Campaign 2000: The Power and The Story

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"He was just so damn engaging and fun to be with," said former Colorado Senator Gary Hart, who would be a groomsman at McCain's second marriage in 1980. "I was amazed at his total experience and his emotional management." The admiration and familiarity not only made McCain a very effective advocate for the Navy; it also got him thinking about himself as the Distinguished Gentleman from Somewhere. "He looked at those guys," says Jay Smith, McCain's early political guru, "and said, I can do this job."

And so there came a warm, cloudy spring day in 1981 when John McCain buried his father in Arlington National cemetery, next to his grandfather's grave, the latest McCain, in a line dating back to the Revolutionary War, to march from training to combat to valor and into the ground at Arlington. It would be a day of two ceremonies. That afternoon McCain signed his final discharge papers, turned in his identification card and wore his uniform for the last time. "It seemed to me that I was disconnected from my previous life," he says of that day. "I was concerned whether I would be able to continue their tradition."

He may have departed the military for politics that day, but he never really stopped fighting. McCain's political career, from Congress to the Senate to a presidential campaign, can seem like a seamless extension of his Navy background, even of his genetic code. "He came from his grandfather and father," says high school friend Malcolm Matheson. "Both of them were small men and tough and scrappy. This man can do no other than that." His campaigns were less about issues and ideas than about hard work and grit. For him, the political is personal. He didn't much care whether you were a Democrat or a Republican, only whether you were with him or against him. His first tutor in politics, in fact, was Arizona's Democratic Senator Morris Udall. And with a prisoner's hungry reflex, McCain always had an eye for an opportunity. "I see an opening," he says, "and I go through it"--first into Congress, then the Senate, and now the political World Series.

He succeeded not only because he had a great story to tell; other war heroes, from Bob Kerrey to Bob Dole, have failed to transfer the luster of their medals to the grimy battle for the presidency. Is McCain, who insists that he is no hero, just cannier and more ruthless about marketing his heroism? Or was he born with instincts, which prison sharpened, for seizing advantage and riding it as far as it might take him? "No one will work harder," says McCain, as if that will be enough.