Campaign 2000: The Power and The Story

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Never mind that the Senate Ethics Committee's Democratic counsel urged that the charges against McCain be dropped. Or that in the end he got a slap on the wrist for showing "poor judgment." Nearly half the voters in his home state said they thought he should resign. The scandal was so damaging that it all but erased the Story. Now McCain's homeric epithet was no longer War Hero. It was Member of the Keating Five, as though his medals had been publicly stripped from his chest.

That investigation, McCain has said, closing the loop, was every bit as painful as imprisonment. It was during that time his wife became addicted to painkillers--and he did not notice. His allies say the rough passage carved his political identity. "People get inspired to do great things by bad things," suggests Torie Clarke, his former press secretary. "In many ways being a POW was the best thing that happened to him as a person. And Keating was the best thing to happen to him as a public servant."

In retrospect, McCain claims that the lesson he learned from the Keating scandal was that in politics, appearances matter. Even if he hadn't done anything wrong, guilt by association was enough to ruin even his image. But it's hard to see that as the main lesson, given how careless he still is about appearances. He denounces big-spending special interests and yet accepts flights on corporate jets; he puts the speaker of the Arizona house of representatives on his campaign payroll despite a flurry of ethics charges around him; he neglects to recuse himself from debates about measures that would affect his family beer business.

Far from making him more sensitive, the Keating Five scandal was a near death experience that changed the way he saw himself and the system. McCain had been at best a reformer junior grade. In fact, he voted against campaign-reform measures before being sucked into the sewer himself. He used to brag about the pork he brought home to Arizona. When an opponent in the 1986 Senate race pointed out the massive campaign contributions that McCain was receiving from defense contractors, McCain accused him of running "one of the most sloppy and dirty campaigns in Arizona's history." But all the while, he was chasing much needed campaign cash, just like any other pol. "I think he brushed up against it," says Clarke of the whole influence-peddling swamp, "and the horror of brushing up against it inspired him to become the reformer he is."

That's the film version, anyway. You could also argue that McCain spun around and embraced reform as a desperate bid to win back his strength and standing. But a funny thing happened on the way to his deathbed conversion: he really converted. By 1994 he was calling Democrat Russ Feingold, arguably the least powerful man in the Senate, and proposing that they join forces to reinvent the whole way money worked in politics. No pac money. Free TV. No soft money. It was a crusade that was guaranteed to lose friends and alienate people, especially the ones he would need if he ever wanted to get anything else done.