Game Change (37 page)

By primary night, no one had a clue as to what might happen. Romney had pulled most of his advertising to focus on Florida—that was good. Giuliani had failed to make the smart move and campaign along the affluent South Carolina coast, where there were scads of pro-choice voters—another boon to McCain. But when the polls closed, neither the networks nor the AP were prepared to project a winner. The early returns were screwy, the forecasting models were messed up. It was going to take a while.

In the McCains’ hotel suite, the tension was nearly unbearable. Always optimistic, Graham began doing his own analysis as the results from certain counties came in, predicting victory. But McCain didn’t want to hear happy talk, even from Lindsey. Don’t say that, he snarled through gritted teeth. You don’t know that. Just shut up.

Watching her husband pace around the room only made Cindy more anxious. “Is everything going to be okay?” she whispered to Davis, on the brink of tears.

When word arrived after eight o’clock that McCain had narrowly won, joy washed over Cindy, excitement over her husband—which was unusual. Normally for McCain, the relief of not losing was a more powerful emotion than the thrill of winning. But South Carolina was different. It was about vindication, about slaying demons, about putting paid to the past. McCain wasn’t a drinker, but that night, there was champagne.

Yet the sweetness of South Carolina lasted only a few hours. McCain now faced what everyone expected would be the decisive primary of the season: Florida, on January 29. With Huckabee and Giuliani effectively finished, McCain was finally going one-on-one against the rival he most disdained, Romney. If McCain prevailed in Florida, the nomination would be his. But if he lost, he would be heading into Super Tuesday mortally wounded, facing a candidate with tens of millions of dollars in personal wealth and little apparent reluctance to spend it.

For the next ten days, Romney campaigned like a conservative incarnation of Bill Clinton circa 1992. “The economy, stupid” was his leitmotif. McCain talked of little besides Iraq, slamming Romney—in a dishonest way—for wanting to prematurely withdraw American troops. (Earlier in the year, Romney had said he favored “a private timetable” for drawing down U.S. forces.) But by the weekend before the vote, the polls remained razor-edge close. McCain and Romney were in a dead heat.

Both men had long hoped that Charlie Crist would be their ticket to ride in the Sunshine State. But after all the hide-and-seek of 2007, Crist seemed to have decided to sit out the primary. “I’m not going to endorse anybody; whoever’s going to win is going to win,” he told his adviser LeMieux on the Friday night before the Tuesday primary. The assurance quickly went out from Cristworld to the Republican candidates: Charlie wasn’t going to put his finger on the scale.

The next day, however, Crist, out sailing with his fiancee, felt a pang of conscience. The governor’s internal polling showed McCain slipping as Romney poured money into the state. Crist harkened back to the endorsement McCain had given him in 2006.
The guy’s been really good to me
, he thought.
I can’t leave my friend behind.

The following night, McCain was in St. Petersburg for the Pinellas County Lincoln Day Dinner. Crist was slated to introduce him. Upstairs in McCain’s suite at the Hilton where the event was being held, he asked John for a word alone—and told him he would be endorsing him at the dinner downstairs in a few minutes.

Crist’s intervention propelled McCain to a five-point win in Florida. The other Republican candidates and their advisers may have seen Charlie as a liar, a manipulator, and a no-account betrayer, but he was all right with John. To Crist’s betrothed on primary night, McCain said, “God bless him.”

THE NEXT THREE WEEKS may have been the most glorious of McCain’s political career. After Florida, much of his party fell into formation and smartly saluted him. Giuliani dropped out the next day and threw his backing to McCain. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Texas governor Rick Perry climbed on board the day after that. McCain’s face graced the cover of
Time
, above the tagline “The Phoenix.” And on February 5, Super Tuesday, he racked up a clutch of big-state wins—California, Illinois, New Jersey, New York—that put him within shouting distance of clinching the nomination.

And yet there was still one enemy lurking that potentially had the power to hang McCain:
The New York Times.
The only questions were whether the Iseman story was in fact a noose around his neck, and whether the paper would ever try to cinch it tight.

All along, Schmidt had assumed that the piece would eventually run. The
Times
had invested too much time and effort in pursuing the matter just to let it drop. He was even more certain when, over the weekend of February 16 and 17, the campaign heard that
The New Republic
was working on its own story about the internal deliberations at the
Times
over whether to publish the opus. There was no way the
Times
would let itself be scooped or embarrassed, Schmidt believed. The Iseman story was coming and coming soon, Schmidt told McCain.

On February 20, it came. Just hours before the piece went live on the Web, Schmidt and Salter learned from the
Times
that it was being posted and was set to run in the paper the next day. McCain and his wife were campaigning in Toledo, Ohio. Schmidt and Salter had to get there fast. They raced to Reagan airport in Washington, but their flight was delayed, so they grabbed a plane to Detroit instead, rented a car, and drove the sixty miles south. Along the way, they studied the story on their BlackBerrys.

It ran to more than three thousand words, the majority devoted to McCain’s dealings with lobbyists. But the story also contended that, in 1999, some of McCain’s aides and advisers had confronted him over an alleged affair with Iseman, and that McCain had “acknowledged behaving inappropriately and pledged to keep his distance” from her. It also recounted the Weaver-Iseman dustup, with Weaver confirming by email and on the record that he had told Vicki to stay away from John. Weaver’s chief concern, he said, was that Iseman had been bragging to others that she had professional sway over McCain, which threatened the senator’s image as a reformer.

It was nearly midnight when Schmidt and Salter finally reached Toledo. They found the McCains in their hotel suite. Cindy was distraught, had clearly been weeping. John was hardly in better shape. He said he was sure the campaign was over. That the story wasn’t politically survivable. That he wouldn’t be the nominee.

“I don’t know how we get through this,” McCain said.

Schmidt was having none of it.

“This is going to be fine,” he said. “The story is outrageous. Someone’s going to get crushed on this, and it’s going to be
The New York Times!’

Emphatically, Schmidt laid out his plan for a counterattack. First thing the next morning, McCain would hold a press conference for the reporters traveling with him, Cindy by his side. We’re not going to put a clock on this, Schmidt said. You’re going to take every question. You’ll deny the story, you’ll express your unhappiness with the
Times
, and you’ll do it in the proper tone. “You can’t get up there looking pissed off,” Schmidt said. “You have to be measured in the response.”

Although both McCains were furious at Weaver for having gone on the record in the story, Salter told McCain that he had to speak positively about his former wingman at the press conference; they needed to avoid giving Weaver an excuse to peddle anything further to the press. As for Iseman, they all agreed that McCain should call her a friend, which was what he said she was.

The next morning, John and Cindy met the press. In a dark suit, blue shirt, and blue tie, McCain performed to his advisers’ precise specifications. He was calm. He was collected. He showed not the slightest flash of even the mildest annoyance. He answered many questions with a simple yes or no. He said that Weaver was a friend. And that the same was true of Iseman.

Asked about the
Times
, he said, “This whole story is based on anonymous sources . . . I’m very disappointed in that.”

The press conference not only achieved its intended effect but had some ancillary benefits. McCain never believed he would see the day when the raving right rallied around him in unison, yet that was what was happening now. Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham—every one of them scorned McCain. Yet within hours, they’d all hastened to his defense, because they hated the
Times
even more. (“For the first time in history, John McCain won talk radio,” Charlie Black drolly observed.)

The McCainiacs had feared that the
Times
story would open up the Pandora’s box that was the senator’s personal life. Although
The Washington Post
and
Newsweek
promptly ran their own similar anonymously sourced versions of the Iseman tale, the stories disappeared without a trace. The unequivocal denials of McCain and Iseman, and the criticism of the
Times
for venturing into tabloid territory, produced the same dynamic as had the paper’s 2006 piece on the Clintons’ marriage: the Gray Lady was forced to play defense, and McCain assumed the self-righteous pose of the aggrieved. Never again would the campaign face another serious press inquiry about the candidate’s personal life.

In defusing the Iseman story, McCain cleared the final remaining obstacle to his nomination. But the victory came at a cost. For two years, McCain’s relationship with the media had been souring, but this turned things from sour to rancid—at least in his mind, where it counted. The campaign’s dealings with the
Times
in particular would never be the same again, either. There was no turning back, no way to restore even a modicum of trust with the most important print outlet in the country.

HAVING DODGED BULLET AFTER bullet, McCain clinched his party’s nomination on March 4 by winning the primaries in Texas, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Vermont, and concluding one of the greatest political comebacks in modern American history. The next morning, he flew from Dallas to Washington to have lunch at the White House and claim his first reward: the endorsement of one of the least popular Republicans in the country. The task of simultaneously embracing and maintaining sufficient distance from George W. Bush presented McCain with his initial political challenge as the presumptive nominee. He handled it awkwardly, garbling his words as he told reporters in the Rose Garden, “I intend to have as much possible campaigning events together as is in keeping with the president’s heavy schedule.”

The weeks between March and June, when the general election would unofficially begin, should have been a period of enormous opportunity for McCain. His approval rating, according to Gallup, was 67 percent, as high as it had ever been. In head-to-head polling matchups, he was running even with both Obama, by then the likely Democratic nominee, and Clinton. The two Democrats were pummeling each other, spending many tens of millions of dollars to do it, and the rancor in their party was growing every day. McCain, on the other hand, had an extended period to regroup after more than a year of chaos. He had won the nomination with no money, no organization, no well-defined message, and no sophisticated strategy. Now he had a chance to acquire all those things. The question was whether he would even try.

On April 2, McCain arrived in Annapolis, Maryland, for one of the stops along his weeklong “Service to America” biography tour. The idea was for him to travel to places of significance in his life story, reintroducing himself to voters and redefining his image. He would visit his high school in Alexandria, Virginia; military installations in Mississippi and Florida where he’d been based; his political HQ in Arizona; and Annapolis, which he entered as a plebe in 1954. After leading the pledge of allegiance at a local diner, where scrapple-scarfing patrons huddled in booths beneath a sign that read “DELICIOUS PANCAKES, MAPLE SYRUP, MARGARINE,” he arrived at a grander setting: the Navy football stadium. But no throng of midshipmen-cum-McCainiacs surrounded the candidate on the podium. In front of him instead were sixty folding chairs occupied by wizened dignitaries; behind him were thirty-five thousand seats, occupied by no one.

McCain was cranky about the setting. “What is going on with this?” he asked his aides. But the speech was hardly better than the TV pictures. He sought to explain how a callow, shallow hellion had become a man of honor. At the academy, McCain said, he was “childish” and prone to “petty acts of insubordination.” But then came the horrors he suffered in Vietnam, and the lessons Annapolis had sought to teach him took hold.

“It changed my life forever,” McCain said. “I had found my cause: citizenship in the greatest nation on earth.” But his next sentence— “What is lost, in a word, is citizenship”—sounded like a non sequitur, and that’s because it was. The prompter was at fault: it had devoured a page of his script.

Nevertheless, McCain’s consiglieri professed themselves pleased with the tour. “It was open-field running for us,” McKinnon told a reporter. “While the Democrats continued to attack each other and claw their way to the bottom, McCain was able to communicate a positive message and create a compelling narrative about the values he learned growing up that make him best qualified to be president.”

But for many Republicans, the biography tour began to instill pessimism about the party’s nominee. McCain had failed to drive a message. He had failed to bore in on the weaknesses of Obama. He had failed to make news of any kind. The press coverage of the tour was perfunctory when not derisory. On
The Daily Show
, Jon Stewart dubbed it the “Monsters of Nostalgia Tour,” cracking that it had “all the allure of an Atlantic City senior citizens’ outing without all the awkward sexual tension.”

Republicans worried, too, that McCain’s organization was ramping up far too sluggishly. Although its leadership—Black, Davis, McKinnon, Salter, and Schmidt—was well regarded, it seemed stretched too thin. The campaign had just four full-time finance staffers and no significant online fund-raising presence. In March, it brought in a mere $4 million over the Web and through direct mail.