Campaign 2000: The Power and The Story

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The story has helped protect him from his own faults, his ethical lapses, his ugly outbursts, the abandoned first marriage, because he admits to failures that sound more heroic than most people's successes, and it is hard to judge someone who has made choices most civilians can't even imagine. It's not just that he survived being hung by ropes from two broken arms and beaten senseless; it's that when his captors learned of his famous father and offered to let him go home, he refused unless they let the rest of the prisoners go as well. Such conduct enthralls a generation that aches for heroes and doubts the moral detour it took during the years John McCain was becoming the icon of Duty, Honor and Country. So compelling is the Story that it has helped bring him here, to a dead heat in New Hampshire with the Texas Governor: the man to whom much has been given against the man from whom much was taken away.

The question is whether, having come so far, he is now a prisoner all over again, this time of his biography. He has traded on it for so long you wonder whether he can break away from it and make the story not about him but about us; whether, having caught his audience, brightened the lights, earned his newsmagazine cover, he can stand up and tell us where he wants to go and what he wants to do. That way, voters might get to judge whether the events that changed his life would help him change ours. Or whether, as a longtime observer says, his bio is all he has.

It was no accident that the first four questions McCain faced in last week's Republican debate were not about Medicare or Chechnya or Microsoft; they were all about him. Just how bad is your temper, Senator, and why do some of the people who know you best dislike you most? Why are people whispering that your years in prison left you slightly unhinged?

Well, McCain replied, as he has all along, he speaks his mind and tells the truth: "It is very clear to all," he said Thursday night, "the lobbyists and special-influence people who run Washington know that if John McCain is President, things are going to be a lot different." But there is more to the charges than that. The whispering campaign aims to turn his story against him: he's not really like the rest of us, give him a medal but don't make him President. "I attribute it all to the abuse," says a former Senator after cataloging McCain's explosions. "He has a very short fuse and blows quickly," adds a Senate staff member, part of the faceless choir that has haunted McCain for weeks now. "That would bother me in a President, who has to be disciplined. I do not believe his temper is controlled."

And so last week, the McCain campaign caught the grenade and tossed it back. McCain's medical records, including psychiatric reports and a virtual orthopedic encyclopedia of his broken bones, were released. "Patient seems to have made an excellent readjustment over the past year," read his mental evaluation just a year after his return. "There is no sign of emotional difficulty." Years of subsequent evaluations found no clue that anything was rattling around in McCain's cupboards. Besides answering the critics, the campaign knew the release of the records brought a second benefit: We've had the book and the documentary; now comes the unabridged version, a chance to tell the Story one more time.