Loyal Opposition (Juan McCain & his allies) [Barf Alert]

John McCain and his Republican allies challenged the president on his own turf—and won. Now that the senator has gained momentum, can he really make the GOP grand again?

My party has gone astray," John McCain says, busily signing books at Warwick's, a bookshop in La Jolla, California, late last year. Hundreds of people are lined up around the block to get a glimpse of the GOP's in-house reformer. He is hawking his fourth best-seller, Character Is Destiny, an anecdote-rich guide to idealism for young readers, and the senator teases the store clerk about books that aren't in proper piles, that he's going to have to put the kid on a watch list. He's exhibiting the same on-the-trail crackle that made him such a barnstorming force through New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Michigan in 2000. And when it comes to his dismay about the Republican party, McCain's whispery rasp builds in enthusiasm: "I don't want to leave it. I want to bring it back."

The Arizona senator is jacked-up on lemon squares, as former middies, surfer dudes, and stroller-pushing family guys file past, all with the same plea: Please run. We need you badly. On the back walls of the store are pictures of other book-selling politicians whose appearances at Warwick's boosted name recognition for a possible White House bid: Rudy Giuliani, Barbara Boxer, and, of course, Hillary Clinton. Months before the rest of America begins to focus on all the campaigns leading up to the next presidential election, this is the season of the proto-primary, a less-formal series of silent-whistle stops, attended by only the truly devoted.

McCain barely interrupts the banter to answer a quick call from Senator Lindsey Graham. There's a snag in a late-breaking deal with the White House over the so-called torture bill. But McCain puts the phone—and concerns—aside to grin and grip for each book-buyer's digital camera. He keeps things moving briskly; his every rushing move indicates the ticking clock, and the passing of time is evident all over his face. His dark eyebrows have whitened, and the scar on his left temple—the site of an excised melanoma—looks like a Ziploc seam. If he runs in 2008, he will turn 72 years old shortly before Election Day, an advanced but not unprecedented age. Ronald Reagan was 69 when he was elected in 1980; Bob Dole was 73 in 1996.

Since his failed White House bid in 2000, McCain has existed as a senator who is equal parts Arizona lawmaker and sagacious talking head. A 20-year veteran of the chamber, he operates skillfully among the 99 other senators in the rituals of deference and sabotage. Similarly, his relationship with the White House has been fraught but productive, with McCain backing President Bush's aims in Iraq yet still vigilantly probing the conduct of the war.

But this past winter, McCain reminded all parties of his inner renegade, reappearing on talk shows, on the cover of Newsweek, and on the front pages of newspapers across the country, in the midst of his latest brinkmanship with the president. The White House threatened to issue its first-ever veto if the bill—which McCain spearheaded, declaring what soldiers and spies can and can't do during interrogation—reached the Oval Office. Vice President Dick Cheney followed up by giving McCain and his Republican allies—Graham and Senator John Warner—a stern talking-to. Their chastisement was echoed when the president himself declared that "no concessions" would be made. Nevertheless, McCain refused to back down, and the torture bill won a 90–9 vote in the Senate, followed by hands-down approval in the House.

Central to the senator's fame—and his victory in the torture debate—is his own five-and-a-half-year captivity in the Hanoi Hilton. For the influential donors and pundits who treat the presidential race like a crucial casting decision, McCain offers a heroic persona—a kind of post-prison Nelson Mandela in a Top Gun flight suit—plus the hard-won modesty of a chastened zealot. He speaks out of turn only rarely these days, and almost never about the trauma of his past. But on the torture issue he achieved one thing that hardly anyone has been able to do in the Bush years: getting the White House to make an about-face.

It could never have come to that without McCain's alliance with the two senators who protected his flanks. Warner, the stately Virginian who chairs the Armed Services committee, represents the Rockefeller Republican segment of the party, and his tough-on-defense persona is moderated by more lenient social views than those of the party's evangelical crusaders. (A decade ago, Warner undermined Oliver North's Senate bid in his home state of Virginia.) "This goes to the fundamental core of how Americans feel about themselves and how we all want to be viewed in the world," Warner says, referring to the bill. "It speaks not only to our protection but indeed our survival."

In 2003, Graham, an eight-year veteran of the House, assumed 100-year-old Strom Thurmond's South Carolina seat in the Senate. He's a former JAG who combines an insider's knowledge of the military with a Bob Jones conservatism routinely applauded in his home state. "If we use degrading techniques, it will do far more damage than any information received from a detainee," Graham explains. "We lose the moral high ground if we miss the big theme that our behavior and our conduct will help us win the war."

None of the three has openly renounced the White House, but the trio issued a gut check to an administration that has often branded critics as traitors. And with the president's poll numbers at a troubling ebb, and congressional Republicans on a public-opinion slide, McCain is emerging as the guy who bucked the White House in favor of a more appealing set of Republican values. Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, McCain's confidant and torture-bill supporter, explains, "John always tries to do what he thinks is right and will stick with that, even if it costs him politically. It comes from his many years of experience, and his years of service and sacrifice in prison."

Of course, McCain has always had a bit of the showman in him, and that's the gripe that still dogs him: He's a party of one, a run-and-gun bully, a squawking exposed nerve. He's been a talk-show regular and a cloakroom pariah. And now he's trying to reshape an entire party in his own image.

Graham dubs the White House's grudging acceptance of the torture bill "one of the more dramatic moments in 2005." Warner, who coaxed the measure through the Armed Services committee, recalls the dramatic reconciliation at the White House—when the president finally reached out and shook McCain's hand and agreed to sign his bill—as "rather touching." For these two men to take McCain's side means they, too, will see their switchboard light up with Rush Limbaugh?orchestrated callers asking why they supported "the Al-Qaeda Bill of Rights."

Such pressure comes with the territory for the so-called Gang of Fourteen, a bipartisan centrist alliance that often rescues the Senate from its most bitter impasses. All three senators are in this coalition—along with senators Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, Olympia Snowe of Maine, and Robert Byrd of West Virginia—and each supports the war's aims but has questioned its conduct: Warner has chided the Pentagon for its disinformation campaign inside Iraq and the president himself for not adequately explaining the war to the nation, recommending a reprise of FDR's "fireside chats." Graham took the lead in denouncing the Abu Ghraib abuses. "What are we fighting for?" he asked in a hearing at the time the prison pictures surfaced. "To be like Saddam Hussein?" And as for McCain, his outspokenness is more precision-targeted than ever: He tells me, proudly, "I've been battling with Rumsfeld for three years."

In addition, McCain used one of his increasingly frequent Sunday talk-show appearances to suggest the White House was wrong to have skirted wiretap laws: "The president should come to Congress with a proposal," he said to Fox's Chris Wallace. "Why not come to Congress? We can sort this all out." Of course, saying anything that the ruling party doesn't want said has its risks, even if you happen to belong to that ruling party. Former Nebraska senator Bob Kerrey, the Democratic maverick who bucked the Clinton White House, has a warning for today's Gang of Fourteen and its McCain-Warner-Graham subset: "Hang together or you'll hang separately."

McCain is no stranger to the fickle nature of political opinion, or to the frontier lingo that often illustrates it. "One day chicken, the next day feathers," he says. His popularity is a great asset for the party and yet sometimes a liability for his goals, given the jealousy it inspires. His magnetism is a strange political commodity that the president doesn't seem to know whether to envy or embrace. In fact, McCain and Bush have gone through so many episodes of baring and burying the hatchet, it's hard to divine what they really think of each other.

In 2000, one of the oddest push-pull relationships in American politics began with an upset. McCain humiliated Bush in a resounding New Hampshire victory. Then, with the help of his father's old friends in South Carolina, Bush summoned dark forces to smear McCain. Later that summer, McCain stood beside Bush in tepid displays of support. After Inauguration Day, McCain succeeded in snuffing out the soft-money machinery that had fueled Bush's victory. In the 2004 election, McCain twice considered John Kerry's VP offers and decried the Democrat's swift-boat attackers. Even so, McCain ultimately had Bush's back, arguing that Bush was the best man to lead the nation to military victory, although McCain was also using the occasion to renew his loyalty vows to the GOP.

One of the ways Bush dispatched McCain in 2000 was to paint him as a loose cannon who couldn't be trusted with the launch codes. But these days the senator's cooler head prevails. It has been just six years that the McCain family was roughed up by South Carolina's local machine, led by former Governor Carroll Campbell, who recently died after battling Alzheimer's disease. When asked about this old antagonist, however, McCain casts him, without hesitation, as a friend from their days serving in the House: "He was a lovely man. He was really huge in making South Carolina Republican."

A wise politician knows to praise a dead man who can do him no harm, particularly when the one in question is a legendary leader in a state where votes must again be won. With the 2008 Republican primaries looming over the horizon, McCain is now working hard to win over those he antagonized in 2000, including the Reverend Jerry Falwell, with whom the senator recently sat down. "He asked to come see me," he says of the visit. "And I was happy to see him."

This seems a far cry from the haranguing Virginia Beach speech that McCain delivered in 2000, when he assailed Falwell and Pat Robertson in their own state—and was sent packing by primary voters. His alliance with Graham and conservative ideologue Gary Bauer now has those same Christian-right leaders seeing no other Republican with McCain's juice, with his proven ability to bring a wide number of voters—from both parties—to the GOP's pro-life, pro-war, anti-spending platform. Still, McCain's relationship to the conservative activists is, according to Reaganite fund-raiser Richard Viguerie, "a work in progress, but not a lost cause."

If the race eventually narrows to McCain vs. Hillary Clinton, as early polling suggests, the choice will be stark, even though they both supported the Iraq War. The former First Lady will be hard-pressed to attract McCain-style crowds in the heartland. But she is adept enough to find weaknesses that won't appeal to independents and Democrats. There's the time, for instance, that McCain did a full embrace of Bush when the president's 2004 reelection was on the rocks. "He kissed him!" says former senator Kerrey. "McCain let Bush's lips touch him. Yuck!"

And given their recent discord, Bush might still find occasions to slap back at McCain when the senator next chooses to speak out against the White House. I ask McCain whether his success on the torture bill had perhaps been too resounding, whether Bush might find a way to punish him. "Oh, no, no, no, no, no," he says. "He and I have a very good relationship. That doesn't work in Washington. If you spent all your time doing that, you'd spend all your time getting even. At least I've learned that you can't hold a grudge."

McCain insists he is not taking revenge for past conflicts with Bush but preventing future ones for the country—and the possibility that brute behavior will mean harsher treatment for U.S. citizens who fall into captivity. But meanwhile, the White House is already undermining McCain's recent victory. Two weeks after the handshake at the White House, the Bush administration issued a "signing statement," accompanying the official anti-torture bill's enactment, which gave the president an out if a special case arose. McCain greets the news warily, saying that he believed the deal excluded any exceptions, that he would guard against any violations.

For all his purportedly growing rapport with Bush, McCain suggests there are still some exceptions to that, too. I ask the senator if the president, in all this closeness, had ever bestowed upon him the surest sign of bosom-buddyhood: a nickname. McCain pauses, considering all the unprintable monikers the president could have called him. "He may have," he says laughing. "But I've never heard it."

Back on that day in December when the president shook McCain's hand on the torture deal, the senator seemed more interested in his copy of The Baltimore Sun. He wanted to read his own words—delivered the day before, in the chapel of the Naval Academy—honoring the memory of one of his closest friends. Admiral William Lawrence was a former head of the academy, a fellow Hanoi Hilton detainee who tapped notes of support to his fellow prisoners through cell-block walls and scrawled a paean to Tennessee that later became his home state's official poem.

McCain breaks into an enviable sprint for a 69-year-old. He's determined to catch the little subway car that links the Senate to the senators' offices—a ride he takes a dozen times a day. I ask if he knew the poem that Admiral Lawrence wrote in captivity. "I knew everything about him," he says brusquely. "He was one of my closest friends." I clarify that I was just asking if the poem was something he had heard while in Hanoi or something that the admiral had revealed later.

His voice wobbly, McCain affirms that he had indeed heard early drafts. He is keeping his balance in the moving subway car, holding the newspaper with outstretched arms, in the limited gestures he's allowed from the broken and rebroken bones in his arms. He's reading his dear friend's obituary in the middle of a momentous day, and then he puts aside the enormity of it all to assume a ready-for-questions pose. He raises his eyebrows, stretching his eyelids so that welling tears won't spill out.

Minutes later, he's again clapping his loafers on shiny floors, heading to the Senate chamber for more votes. When he emerges from the cloakroom, we talk briefly about Mitt Romney, the Massachusetts governor who could be a main rival if McCain enters the race for the White House in 2008, especially in what pollsters call "the media primary" in New Hampshire. This very morning, Romney singled out McCain for derision during a Boston press conference, and it resounds like the first salvo in the GOP nomination fight. Romney remarks that McCain is more idealist than realist, that he resides "in a galaxy far, far away."

On the campaign trail, McCain had often compared himself to Luke Skywalker, a running gag that allowed his enemies to cast him as messianic, self-righteous, too maverick to be the main guy. Asked about Romney's characterization, McCain stiffens, clasping his lapel, and witheringly says, "Well, I have had some experience in war." His cheeks rise in a take-that expression as he drops his hand and his smile—and ducks into a senators-only elevator.

In the tiny lift, one security agent confines me to the tight space by the door, while another is flirting with McCain's lissome press secretary. McCain is shoulder-to-shoulder with his colleague from New York, Hillary Clinton. He is in full fun-guy mode, gently jabbing his elbow into her arm, kidding her about Jeanine Pirro, his own party's feckless—and now withdrawn—challenger to Senator Clinton's 2006 reelection: "Your opponent is coming on preeeettty strong. It's gonna be a late night that night! A real squeaker!"

The former First Lady is smiling, in an acknowledgment that he is, by dissing her opponent, complimenting her. "I know," she says. "She just gave another emotional press conference." They are jokey and cordial, for now. In all likelihood, McCain will be beckoned to campaign for whoever emerges as Hillary's eventual Senate challenger. When the doors open, he offers her the ladies-first lead into the basement passageway.

No one has a better chance at becoming the next leader of the free world than these two people. Their names are so recognizable, Kerrey points out, that an unknown would have to spend $35 million just to reach their level. And think of the intrigue: Will Hillary peel off the Rockefeller Republicans by assailing McCain's unwavering pro-life record? Will he attract suburbanites who have not yet shaken their Clinton fatigue? Or will he seem so much like her, given his moderate views, that the Bob Jones crowd will brand him as their Judas?

As the senators part ways, Clinton takes the footpath, with one Secret Service agent a few steps ahead of her and another a few behind. McCain resumes his full gallop toward another subway car. "Keep up," he says.

Someone needs to make a fake gringo dollar (like the GWB one) with McCain (”Juan McCain”), Lindsey Graham “Grah-Amnesty”, McConnell, and Lott getting their own versions.

And then we stuff the RNC postage paid envelopes full of them and send them back.

I think Lott’s pic will need some kind of villain mustache.

****His poll numbers can’t drop quick enough for me.****

You got that right! I don’t understand why he doesn’t run as a demo?

(THE ROMNEY REVOLUTION IS COMING ...... YOU IN ?)

Nope! Although I haven’t chosen another candidate yet, I have grave conserns about Romney’s electability. West of the Mississippi most have never heard of Romney, and those who have know only that he was elected governor of the most liberal state in the union (Mass). How does a conservative get all those libs to vote for him? One way might be to support abortions to pander to the liberal northeast voters to get yourself elected governor, then a few years later when you are running for president do a 180 and strongly come out as anti-abortion to pander back again to the GOP base. Not exactly qualities I am willing to vote for in a GOP Presidential candidate.

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