Campaign 2000: The Power and The Story

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If a politician's first campaign has a way of shaping him forever, then you can trace the patterns of his current New Hampshire ground war back to 1982 and the newly poured asphalt of Arizona's rapidly growing First District. Arizona may have been new to McCain, but he was not new to the state. In 1980 he had married Cindy Hensley, 18 years his junior and the daughter of one of the largest beer distributors in the country. "His history as a POW preceded him out here," she admits, "because my father was so proud of him." McCain went to work for his father-in-law as head of public relations, a job designed to increase his exposure. McCain met every local politician and businessman and community leader he could, joining in such activities as a local anti-litter campaign to make his face known. But in the end it took some luck for him to find his opening. John Rhodes, the 20-year Republican minority leader from Phoenix, decided not to seek re-election, and the McCains closed on a new house in his district on the very same day.

McCain hit the streets. In the 110[degree] Arizona summer heat, he went door to door, block by block, meeting people, wowing them with his easy charm and his great story. He told voters he had served in Washington, how his relationship with Armed Services chairman John Tower had helped bring a contract to build helicopters to a company in the First District. In the course of the slog, he contracted skin cancer and wore through three pairs of shoes, inspiring his wife to bronze the third.

His supporters were called McCain's navy, and the new civilian still remembered how to inspire the crew. Talking to a group of truck drivers at the beer distributorship where he worked, he joked, "You guys need to put my bumper stickers on your trucks, you need to tell your wives and you need to spread the word. Because if I lose, I'm going to be running this company someday and I'll fire half of you and the other half will be miserable."

It was in this race that McCain first tested his powers of inoculation, which have served him well ever since. He didn't have to worry about critics raising the question of his womanizing and the collapse of his first marriage because McCain had said flat out, as he does to this day, that these failures were his fault. He instructed his adviser Smith not to constantly harp on the Story. "He wasn't comfortable exploiting it," Smith recalls. "'Whatever you do, be tasteful,' he would say. 'I don't want to be the POW candidate. I want to be John McCain from Arizona.'" Yet he was prepared to roll out the artillery himself when he needed it.

From the start, McCain was attacked as an opportunist and a carpetbagger. His high-priced Washington consultants, big war chest and television ads did nothing to alter that image. At a debate with his three Republican primary opponents, he took aim at the issue and killed it dead. "Listen, pal," he replied to a challenge to his status as an Arizonan. "I spent 22 years in the Navy. My father was in the Navy. My grandfather was in the Navy. We in the military service tend to move a lot. I wish I could have had the luxury, like you, of growing up and living and spending my entire life in a place like the First District of Arizona, but I was doing other things. As a matter of fact, when I think about it now, the place I lived longest in my life was Hanoi." The issue didn't come up much after that.