Understanding John McCain

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Talking Straight
As with many military men, McCain's Vietnam experiences seemed at times to make him wary of U.S. involvement abroad. He opposed Reagan's deployment in Lebanon and peppered the Clinton White House with questions about military interventions in Haiti, Somalia and the Balkans. But as he began his presidential quest in the late 1990s, McCain began to argue that America's honor required much stronger responses to tyrants, and he attacked the Clintonites for refusing to send combat troops to the Balkans and for appeasing a retrograde regime in North Korea. "I understand the instinct to protect national honor, but [North Korea] has got 800,000 men 40 miles from downtown Seoul," says Cohen, who was best man at McCain's second wedding but has not endorsed his friend. "Wars can get started over honor."

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McCain's enemies say he lacks the temperament to be President; his friends say he is just a spirited fighter who isn't afraid of taking on sacred cows. Some of McCain's worst enemies have been GOP appropriators like Domenici, Ted Stevens of Alaska and Thad Cochran of Mississippi, who has said the thought of a President McCain sends a cold chill down his spine. McCain has been a relentless critic of congressional pork and has made a point of publicizing the pet-project earmarks that appropriators slip into budget bills. "He ruffles a lot of feathers because he doesn't worry about playing the game with the boys in the club," says Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican who has replaced McCain as the Senate's top porkbuster — and top headache. "I call him a crusty old fart. People say he's bullheaded, but he's never afraid to irritate people if it will get something done for his country."

While Coburn has been willing to bog down the Senate to try to stop pork, McCain stops short of drawing the line. He tends to bend institutions without breaking them; he never alienated his caucus enough to lose his chairmanship, and even Cochran has endorsed McCain's candidacy now that he's the Republican nominee. "McCain used to make great speeches about all the garbage in military spending bills, especially after 9/11, but he'd do nothing to stop it," says the Center for Defense Information's Winslow Wheeler, a former GOP staffer who supports Obama for President. McCain "got the porkbuster reputation, but he never strayed too far off the reservation."

In 2000, McCain ran for President as a reformer, vowing to clean up Washington and restore honor to the presidency after eight years of Bill Clinton. But the wheels came off the Straight Talk Express right after New Hampshire, when he impulsively decided to pull all his negative ads off the air even though George W. Bush supporters were spreading vicious lies about him. Bush soon co-opted McCain's message — he too vowed to be "a reformer with results" — all the way to the White House. And McCain spent the next several years picking fights with Bush and the GOP establishment over campaign finance, health care, gun control and the President's massive tax cuts, which McCain characterized as fiscally irresponsible. The battles burnished his maverick image, but critics within the party attributed them mostly to vanity and sour grapes. "He was just grumpy about losing to Bush," says Grover Norquist, the antitax activist who has clashed with McCain but supports him now. "Anybody could see that."

But as he prepared to run for President again, McCain made peace with Bush and their party. The iconoclast who attacked Jerry Falwell as an "agent of intolerance" during the 2000 campaign made a pilgrimage to Falwell's university to make amends. The scold who attacked the Swift Boat Veterans campaign as dishonorable in 2004 signed up its funders for his campaign. McCain now wants to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, and he has not only reversed his opposition to offshore drilling but has also made offshore drilling the centerpiece of his economic message. Several veterans of the McCain 2000 campaign told TIME that they barely recognize the McCain of 2008, but most of them also noted that the McCain of 2000 lost. "He's learned over the past eight years that the world of politics he'd like to inhabit is not the world he inhabits," says Dan Schnur, the communications director from the 2000 campaign. The world he inhabits paid almost no attention to McCain's heartfelt and self-critical speech about Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, Tenn., but has buzzed about McCain's tawdry ads comparing Obama to Britney Spears and Moses.

Honor and Its Limits
The unanswerable question is whether McCain's rough campaign will eventually violate his own code of honor; he adores boxing, but he considers ultimate fighting a sickening national disgrace. Most Americans see McCain's focus on honor as a commendable commitment to principle; the danger comes when that insistence turns into dogma or a belief in one's monopoly on virtue. Asked whether he would look back at his tactics with Confederate-flag-style regrets, McCain at first refused to answer. When pressed, he gave the kind of canned, these-are-my-talking-points response he used to ridicule on the Straight Talk Express: "I'm very happy with the way our campaign has been conducted, and I am pleased and humbled to have the nomination of the Republican Party."

Behind the new front, McCain and his aides believe a straight-talk hiatus, a few necessary policy reversals and some standard-issue political attacks are small concessions to expedience, considering the stakes of the election. The race may turn on economic matters — and McCain seems to be learning how to talk about gas and housing prices with passion — but his driving issue is America's honor in a dangerous world. He has framed his support for the surge in Iraq — and Obama's unrepentant opposition — as proof of his superior qualifications to be Commander in Chief and of Obama's willingness to put politics before country.

Though McCain is quick to say he considers his opponent a "patriot," McCain and his aides now view Obama with the same level of contempt they once reserved for tobacco-company executives, corrupt lawmakers and George W. Bush. They have convinced themselves that Obama is not honorable, that he does not love his country as much as himself. That makes it easier to justify doing whatever is necessary to defeat him — especially if it's done in the pursuit of honor.

McCain genuinely believes that America's honor is at stake in this election. His friends say he's learned through hard experience as well as family values that tough talk backed by force is the only language our enemies understand, that vacillation in the face of evil will dishonor America and endanger our safety. And this obsession with national honor has driven his belligerent approach to dishonorable regimes — not only North Korea and Iraq but also Iran, Cuba and, most recently, Russia. His hard-edged approach has a visceral appeal and an undeniable consistency; it is also popular with some conservatives who are otherwise skeptical of McCain. But it's a radical and potentially dangerous approach to foreign affairs. In a messy world full of unsavory despots, belligerence can have its costs, even when it's belligerence in the pursuit of honor.

John McCain had dedicated his adult life to that pursuit; in November, Americans will have to decide whether to make his obsession with honor their own. (See photos of John McCain's Tumultuous Week here.)