The Power and The Story

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But it was also perfect for John McCain, citizen soldier, maverick hell raiser. Whatever self-image he brings to the table, campaign reform taps every theme. Only a truly brave politician would take on the whole system that had brought his party to power in the first place. This cause isn't just Greater Than His Own Self-Interest--it goes directly against his self-interest. His party is in power, after all, so it controls the spigots. Campaign-finance reform has become McCain's Unified Field Theory of Politics. All problems--HMO reform, education, military waste, the 44,000-page tax code--come down to this one problem: help me fix it, and we'll be able to fix everything else.

In a campaign of big ideas, that may be a big enough idea to carry him a long way. There is the problem that if McCain, the Renegade Challenger, actually manages to topple Bush, the Establishment Kid, he disproves his reason for running. Money would not have made all the difference, after all. And there is the problem, which he himself acknowledges, about basing a campaign on reform. "Most people," he says, "are busy thinking about other things. They don't think government makes much difference in their lives." It would be easy if they were as angry as he is; but instead, they're mainly just detached from a system that seemed to stop speaking to them years ago.

And McCain, for all his candor and accessibility, seems somehow detached from them. Senators, like sailors, live strange lives, far from home. But McCain has a special handicap when it comes to reaching out to voters and understanding what really matters to them. Heroes don't live at sea level; they live on pedestals. And he has been to places few others have. "Pain makes it difficult to see," says his friend Bob Kerrey, another Vietnam hero who once tried to connect with New Hampshire voters. "It can blind you and narrow you, whether it's the pain of loneliness, or physical pain or the pain of loss."

So McCain, more than any other politician in America, works hard to pull people in, a constant reminder that he's not in solitary anymore. There is no entourage, no bubble of staff members around him keeping voters and reporters at bay. And then there are the stories he tells--to which, if there's a pattern, it's to exalt other people and deflate himself. A presidential candidate is not supposed to talk at length and on the record about the rules he broke or the strippers he dated, or the time he arrived so drunk that he fell through the screen door of the young lady he was wooing. The candor tells you more than the content, and reporters sometimes just decide to take him off the record because they don't want to see him flame out and burn up a great story.