Game Change

by John Heilemann

  On September 5, Schmidt’s galvanizing advice about his message on Iraq still ringing in his ears, McCain appeared with the other candidates at the University of New Hampshire for a debate. With Petraeus scheduled to testify before Congress the following week on the progress of the surge, Romney was asked a question about his attitude toward troop withdrawals. “I don’t have a time frame that I’ve announced,” Romney said. “The surge is apparently working. We’re going to get a full report on that from General Petraeus . . . very soon.”

  McCain spoke next—and let Romney have it. “Governor, the surge is working. The surge is working, sir. It is working.”

  “That’s just what I said,” Romney replied.

  “No, not apparently,” McCain said sharply, cutting him off. “It’s working!”

  A week later, the No Surrender Tour commenced in Waterloo, Iowa, and from there continued to New Hampshire and South Carolina. The crowds were small, the staging often ragged, the events in cramped, dark, smoky rooms. But the impact was apparent—and not just on the press narrative, but on McCain himself. He was now at the center of a high-profile fight where he had moral certainty that his cause was just and his fear of the opposition was nil. He was distancing himself from the White House’s mushy rhetoric and slamming the totems of the left. Surrounded by friends, he started joking again, enjoying himself, some of his confidence returning. Fatalistic as ever, he tried to keep his excitement in check. But his political nerve endings began to tingle.

  My God, I might be pulling this thing back in, he thought.

  MCCAIN FLEW DOWN TO Florida to raise some money. A fund-raising event had been set up for him on October 2 at the Governors Club in Tallahassee. As long as he was in the neighborhood, he arranged to pay a call on the governor himself. If he couldn’t get Crist to endorse him, at least he might be able to hold him neutral.

  One of McCain’s top Florida supporters, Kathleen Shanahan, was with him when he finished up the donor event. On the way to the statehouse, she verbally took McCain by the lapels and shook him. She was worried that if she didn’t say something, McCain, being McCain, would almost certainly sit down with Crist, make small talk, tell some jokes, and waste the moment.

  “Don’t go over there and bullshit your way through this meeting,” Shanahan said. Crist was under all sorts of pressure from Giuliani, Romney, and Thompson, and there was no telling which way he might jump. “You have to be serious; you’ve got to tell him why you need Florida, why you need Charlie, why you can win.”

  “I hear you,” McCain assured her.

  McCain marched into Crist’s office and got down to business. He followed Shanahan’s script to the letter. No one likes Rudy Giuliani more than me, McCain said, but he’s not going to be the nominee of this party, and you’d be wasting your support if you endorsed him. There’s no way he’s going to win. You should support me. I’m going to win this nomination. My campaign is revived.

  Afterward, Crist told his advisers that he cared about McCain, was grateful for his backing in the governor’s race. He might not endorse John in the end, Crist said, but otherwise, the senator’s speech had convinced him. He intended to remain neutral—for now.

  A few weeks later, in early November, the Giuliani people got the word from Florida that Crist’s endorsement was being suspended until further notice. Giuliani tried to reach Crist, but he was out of the country, on a Latin American trade mission—having taken Giuliani’s nomination strategy with him.

  Giuliani’s campaign was in a precarious place. Bernard Kerik, the mayor’s former driver and then police commissioner and business partner, whom Giuliani had lobbied Bush to nominate as federal director of homeland security, had just been indicted on corruption and tax evasion charges. Worse, on November 27, Politico reported that Giuliani’s mayoral office had allegedly used murky accounting practices to cover up government funding of his security during secret visits to Judith’s Southampton condo when she was his mistress. Together, the stories created the kind of political-personal reek around Giuliani that many had predicted would be as likely to derail his presidential bid as would his liberal positions on social issues.

  Without Crist’s endorsement, Florida was almost certainly gone for Giuliani, though he would gamely continue to stump there. Where else did he have to go? Among the first four states, Giuliani’s people believed New Hampshire was their only shot. But his poll numbers there were falling fast, which led him to throw in the towel on the Granite State. In doing so, Giuliani was making the single significant change—in strategy, personnel, or message—he ever attempted in reaction to his campaign’s decline. He was also helping pry the door open for the resurgence of McCain.

  NEW HAMPSHIRE WAS THE only state that mattered to McCain. He knew he was in a binary situation: If he lost the primary, he was through; if he won it, he’d be the front-runner again, and this time, when it counted. Had it been any other state, McCain’s emerging sense of optimism would have been even more guarded than it was. But being all-in on New Hampshire? That wasn’t too bad. Man, he loved that place.

  And why not? New Hampshire had given McCain his nineteen-point win over Bush in 2000, the greatest political victory of his life. More important, it was the perfect place for the kind of campaign that he had to run now. It was small, intimate, pure retail, and everybody already knew him. McCain was flat broke, after all. He had no staff. He had no pollsters. All of it was gone. Instead of the Cadillac campaign that his advisers once had in mind, he was driving around in the political equivalent of a Ford Pinto—with a hamster wheel for an engine, and Rick Davis sprinting furiously on the thing to keep it spinning. And weird as it might sound, McCain preferred it this way. Living off the land, guerilla-style, hand to mouth. In a way, the collapse of his campaign had been the best thing for McCain, because when the campaign disintegrated, so did the crippling campaign dysfunction.

  McCain was at his best in the town hall meetings that were a staple of New Hampshire’s quirky political culture. They were how he won the state in 2000, and ever since the No Surrender Tour, town halls in New Hampshire were the oxygen that sustained him. Week by week, day by day, he could feel himself picking up steam. For one thing, the crowds were getting bigger; he always took a mental count. For another, they were getting friendlier. At a town hall up in North Haverhill in late November, the audience was practically hanging from the rafters. And when it was over, a stream of people came up and said, unprompted, “I’m voting for you.”

  Equally heartening for McCain was this: no longer was he getting blistered by the anti-immigration forces. Oh, sure, he still had to defend his position on the issue. The hot-eyed ranting had ceased, however, and that was a good sign.

  McCain’s advisers were glad to hear his rosy reports from the road. But contrary to what he might have believed, they knew he couldn’t win the state on town halls alone. Back in September, the campaign had scraped together just enough money to get him on the air in New Hampshire. McCain’s advisers wanted to use the famous footage of him in Hanoi filmed after his capture, the pictures of him prone and in excruciating pain, his broken bones encased in slipshod dressing. McCain resisted, as he had throughout his career, the exploitation of his suffering for political gain. But Salter and Schmidt brought him around. “You don’t have an option of not talking about who you are and what made you who you are,” Schmidt said. “That decision got made the day you decided to run for president of the United States. Whether you like it or not, that’s reality, and if you don’t do it, we don’t have a prayer.”

  McCain reluctantly agreed, and the ad stirred up a lot of press attention. Several weeks later at a debate, McCain snapped out a sound bite for the ages. “A few days ago, Senator Clinton tried to spend one million dollars on the Woodstock concert museum,” he said. “Now, my friends, I wasn’t there. I’m sure it was a cultural and pharmaceutical event.” Pause. “I was tied up at the time.”

  The audience roared, and the campaign took the cue. The quip be
came part of another TV ad for New Hampshire.

  McCain had taken New Hampshire a bit for granted at the start, as he ran around trying to raise money to pay for that Bush machine his lieutenants were building. He’d made it easy for Romney to seize the top slot in the polls. The funny thing was, as events unfolded, this worked to McCain’s advantage, with Romney writing him off for months. Now the former governor found himself under siege in Iowa, where Huckabee was coming on strong. More good news for McCain; it let him continue to fly under the radar.

  One day in late October, out of the blue, McCain told Charlie Black, “We gotta get to twenty percent by December first” in New Hampshire. Black had no idea where the number or target date had come from. Davis didn’t know, either. The goal struck them as arbitrary, but what the hell? If it helped McCain to have a tangible marker, fine.

  McCain talked about the goal incessantly from then on. Twenty percent, twenty percent, twenty percent. Then, in late November, they all looked up, and there he was: Fox News put him at 21 percent, just eight points behind Romney.

  OVER THANKSGIVING, MCCAIN MADE another trip back to Iraq, accompanied again by Graham and also by Democratic senator Joe Lieberman, of Connecticut. While they were there they met with General Petraeus and visited Jimmy McCain in Anbar Province.

  McCain and Lieberman had developed a close friendship through the years, and the war was a big part of it. Lieberman was inarguably the most hawkish Democrat in the Senate. He and McCain saw eye to eye on almost everything when it came to Iraq, but the bond was deeper than that. It was forged around the antipathy they both had for the bases of their parties, which was reciprocated in spades. Though Lieberman had been Al Gore’s running mate in 2000 and was a fairly standard issue Democrat on most social and economic issues, his foreign policy stances had made him an enemy of the left and especially of the netroots, which had successfully targeted him for defeat in the 2006 Connecticut Democratic primary. Lieberman now called himself an Independent Democrat. McCain could relate to that.

  The day after returning from Iraq, McCain phoned Lieberman. New Hampshire is going to be everything for me, he said. And there’s a lot of independents who are going to vote in the primary. I want to ask if you’d think about giving me your support. If you can’t, I’ll understand. You’re in enough trouble with your party already, but I know it would help me out a lot.

  Give me a couple of days to think it over, Lieberman replied. It’s a big step, but you know how I feel about you. We’ve been through a lot together and particularly on the war.

  A former Democratic vice-presidential nominee endorsing a Republican? It sure was a big step. Lieberman talked it over with his wife, a couple of staffers, a few friends back home. One of them said, I think you’re crazy—but McCain’s campaign won’t last long, so this will be a brief interlude. For Lieberman, deciding to support McCain would mean crossing another Rubicon. The calumny that would be hurled at him from the left, he knew, would be intense.

  On the other hand, not a single Democratic candidate had asked for Lieberman’s endorsement, not even his fellow Connecticut senator, Chris Dodd. For all the distance between him and his party, Lieberman still found that level of ostracism surprising—and painful, very painful. He believed that McCain had shown guts by putting his campaign on the line to stick with the surge. Also that he’d be the best president in a dangerous world. I don’t agree with him on everything, but I agree with him on a lot of big things, and war and peace is one, Lieberman thought. Besides, the guy’s my friend.

  Lieberman’s endorsement came on December 15 in New Hampshire. For McCain, it capped a three-month run of favorable press, rising poll numbers, and the new story line that he had created through the sheer force of his personality. Between Christmas and New Year’s, a series of polls showed him ahead in New Hampshire for the first time since the early spring.

  McCain had gone from front-runner to corpse to contender in less than a year. Everyone assumed he was flying high: the Mac was back. But the truth was, dangling over his head was a sword of Damocles invisible to almost everyone, if no less menacing for that. The blade was in the form of a newspaper article that was threatening to drop any day. McCain thought it might kill more than his shot at the nomination. He thought it might destroy his career and his reputation—even though the woman at the heart of the story insisted that she’d never even been alone with him.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Slipping Nooses, Slaying Demons

  VICKI ISEMAN WAS A small-town girl in Gucci Gulch. She came from rural Pennsylvania, born in the same burg as Jimmy Stewart, where she was a high-school cheerleader. She arrived in Washington in 1990 with a degree in elementary education and everything she owned stuffed inside two plastic garbage bags. She landed a job as a receptionist at a lobbying shop called Alcalde and Fay. Eight years later, she became the youngest partner in the firm’s history. On paper, she gave every appearance of being a familiar Washington archetype: ambitious, workaholic, politically connected, thin and blond and pretty. But she was more a striver than a climber, more earnest than gimlet-eyed. Her clients were mid-level corporations, mostly telecommunications companies that no one had ever heard of. She didn’t work the social circuit or want to be a public figure; she had no interest in appearing on Hardball. She seemed slightly wonderstruck by how far she’d come. When her college newspaper interviewed her in 2002, she talked about the great view of the nation’s capital she had through her office windows, and proudly listed the celebrities she had been lucky enough to meet: Melanie Griffith, Bo Derek, Britney Spears, and Rudy Giuliani.

  McCain was another boldface name with whom Iseman was acquainted by then. As the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee in the late nineties, he held sway over regulations that affected companies she represented. Iseman supported McCain in his 2000 race and helped him raise money for it. In February 1999, she and the senator flew down to Miami and back together on the corporate jet of one of her clients to attend a fund-raiser. The shared transport may have seemed like little more than a convenience to the lobbyist and the senator—but to McCain’s advisers, it looked like trouble.

  With his wife three thousand miles away, McCain was on his own for months at a time when he was in Washington. As a rule, his aides saw no need to police him and had no desire to play chaperone. The level of scrutiny accorded the private life of an ordinary senator was minimal, anyway. But with McCain preparing for his first presidential bid, the glare of the spotlight was about to increase a thousandfold. Appearances mattered now more than ever. So when a rumor that McCain was having an affair with Iseman started flitting through Washington, his advisers blanched. Some thought it was true, some thought it was false, but they all feared that it could pry open a can of worms.

  The Iseman problem never reared its head publicly in 2000, and the qualms of McCain’s team receded for years thereafter. But in the first half of 2007, just as McCain’s new campaign was launching and faltering in the same breath, a reporter from U.S. News & World Report began pursuing a story that McCain and Iseman had been sexually involved. Iseman denied it. The McCainiacs pushed back hard. U.S. News ran an article on McCain and lobbyists, but mentioned neither the allegation nor Iseman.

  Now, in November 2007, the Iseman problem had returned with a vengeance. The New York Times was on the case, with four staffers assigned to the story.

  Iseman’s colleagues at Alcalde told her that reporters had been calling and asking questions about her relationship with McCain. When one of them left a message for her, she refused to return the call. But she started to panic as she discovered the scope of the Times’s investigation. She called Rick Davis and told him about the unsettling intrusion into her life. “What is going on? Where is this coming from?” Iseman asked. “Is it Weaver?”

  Iseman had known Davis, a fellow lobbyist, longer than she had known McCain. She trusted Rick—unlike Weaver, whom she loathed. Back in 1999, after the Miami trip, Iseman and Weaver had clashed, with Weav
er instructing her to steer clear of McCain, and they hadn’t spoken since.

  Davis tried to soothe Iseman, who sounded desperate and a little unhinged. But he shared her surmise that his former rival was the culprit. Ever since his departure, Weaver had been carping to reporters about the McCain campaign; Davis blamed him for some nasty leaks in the wake of the implosion. Within Team McCain there was a strong suspicion that all roads in the Times inquiry led back to Weaver.

  But the sourcing behind the Iseman story was the least of the campaign’s worries about it. The perception that McCain, the great reformer, was too close to the capital’s influence peddlers had hurt him badly before; in 2000, the Bush campaign had skewered him mercilessly over that contradiction. Allegations of infidelity aside, the Times could do McCain damage on the hypocrisy front. The publication of the story might also incite more unwelcome snooping around in McCain’s bedroom—which would be bad enough by itself, but potentially devastating in a party dominated by religious conservatives who didn’t trust McCain to begin with. Already, as word had spread in media circles about what the Times was chasing, at least a half-dozen new delvings into McCain’s personal life had been undertaken by news organizations. At the same time, the campaign was coping with an incipient revival of the story about Cindy’s alleged extramarital wanderings; McCainworld heard that there might be an incriminating surveillance videotape of her and another man.

  As November turned to December, the public picture of McCain’s campaign was all about revival. But privately, his advisers were living in terror. Behind the scenes, no single issue was consuming more of the staff’s time or psychic energy than the Iseman problem—and nothing was weighing more heavily on the candidate’s mind. Outwardly, McCain was coming on strong in New Hampshire, but inside, he was coming undone.