Campaign 2000: In This Corner...

The fix was in. John McCain's Republican opponents had been waiting for months to take him down a peg. His issue, campaign-finance reform, was up for debate in the Senate. One after another, Senators from his own party baited him, hoping to bring out his famous temper. "They tried to get him to explode on the floor," says McCain's ally, Democrat Russ Feingold. "They tried as hard as they could." McCain rocked in his shoes; he folded and then unfolded his arms; he fidgeted with the papers on his lectern. But the man once crowned Senator Hothead did not blow. As he remembers, "I had to say to myself, 'Look, John, you're not going to gain anything by displaying anger here.'"

When voters put their presidential candidates on the examining table, the first test is whether they have enough "fire in the belly" for the job. Americans like to see whether their future President can make it through a tough campaign. When he gets to the Oval Office, the theory goes, that fire will get him through the even tougher days and nights. For McCain, the challenge is not to prove he has the fire, but the opposite: that if he carries the McCain flame into the White House, it won't set the mansion ablaze.

Of course, President John McCain would not be the first Commander in Chief to snap his pencils out of pique. Bill Clinton is famous for his purple rages, usually directed at his staff. Eisenhower's fits were volatile but short. Kennedy said anger was a luxury, but his 1962 negotiations with steel companies over price controls were set back when he quipped that his father was right to have called steel executives "s.o.b.s." Nixon's anger was more corrosive. He expelled pure poison on the White House tapes and had particular enemies chased by the irs. L.B.J.'s long-standing feud with Bobby Kennedy caused Johnson to descend into paranoia at times.

McCain's fire has been on display for a while, and it has often served a useful purpose. It kept him going for 5 1/2 years as a POW. It sustained him through withering opposition to his attempts to overhaul campaign finance and regulate tobacco. Precisely because he is willing to rip up the rule book and stomp around a little bit, McCain has won the hearts of those who recognize that if Washington is going to be changed, it requires wrinkling a few ties.