The Restless Wave

by John McCain

  I loved it, the entire day. It remains one of my fondest memories of the campaign and in all my public life. Noted in many of the news accounts of the day’s events was the fact that I was a rare Republican politician in those parts. I loved that. The headline for the Birmingham News’s report proclaimed, “In Black Belt, McCain Wins Hearts, Not Votes.” I loved reading that, too.

  We visited the weathered porch of the Fletcher family’s house in Inez, Kentucky, where Lyndon Johnson had announced the War on Poverty in 1964, and where the coal industry’s decline had sunk the area deeper into the poverty Johnson had promised they would escape. Inez remained one of the poorest communities in Appalachia. I made a brief speech at the Martin County courthouse before taking questions. I acknowledged that I had been raised in the Navy, and had an easier start in life than the families who worked the mines and farms of Appalachia, and my life continued to be easier than theirs. “But you are . . . my fellow Americans, and that kinship means more to me than almost any other association.” Then I answered questions, joked around, and swapped stories with them for a while, refusing a few invitations to attack Obama, who had lost the Pennsylvania primary the night before but was still viewed as the likely Democratic nominee. There would come a time, soon enough, when our campaigns would trade accusations and batter each other. For now, I wanted to do what I was doing, talking with Americans I didn’t know and who didn’t really know me, and assure them of my concern for their situation. A reporter for The New Yorker described my Inez town hall as a “remarkably subdued performance.” I didn’t mind. I followed the town hall with a fairly lively press conference. The same reporter had also noted that “McCain doesn’t try to stir the crowd’s darker passions or its higher aspirations. He doesn’t present himself as a conservative leader. He is simply a leader. . . . Here I am, a man in full, take me or leave me. This might be the only kind of Republican who could win in 2008.” I liked that thought quite a bit whether it was true or not.

  We ended the tour walking the streets of New Orleans’s Katrina-ravaged Ninth Ward, past abandoned homes and huge heaps of debris. Reporters rode in front of us in a flatbed truck, captives for the moment, and unhappy they couldn’t interview the locals as we toured their devastated neighborhood. I promised to expedite the building of a new levee system and restore wetlands that could absorb storm surges. I swore never again would the federal government fail Americans as disgracefully as it had failed the people of New Orleans.

  We followed the tour with a series of policy speeches, on health care, national security, economic policy, the environment, and tax reform. I gave a speech in Columbus, Ohio, that envisioned the progress I hoped to achieve by the end of my first term in office, listing a number of bipartisan accomplishments that included a successful conclusion to the war in Iraq and most of our troops returned home. I wanted to run the kind of substantive campaign the press and public claim to want while they focus their attention on the horse race. They had quite a race running in the other party, and while we received dutiful attention for my campaign stops and policy speeches, it was usually relegated to the inside pages of the newspaper while the Obama-Clinton contest owned the front page.

  Then it was over. In the first week of June, on the night of the last Democratic primaries, Obama collected enough delegates to be the presumptive nominee. Hillary conceded and endorsed him a few days later. Turnout in the Democratic contests had set records. Even in some red states, more people had voted for Obama or Clinton than had supported me and the other Republican candidates. Obama looked on top of the world the night he clinched the nomination. He gave a speech that captivated his supporters, and most of the press. I made a speech that night, too. I didn’t want to concede to him any news cycle from that day on, if I could help it. It was a mistake in hindsight. I wasn’t going to own even a small share of the attention on the night a young African American with an exotic name, who had come from obscurity a few years before, captured the hearts and minds of millions of excited voters and won a major political party’s presidential nomination. Not much was noted in the press about my speech other than that I had the temerity to distract attention from my opponent’s triumph and that I’d spoken in front of a bright green background that looked odd on television.

  There would be other nights throughout the general election campaign when I would find it difficult if not impossible to compete with the publicity and excitement my opponent generated. I had two imperatives before me that were clear from the beginning of my contest with Barack Obama. The first was obvious. I was the more experienced public official, having had a career in the military as well as a career in politics. I had to make the case that experience was still crucially important in choosing a President. My military credential was more of an advantage than my long career in Congress, which wasn’t something that thrilled voters in 2008. It hampered my second, more important objective—convincing skeptical voters that I, too, could be counted on to change Washington.

  The only way I could persuade voters I would bring change as President was to conduct my campaign for the office in ways that were noticeably different from presidential campaigns of the past. But the idea wasn’t just tactical. I truly did want to campaign in a way that was more honest and, I hoped, inspiring. And to do that I needed my opponent to be my partner. I loved the story that Jack Kennedy and Barry Goldwater had agreed to travel together on the same plane in 1964 if Barry were to win the Republican nomination, and hold a series of informal debates or dueling speeches in small and large communities across the country. We proposed something along that line to the Obama campaign. We suggested holding ten joint town hall–style debates, and traveling together to each of them. They countered by offering one town hall event on the Fourth of July, and the three traditional debates the Commission on Presidential Debates had already proposed. They were silent about the plane.

  That was disappointing. I’m not naive. I had a lot to gain. Obama had a lot to lose. He was the front-runner. He had lots more money than we had. He was getting a lot more attention than I was. And he owned the change message. All those advantages might have been risked or at least diminished had he agreed to share the spotlight with his opponent in such a novel way. But I believed then that by our willingness to trust voters’ intelligence and decency, and to an extent, to trust each other, we would have called out some of the BS in the way politics is routinely practiced, and conducted ourselves in a way that we and the country could be proud of. I loved the idea. I suspect he saw the appeal of it, too. But front-runners are risk averse, challengers are risk-takers, and that’s how his advisors likely saw the proposal, as an unnecessary risk. Yet his very decision to run had been a risk. I hoped some of that daring would have influenced his decisions in the general election campaign. But he decided not to squander his advantages. It was the prudent thing to do.

  When Nancy Reagan and Lyndon Johnson’s daughters invited us to hold joint town halls at the Reagan and Johnson libraries, we agreed. The Obama campaign declined. When we agreed to abide by campaign spending limits in order to receive the millions of dollars in public financing we needed, the Obama campaign, knowing they had an immense financial advantage, announced Obama would be the first nominee to opt out of the public financing system. That was also the prudent thing to do. We expected that the press would support our position on debates and public financing, and punish Obama for rejecting them. That turned out to be a misjudgment on my part. Most reporters liked the idea of joint town halls and spending limits. But they liked the Obama story better, and the fallout he experienced for rejecting them was negligible.

  There isn’t any way the loser in an election can criticize the press without appearing to be a sore loser. So I won’t complain here. Not much, anyway. Most of the coverage I received was fine. I didn’t agree with all of it. I disliked the criticism I received, although I earned some of it. I also understand why my opponent’s campaign made such good copy and attracted more attention than ours did. He wa
s new news. I wasn’t. And most reporters were more aligned with his politics than mine. Above all, his success seemed to transcend political tribalism and represent real progress against the racism that had afflicted our society from its founding, and reporters, like most people, didn’t want to see that progress set back.

  The press had a finger on the scale for Obama, both in the primaries and the general election. They gave him more favorable attention than they gave his opponents. They defended him from attacks, unfair and fair, and criticized his opponents for making them. I don’t think that’s disputable or surprising. The favoritism wasn’t universal and it didn’t determine the outcome. It was just a challenge we had to factor into our decision making. I didn’t like it. But given the media environment we live in today, where we can restrict information gathering to sources that tell us only what we want to hear, where crackpot conspiracy websites like InfoWars and Breitbart, and Russian propagandists such as Russia Today and WikiLeaks, are taken more seriously by their credulous followers than journalism practiced with professional standards and ethics, the problem of routine liberal bias in the media seems positively quaint.

  I’m familiar with how reporters can favor and protect one candidate over another. I had that advantage in the primaries in 2000, and I know it when I see it. It’s certainly helpful, but you can’t win a presidential election on better press alone. The irony here is that Obama didn’t need it. He was running a hell of a campaign. He had bottled lightning in a political environment that couldn’t have been more favorable to the party out of power. He was in accord with the country and the times. He was the biggest political show on earth.

  His first trip overseas as the Democratic nominee in July generated much more excitement than mine had. He stopped in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as Jordan, Israel, and the West Bank before visiting the capitals of our main European allies. He was greeted effusively not just by the government leaders he met. His public reception at some of his stops was rapturous. He gave a speech in Berlin that drew a crowd estimated to be as many as a quarter of a million people. It was a spectacle that led the news broadcasts and dominated the front page. He had something going on all right, and figuring out how to challenge it and divert a little more interest in our direction was as difficult as it was imperative.

  Win or lose, I didn’t want anyone ever to have fair grounds to criticize us for resorting to any kind of racist dog whistling. I wanted to win. I wanted to be President. But I, too, recognized the social progress Obama’s candidacy represented, and I didn’t want to impede it by inciting, even with a wink and a nod here and there or with language that had double meanings, the prejudices that have marred our history. I cautioned staff repeatedly, and senior staff reiterated it repeatedly, to steer clear of any communication, formal or informal, or an event or any person that could be interpreted as suggesting race as a reason to vote for me and against Obama. That meant our criticism of him and any of his associates had to be carefully screened for a meaning we didn’t intend. We were on the receiving end of quite a number of attacks by his campaign and assorted Democratic entities on people working with or associated with us in some way. We had to be more restrained in that line of attack, as we would learn again and again. The press was primed to prosecute any hint of racism. Every now and again I had to chastise someone introducing me or warming up the crowd or asking me a question for what could be construed as at least an implicit racist remark. Emphasizing Obama’s middle name. Claiming he was a secret Kenyan or Arab or Muslim, and somehow disloyal to the country. Questioning his patriotism, his parentage, his travels and experiences as a young man. The occasional vulgar or cruel or racist shout from the crowd. I condemned them when I heard them.

  I forbade all mention of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s controversial pastor, whose sermons had been the reason Obama felt it necessary to give his much-praised speech on race the previous March. Fred Davis, who led our media team, had prepared an ad that attacked Obama’s relationship with Wright. I rejected it. In July, Fred, Rick Davis, and Steve Schmidt proposed a kind of jujitsu ad that used my opponent’s strength against him. In this case, the ad used Obama’s global celebrity to raise doubts about his preparation for the job of President, and by inference contrasted his experience unfavorably to mine. I thought it was fair play, and still do.

  It was a thirty-second spot with a female narrator. Over images of his Berlin event, and pop culture celebrities of the time, and above the sound of a crowd chanting Obama’s name, the narrator intoned, “He’s the biggest celebrity in the world, but is he ready to lead?” That was it. The ad took a couple quick shots at his positions on oil drilling and taxes, but they were sort of beside the point. Its purpose was to suggest that his sudden celebrity was not based on real achievements or better ideas. It didn’t mention my record. It didn’t need to. We would do that in our earned media. Our message through that summer had two parts: ready on day one and country first. My war record, Navy career, long involvement with national security issues, long-standing relationships with foreign leaders, and record of bipartisan accomplishments demonstrated more experience than could my opponent, who had been a state senator and briefly a U.S. senator before becoming “the biggest celebrity in the world.” My support for the surge, and other views that weren’t always popular with Republican leaders or the conservative base, as well as my conduct as a POW were presented as proof that I put the country before myself. It was our best case at the time, and it worked. By the end of the month we had put a dent in Obama’s lead, and in August a few polls, including Gallup’s, had me slightly ahead.

  Everything we did was scrutinized by the other side and the media for any trace of below-the-belt insinuations. That included the “celebrity” ad. Questions were raised about whether we used Paris Hilton’s and Britney Spears’s images in the ad to appeal to prejudiced white voters’ fear of miscegenation or if we had darkened Obama’s skin in the photograph we used. Silly shit like that was tossed at us regularly. We didn’t intend to play those games. We didn’t want to play those games. And we didn’t play those games. We didn’t want to set the country back or undermine the social significance of Obama’s candidacy. We took pains to stay clear of that stuff. We denounced anyone who resorted to it, and we were proud we did.

  Nevertheless, we were frequently accused without evidence of racist insinuations or worse. Newsweek ran a cover story in May that didn’t just imply but openly assumed we would make or secretly support racist attacks on my opponent. The Obama campaign and reporters relying on Democratic opposition research regularly assailed members of my campaign staff, my donors, and supporters for their businesses and associations. But we were restrained from doing the same by our own and the media’s insistence that we take extreme care to avoid the appearance of appealing to people’s prejudices. Our surrogates were criticized for making fun of Obama’s experience as a community organizer, which I sort of regret. There’s nothing wrong with and probably much that’s admirable about the occupation. But our ridicule wasn’t racist, as some alleged. We were accused of racism for calling Bill Ayers, my opponent’s early supporter and former member of the Weather Underground, a terrorist despite the fact that he was white and had been involved in bombings at New York City’s police headquarters, the Pentagon, and the U.S. Capitol. When the housing market crashed in the fall, and with it much of the global credit system, Democrats fixed the blame on George Bush and his heir apparent, me. That’s politics. I would’ve done the same if I’d been them. When we responded by pointing out that the people who ran Fannie Mae, one of the institutions responsible for the housing market collapse, were all Obama supporters, including its CEO, Franklin Raines, we were accused of invoking race because Raines was black. It was the predicament we had to learn to operate within and not take personally.

  I didn’t like it, of course, at all. But in only one instance did I take lasting offense at a false accusation. Citing reports that fall that racist insults were shouted
from the crowd at some of my events, John Lewis, a personal hero of mine, accused our campaign of sowing hatred, compared me to George Wallace, and said that, like Wallace, we were creating the kind of political atmosphere that got four little girls killed in a Birmingham church. I couldn’t believe it, and I couldn’t forgive it. I still can’t.

  • • •

  My biggest predicament was my difficulty convincing voters I was an agent of change. That was our principal concern as we assembled a list of potential vice presidents that summer. I wanted to choose someone I respected, and I wanted the choice to represent change. We had a list of names with twenty to thirty people. The lawyers vetting candidates for us, led by the able A. B. Culvahouse, a prominent Washington attorney, did a public records search for all of them, and several were removed from the list. I admit I didn’t give the attention they deserved to all the prospects who remained on the list. I gave most thought to people with whom I had an established relationship. I thought a lot about choosing Mitt Romney. He had been my most formidable opponent in the primaries, and is a smart, capable, and appealing candidate with expertise in issues where I was a little deficient. Tim Pawlenty was another successful blue state governor I got along well with. Mike Bloomberg, a friend, brilliant businessman, and innovative mayor, was on the list, too.