McCain's Moment

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Well, maybe. By morning, the money was flooding in over the Internet--nearly a million dollars by the next night--and 12,000 people signed up to volunteer all over the country. Donations were coming in at such a furious pace that the campaign had to find a second server to handle the overflow. Israeli and Japanese television were on lines two and three. "My folks and supporters have never been as well treated as they have in the past 24 hours," joked McCain. "People have found our phone numbers that have been lost for years." Even Republican Party chief Jim Nicholson, long an outspoken critic of McCain's crusade to ban soft money, called with congratulations.

To the Republican barons who say McCain is out to destroy the G.O.P., he replies that he intends to save it. If Bush is campaigning as the champion of the status quo sentries of Washington, McCain is trying to turn them all out in the street and build a whole new bigger house, just as Bill Clinton did for the Democrats eight years ago. Which just raises the question: Is this for real, or is this a Jesse Ventura moment, all fun and feathers and wild surprise but not the kind of earthquake that redraws the continents?

For the moment, at least, it's both, as was clear when McCain climbed back onto his plane and headed down to South Carolina, where he was met at 3 a.m. in an airport hangar by hundreds of college kids and the earsplitting techno sounds of Fat Boy Slim. Bomba dada boomba ba went the music. It nearly parted your hair. Signs were waved and bodies were hopping on the concrete floor. It was as if this father of seven, who spent 5 1/2 years in a prison camp during a war that was over before most of the revelers were born, were on the cover of Rolling Stone. "He is the last hero of American politics," said Brandon Goeringer, 22, who drove in early from Greenville to get a good spot near the stage. "I don't agree with all of his policies, on abortion and other stuff, but he tells the truth."

"I like his position on the military," said doe-eyed Anne Marie McNeil, 18, of the University of South Carolina. "And I like that he is paying down the debt and not spending it all on Social Security." This is from someone who has never voted before? "The fact that we're all still here till 3 o'clock and we have school tomorrow should say something."

That night and over the next several days in South Carolina, as McCain's events just got bigger and bigger, the very size of the crowd was sending a message. More than a third of the online donors had never given money to a campaign before. At a town hall in Beaufort, the sign-in sheets that usually get a few signatures per event were crumpled from the compression of so many pens. The McCain team planned for 250 at a Georgetown fire station, and 1,000 turned out, climbing up to sit on fire trucks and on ladders propped against the wall and spilling into the street. "There's something a little bit magical going on," said McCain on the bus afterward, looking dazed by the crowd. "There's something happening out there."