The Temperament Factor: Who's Best Suited to the Job?

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But some veterans of Arizona politics paint a more complicated picture of McCain than as just a crusader against corruption. They talk of bullying and intimidation, of meetings when he banged the table so hard they feared it would split. In one case, recalls former Arizona Senator Dennis DeConcini, when he refused to fire an aide who had annoyed McCain, "to put it politely, he told me that I could go do something with myself." DeConcini, a Democrat, says that "in my eight years with him, I learned that John just hates it when you disagree with him. If you press it, he just falls back on his patriotism. And then he blows up." The sense that you're never sure which McCain you'll get feeds Obama's case that being an unpredictable "maverick" may not be the model you want in times that call for methodical decision-making. But McCain's defenders cite another soldier turned politician who was legendary for his temper: George Washington. Those who rise in the military, notes Virginia Senator John Warner, "are people of strong will, of brevity, giving orders and commands. I just hope the people that occupy the presidency are people of strong will."

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Warner first encountered McCain in 1973 when he was serving as Secretary of the Navy and read the intelligence reports on the young POW. They soon became friends and eventually Senate colleagues on the Armed Services Committee, often working in closed-door sessions where members would not need to moderate their passions for public consumption. "I have not, in all those years, ever witnessed any moment when he wasn't in complete control over what he was saying and doing," says Warner. Several other politicians even suggest that McCain's outbursts are not irrational but calculated for effect, to help him push his agenda.

Obama, meanwhile, is running a campaign with the unofficial motto No Drama Obama. He handles emotion with rubber gloves and tongs, as though he has internalized Napoleon's dictum that the heart of a statesman should be in his head. His body language is restrained, his emotional range narrow: "I don't get too high when I'm high, and I don't get too low when I'm low," he says. "That, I think, is a temperamental strength."

If McCain used the market meltdown to advertise boldness, Obama used it to show steadiness. "Presidents are going to have to deal with more than one thing at a time," he said, dismissing McCain's back-to-Washington gambit as an inability to multitask. Since he hasn't nearly as much experience handling a crisis as McCain does, he's used his campaign itself as a stand-in, one long test of nerves. He resisted calls to take a hatchet to Hillary Clinton a year ago; as McCain gained ground in September, Democrats demanded that Obama get hotter and meaner. But he barely touched the thermostat. It's hard for McCain to charge that we don't know who Obama really is when he has been the most disciplined Democrat voters have seen in years.

But that consistent coolness has a cost. The most successful Presidents have had a gift for projecting warmth during the chilliest times: Teddy Roosevelt, famously coolheaded in a crisis, had his teddy bears; F.D.R. warmed the shivering nation with his fireside chats. When Obama sneered to Hillary that she was "likable enough," when he talks about feelings rather than feeling them, when a voter tells him about a tragedy and he pivots into policy, it can make you wonder where his real passions lie. "You have to have a fire inside," Gergen says, "an ambition for the nation, an internal, fierce desire for change, for new accomplishments, higher goals."