concert here.” But the park was nearly empty.

  MCCAIN’S CAMPAIGN WAS FORMALLY off the ground, but it remained a hugely troubled enterprise. The candidate was depressed and fatigued, feeling helpless, picked to pieces by something he couldn’t control. He contemplated how much better his life would be if he just pulled the plug on his campaign. If I’d known this before, I never would have run, McCain thought. “This wasn’t the campaign I wanted,” he told his advisers.

  Long gone was the tough, spry McCain of the 2000 race, the cocky, joyous McCain of the Senate. This McCain was angry, angry every single day, as angry as Weaver had ever seen him. McCain knew what was being said about his implosion; he obsessively read the papers and the tip sheets, collected political gossip, and watched cable news. A mocking Maureen Dowd column could ruin his entire day.

  “The press is out to get me” became McCain’s new catchphrase. No more was he accompanied by a merry band of accomplices filing stories about his charm. Now, trailing behind him, eager to catch every snort and frown, were stern scribes, overcaffeinated bloggers, and curious civilians with camera phones.

  McCain was erupting over everything. At a scheduling meeting to discuss Meghan’s college graduation, McCain learned that the commencement was a multiday affair that would require him to make several round trips to New York. “How many fucking times do I have to go to fucking New York this week?” he yelled. “How many fucking times can you fucking graduate from fucking Columbia?”

  Agitating him further was a policy debate about which he cared greatly, and for which he was catching major flak. The issue was immigration reform. With Bush’s support, Congress was taking up a proposal that would allow a path to citizenship for some illegal immigrants. In late May, McCain stood alongside Ted Kennedy and announced his support for the bill.

  Weaver and Salter begged McCain to ease up. He was already the face of the Iraq surge. Now he was becoming the face of what opponents called “amnesty.” Just tone down the rhetoric, his advisers pleaded.

  McCain refused. He was disgusted by Republicans in Congress and talk radio gasbags such as Rush Limbaugh who bashed immigrants. “They’re going to destroy the fucking party,” he would say.

  As McCain’s town hall meetings devolved into shouting matches over immigration, the candidate let his frustration show through. He called Lindsey Graham in despair. Listen to these people, McCain said. Why would I want to be the leader of a party of such assholes?

  BY THE TIME THE immigration bill collapsed in the Senate on June 28, 2007, the damage was done. The issue had more than injured McCain politically. It had thoroughly crippled his already lame and halting fund-raising. The second quarter had the same unhappy result as the first. He raised only $11 million, which left him just $2 million in the bank, and the political world switched from describing him as a “troubled front
-runner” to predicting, and then assuming, he would be forced to quit the race.

  McCain returned from a Fourth of July trip to Iraq with Graham more riled up than ever, but still capable of some gallows humor. “I’m the only one I know who would go to Iraq to get away from it all,” he said.

  In that spirit, he had resolved to finally make some changes in the campaign. With his polling numbers receding both nationally and in key states, he blamed Nelson and Weaver for running things into the ground, and he wanted Davis to take over.

  After one last climactic shouting match in the Senate office, Nelson announced that he was quitting, jumping before he was pushed. Weaver, out of frustration, disdain for Davis, and solidarity with Nelson, decided to say sayonara, too.

  McCain wanted Weaver to stay. They were brothers-in-arms from 2000, and no one, including McCain himself, had spent anything like the amount of time that Weaver had thinking about how to get him elected president. But too much poison had flowed between them.

  With Weaver’s conspicuous departure, McCain lost his wingman, and was visibly uncomfortable answering reporters’ questions about the situation. “I’m very happy with the campaign,” he repeated stiltedly, making himself seem deluded in addition to desperate.

  McCain was on the verge of losing Salter, too. Close to Weaver, disillusioned by the spiteful family feud, he told McCain that he’d continue to write his speeches, but little more. But McCain pleaded with Salter to stay—“Forget about this shit; we’re friends, we’ve been friends for twenty years”—and Salter relented.

  McCain’s highest priority was fixing the money situation. Davis took over the shriveled operation, its staff shrunk by Nelson at McCain’s insistence from nearly three hundred to around forty, and zeroed out every other possible expense. Publicly, the moves were seen as the slow winding down of the operation. McCain had gone from a campaign bleeding internally to spilling its entrails all over the carpet.

  The candidate gave pep talks to his remaining staff, his donors, his backers. In every case, he tried to be upbeat about his chances without sounding ridiculous. He showed more emotion than usual in thanking people for sticking by him.

  With his closest friends, he was more torn. “I guess I never should have fucking run,” he said. “I’m gonna do what I need to do, everything I need to do, and then we’ll probably lose.” He knew he risked further embarrassment, but he was willing to take the hit: I know they’re gonna make fun of me. I know what they’re gonna say. I watch cable. I get it.

  McCain went to New Hampshire on July 13, trailed by national reporters who hadn’t covered him for months but who wanted to be present at the cremation. Jimmy McCain, who almost never campaigned with his father, came along. The senator was quietly defiant, vowing to stay in the race, with the Granite State the key to his comeback.

  Cindy and Salter weren’t dreaming of a resurrection. They were worried about John, about his entire career being defined by a botched mission of a few months. Their goal was to wrap up the campaign without further damage to his reputation or a plunge deeper into debt. “He’s not gonna be the nominee,” Salter told one of his colleagues. “I just want the campaign to last long enough so we can tell people one last time, ‘Go fuck off. We made it this far.’”

  McCain had a series of conversations with Charlie Black, a longtime friend and Republican strategist—and another Washington lobbyist. Despite all the speculation, McCain wasn’t inclined to leave the race right away, but he wanted to know if he still had a chance to win. He was irritated and sad, burdened with a sense of responsibility for letting everyone down.

  There was a narrow path back, Black told McCain, mostly because the other candidates seemed so weak. Giuliani? He would never roll up his sleeves and do the hard work. Romney? Conservatives would never fall in behind him; he was the moderate former governor of Massachusetts, for heaven’s sake. The others? Please. McCain stood head and shoulders above them all. It was like what happened with Ronald Reagan in 1980, Black reminded McCain. The Gipper had been the front-runner, but his campaign ran out of money at the end of 1979 and his staff was in turmoil. Reagan had come back, and so could McCain.

  Black advised McCain that he needed to adopt a distinctly un-McCain-like approach: he needed to lower his profile. He had to do whatever he could to get as little national media attention as possible. “Every time you get covered it’s going to be, ‘That idiot McCain was the front-runner and screwed up his campaign,’ ” Black said. “So our goal is to be off the radar screen.

  “Look,” Black added, “for the next three months, all the stories are just gonna say, ‘McCain’s dead and buried.’ Your only job is to keep your head down, go to those early states, and keep right on campaigning. We’ll see where we are after Labor Day. If we aren’t dead and buried, we’re in this.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Running Unopposed

  RUDY GIULIANI TOOK LITTLE personal pleasure in the prospect of McCain’s demise. The two men were friends, and not just faux political friends. They actually liked each other. They’d first met at New York’s City Hall in the late nineties, when Giuliani was mayor. They bonded over sports, baseball in particular, with Giuliani touting his beloved Yankees and McCain his Arizona Diamondbacks. In that awful autumn after the Twin Towers fell, when their teams met in the 2001 World Series, they’d made a show of attending several of the games together. More than once in the course of the 2008 presidential, Giuliani had said publicly that if he weren’t running, he would probably be supporting McCain.

  Not that Giuliani didn’t see the political upside for him in the unraveling of his pal’s campaign. He would’ve had to be blind to miss that—and Giuliani had an eagle eye when it came to his own advancement. Since he entered the race in February, he had led the field in virtually every national poll, riding his celebrity as “America’s Mayor” and his brassy reputation as a hero of 9/11. With his hawkish profile on national security and moderation on social issues, Giuliani was chasing many of the same voters as McCain. In the wake of the maverick’s meltdown, he seemed positioned to scoop them up, along with a chunk of McCain’s donors. He looked like the new front-runner.

  Yet to the members of the politico-industrial complex, Giuliani’s candidacy was a chimera. The idea that the Republican Party would select a man of his background and views as its nominee struck them as implausible when they were being polite, risible when they were being honest. They contended that Romney was the runner to watch in the aftermath of McCain’s implosion. Or maybe Fred Thompson would be the one to seize the moment; the former Tennessee senator and Hollywood actor, familiar from his regular role on Law & Order, had been making noises for months about a late entry into the race. But Hizzoner? No way.

  McCain himself agreed. Even at his lowest depths, he never felt threatened by Giuliani. Asked why by his advisers, McCain would shrug and say, “Rudy’s Rudy.”

  Giuliani’s defects, from a conservative point of view, were readily apparent. He was pro-choice, pro—gay rights, pro—gun control. He was thrice married, and had carried on a public affair with wife number three while going through a messy divorce from wife number two. When the latter, Donna Hanover, kicked him out of Gracie Mansion, he cohabited with two gay men. There were pictures all over the Internet of him in drag—face painted in rouge, head adorned with a blond wig, shoulders draped in a feather boa—from a New York variety show.

  And those were just the liabilities that Giuliani brought into the campaign with him. The past six months had exposed more. He had fallen far short of his fund-raising goals. He had failed to master the retail politics rituals of Iowa and New Hampshire, never shedding his swollen entourage or his preference for photo ops over town hall meetings and intimate voter coddling.

  Most puzzling was his timidity. Giuliani was supposed to be a tough guy, but in the face of attacks by his opponents, his performance had been as limp as an overcooked Chinatown noodle. Challenged in debates, he would bare his cartoonishly big teet
h and respond with lame jokes. When his advisers, trying to fire him up, showed him vicious direct-mail attacks on him by the Romney forces, Giuliani would just chortle. He never discouraged his aides from producing negative TV ads against his foes, but whenever they showed him a new spot or proposed script, he invariably rejected it.

  Giuliani’s aides were at a loss to explain his softness. Some attributed it to his bout with prostate cancer in 2000. Others thought he feared that getting tough would provoke retaliation. Still others believed Giuliani didn’t want to be president badly enough to assail his fellow Republicans. But mostly, when his advisers were trying to make sense of the bizarreness of Giuliani’s behavior, they talked about his wife—and the operatic piece of psychotropic theater that was the Rudy and Judi Show.

  JUDITH NATHAN HAD BEEN in the spotlight since 1998, after she and Giuliani collided one night at a cigar bar. The tabloid coverage of her had never been flattering, but once her husband entered the presidential race in early 2007, it turned into a horror show.

  First came the story that Judith had actually been married twice—not once, as she had previously suggested—before wedding Rudy in 2003. (“JUDI GIULIANI’S SECRET HUSBAND REVEALED.”) Two weeks later, she suffered a far worse headline: “JUDI’S JOB WITH PUP-KILLER FIRM.” Years earlier, it seemed, she had worked for a medical supply firm that, yes, exterminated puppies as part of its sales demonstrations.

  Rudy’s famously thin skin was a suit of armor compared to the gossamer sheath that enveloped Judith; after every negative story, she became hysterical. The press hates us, she howled to her husband’s advisers. They hate Rudy. They love Donna. And, “They’re fucking me!”

  Judith had the same view, also loudly expressed, of the press staffers assigned to her. They’re all out to get me, she’d say. Nobody gives a shit about me.