How McCain put his candidacy back together

by Jill Zuckman

NEW YORK, N.Y. - Back in the dark days, after Sen. John McCain discovered that he had virtually no money to run his presidential campaign and had fired his campaign manager and closest political adviser, many journalists wanted to know just one thing: When would he quit the race?

"As Chairman Mao says, it’s always darkest before it’s totally black," he told reporters who had come to New Hampshire "to watch the embalming," as he put it.

With a mix of black humor and grim determination, McCain went from front-runner to dead man walking to likely Republican nominee, a status that may be sealed Tuesday. The story of how the Arizona stitched his candidacy back together is an account of a remarkable political comeback.

"I had no illusions of how tough it was," McCain said over the weekend as he chewed on a cherry Twizzlers in the back seat of an SUV. "But I never thought of it in terms of, ‘Well, you’re basically through.’ "

But it was close. As of last June, his campaign had bled through all the money it had raised. Campaign events routinely cost north of $25,000. The famed Straight Talk Express bus tallied $9,000 a day. McCain was spending like a front-runner, even while Republican voters were increasingly disenchanted with his positions.

In the Senate, he seemed decidedly on the wrong side of every major issue—from immigration, where he was trying to broker a deal toxic to GOP voters, to the Iraq war, where he was asking for more troops when others were talking withdrawal.

Here is how he put his campaign back together: asking friends for help, cutting costs, adjusting his position on immigration, making the troop surge his cause and relying on a band of dedicated volunteers. Other ingredients included lots of talk, sheer will—and a good deal of luck, as McCain is the first to acknowledge.

"I realized a lot of things had to break my way, some of which weren’t under my control," McCain said.

He began his resurgence in an unexpected way—with a visit to Iraq over the Fourth of July weekend. In many ways, that trip was a turning point for McCain, who points to it as the moment that galvanized him to keep on the presidential track.

He watched as 688 young men and women re-enlisted and 130 service men and women became naturalized citizens. Two empty chairs represented soldiers who’d died before they could become U.S. citizens. Himself a former prisoner of war, McCain gave an emotional address, and about 2,000 service men and women waited to shake his hand.

Back in the U.S., he began enlisting his friends. "He called and said, ‘What do you think?’ I said, ‘It’s a hell of a mess,’ " recalled Orson Swindle, his former cellmate in North Vietnam who has helped to organize veterans’ support.

McCain realized he’d allowed his campaign to spend with the same kind of abandon he routinely denounced in the federal government. The swank $9,000-a-day bus with the flat-screen television screens gave way to one with an ’80s décor that rattled and sputtered but cost just $9,000 a month.

A bill for $900 worth of doughnuts gave way to a ban on what had always been a trademark of the McCain bus and a staple of the senator’s diet. The campaign payroll was slashed from 280 people that summer to about 90. John Weaver, McCain’s longtime strategist, departed; the remaining senior advisers worked without pay.

Campaign events often meant speaking at Rotary Club or Commerce or lunches, which cost no money to arrange. McCain began flying commercial and carrying his own bags.

During his first trip to New Hampshire after the near-collapse, he went straight to Concord to meet privately with his top supporters in the state. "He said, ‘I know how to campaign in New Hampshire, and I’m going to take my case to the people,’ " said Steve Duprey, a top backer. "He just picked that campaign up and carried it on his back."

Still, some of McCain’s closest advisers did not think it was possible for him to recover. "We wanted John McCain, if he fell short, to walk off the field with his chin up," said one.

The press ignored him almost completely. Donors shied away. But he kept making his pitch – that the troop surge was working and he was best prepared to be commander-in-chief.

He put himself before the voters, holding town hall meeting after town hall meeting, sometimes before very small groups of voters. Not infrequently, the questions were hostile. A humble McCain would present his position – usually on immigration, often on the war – and then ask the questioner if they wanted to follow up. When he finished talking, he would ask, "Did I answer your question?"

“What it required was complete focus by him and effective campaigning every day, because he was the only asset we had," said Charles R. Black Jr., who has emerged as McCain’s chief strategist.

A key moment came at a Republican debate in New Hampshire when Erin Flanagan told the candidates about her brother, 1st Lieutenant Michael Joseph Cleary, who was killed in action in Iraq eight days before he was supposed to come home. Flanagan pleadingly asked the candidates what they would do to bring the parties together and “bring this conflict to a point in which we can safely bring our troops home."

McCain rose from his stool and walked forward. "This war was very badly mismanaged for a long time,” he said gently. “And Americans have made great sacrifices, some of which were unnecessary because of this management of the war.

"I believe we have a fine general. I believe we have a strategy which can succeed, so that the sacrifice of your brother would not be in vain, that a whole 20 million or 30 million people would have a chance to live a free life in an open society, and practice their religion, no matter what those differences are," he said. "And I believe that if we fail, it will become a center of terrorism, and we will ask more young Americans to sacrifice, as your brother did."

Flanagan later invited McCain to her home for dinner and he brought his son, Jimmy, a rifleman in the Marine Corps, who was about to ship out to Iraq.

Another important moment came with McCain’s "No Surrender Tour," devised by the senator and his adviser, Steve Schmidt, an expert on crafting messages. It was a defiant stand on both the war and his campaign, with McCain traveling from Iowa to New Hampshire to South Carolina, visiting Veterans of Foreign Wars and American Legion halls, making his case for the war with his band of P.O.W. friends around him.

Then came the real blessing: The surge seemed to be working. "If the surge had failed, nobody could have resurrected this campaign," said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), perhaps McCain’s closest friend in the Senate.

At the same time, the immigration bill died in the Senate, sparing McCain daily aggravations. And he shifted his position to emphasize border security ahead of a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants.

McCain’s luck was turning in another way, too. None of his Republican rivals were capturing voters’ imagination. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee were battling for the conservative vote. Suddenly, it seemed, there was an opening.

"Nobody was really gaining traction, nobody was really solidifying their position," McCain said. "But I didn’t pay a whole lot of attention to the other campaigns because I couldn’t do anything about them."

McCain himself began to get that traction in New Hampshire just before Thanksgiving with a bus trip to Dixville Notch and back down along the Vermont border. With every event, the crowds seemed larger.

"It’s starting to look like 2000, don’t you think?" he asked one of his bus passengers, referring to his dramatic New Hampshire victory that year, just before walking into the New London Town Hall to find it overflowing with voters.

Even as he began to win, it was almost as if he didn’t really believe it. In his suite at the Crowne Plaza in New Hampshire, McCain continued to stand in front of the television after the race had been called, watching the vote tallies. "I can’t stop watching," he said, with his wife Cindy standing him, clutching his arm.

In Florida, McCain was tense despite predictions of victory. Waiting for returns, one friend punched him in the shoulder and said, "You did it!" McCain shot back, "Don’t do that," retreating into the quiet of the bedroom to huddle over a laptop, looking at county-by-county returns.

Even in the darkest hour, "He saw a path,” said Black, his political adviser. “It was a narrow path, but he believed in it, and so did we.”