Game Change (36 page)

McCain was at his best in the town hall meetings that were a staple of New Hampshire’s quirky political culture. They were how he won the state in 2000, and ever since the No Surrender Tour, town halls in New Hampshire were the oxygen that sustained him. Week by week, day by day, he could feel himself picking up steam. For one thing, the crowds were getting bigger; he always took a mental count. For another, they were getting friendlier. At a town hall up in North Haverhill in late November, the audience was practically hanging from the rafters. And when it was over, a stream of people came up and said, unprompted, “I’m voting for you.”

Equally heartening for McCain was this: no longer was he getting blistered by the anti-immigration forces. Oh, sure, he still had to defend his position on the issue. The hot-eyed ranting had ceased, however, and that was a good sign.

McCain’s advisers were glad to hear his rosy reports from the road. But contrary to what he might have believed, they knew he couldn’t win the state on town halls alone. Back in September, the campaign had scraped together just enough money to get him on the air in New Hampshire. McCain’s advisers wanted to use the famous footage of him in Hanoi filmed after his capture, the pictures of him prone and in excruciating pain, his broken bones encased in slipshod dressing. McCain resisted, as he had throughout his career, the exploitation of his suffering for political gain. But Salter and Schmidt brought him around. “You don’t have an option of not talking about who you are and what made you who you are,” Schmidt said. “That decision got made the day you decided to run for president of the United States. Whether you like it or not, that’s reality, and if you don’t do it, we don’t have a prayer.”

McCain reluctantly agreed, and the ad stirred up a lot of press attention. Several weeks later at a debate, McCain snapped out a sound bite for the ages. “A few days ago, Senator Clinton tried to spend one million dollars on the Woodstock concert museum,” he said. “Now, my friends, I wasn’t there. I’m sure it was a cultural and pharmaceutical event.” Pause. “I was tied up at the time.”

The audience roared, and the campaign took the cue. The quip became part of another TV ad for New Hampshire.

McCain had taken New Hampshire a bit for granted at the start, as he ran around trying to raise money to pay for that Bush machine his lieutenants were building. He’d made it easy for Romney to seize the top slot in the polls. The funny thing was, as events unfolded, this worked to McCain’s advantage, with Romney writing him off for months. Now the former governor found himself under siege in Iowa, where Huckabee was coming on strong. More good news for McCain; it let him continue to fly under the radar.

One day in late October, out of the blue, McCain told Charlie Black, “We gotta get to twenty percent by December first” in New Hampshire. Black had no idea where the number or target date had come from. Davis didn’t know, either. The goal struck them as arbitrary, but what the hell? If it helped McCain to have a tangible marker, fine.

McCain talked about the goal incessantly from then on. Twenty percent, twenty percent, twenty percent. Then, in late November, they all looked up, and there he was: Fox News put him at 21 percent, just eight points behind Romney.

OVER THANKSGIVING, MCCAIN MADE another trip back to Iraq, accompanied again by Graham and also by Democratic senator Joe Lieberman, of Connecticut. While they were there they met with General Petraeus and visited Jimmy McCain in Anbar Province.

McCain and Lieberman had developed a close friendship through the years, and the war was a big part of it. Lieberman was inarguably the most hawkish Democrat in the Senate. He and McCain saw eye to eye on almost everything when it came to Iraq, but the bond was deeper than that. It was forged around the antipathy they both had for the bases of their parties, which was reciprocated in spades. Though Lieberman had been Al Gore’s running mate in 2000 and was a fairly standard issue Democrat on most social and economic issues, his foreign policy stances had made him an enemy of the left and especially of the netroots, which had successfully targeted him for defeat in the 2006 Connecticut Democratic primary. Lieberman now called himself an Independent Democrat. McCain could relate to that.

The day after returning from Iraq, McCain phoned Lieberman. New Hampshire is going to be everything for me, he said. And there’s a lot of independents who are going to vote in the primary. I want to ask if you’d think about giving me your support. If you can’t, I’ll understand. You’re in enough trouble with your party already, but I know it would help me out a lot.

Give me a couple of days to think it over, Lieberman replied. It’s a big step, but you know how I feel about you. We’ve been through a lot together and particularly on the war.

A former Democratic vice-presidential nominee endorsing a Republican? It sure was a big step. Lieberman talked it over with his wife, a couple of staffers, a few friends back home. One of them said, I think you’re crazy—but McCain’s campaign won’t last long, so this will be a brief interlude. For Lieberman, deciding to support McCain would mean crossing another Rubicon. The calumny that would be hurled at him from the left, he knew, would be intense.

On the other hand, not a single Democratic candidate had asked for Lieberman’s endorsement, not even his fellow Connecticut senator, Chris Dodd. For all the distance between him and his party, Lieberman still found that level of ostracism surprising—and painful, very painful. He believed that McCain had shown guts by putting his campaign on the line to stick with the surge. Also that he’d be the best president in a dangerous world.
I don’t agree with him on everything, but I agree with him on a lot of big things, and war and peace is one
, Lieberman thought.
Besides, the guy’s my friend.

Lieberman’s endorsement came on December 15 in New Hampshire. For McCain, it capped a three-month run of favorable press, rising poll numbers, and the new story line that he had created through the sheer force of his personality. Between Christmas and New Year’s, a series of polls showed him ahead in New Hampshire for the first time since the early spring.

McCain had gone from front-runner to corpse to contender in less than a year. Everyone assumed he was flying high: the Mac was back. But the truth was, dangling over his head was a sword of Damocles invisible to almost everyone, if no less menacing for that. The blade was in the form of a newspaper article that was threatening to drop any day. McCain thought it might kill more than his shot at the nomination. He thought it might destroy his career and his reputation—even though the woman at the heart of the story insisted that she’d never even been alone with him.

VICKI ISEMAN WAS A small-town girl in Gucci Gulch. She came from rural Pennsylvania, born in the same burg as Jimmy Stewart, where she was a high-school cheerleader. She arrived in Washington in 1990 with a degree in elementary education and everything she owned stuffed inside two plastic garbage bags. She landed a job as a receptionist at a lobbying shop called Alcalde and Fay. Eight years later, she became the youngest partner in the firm’s history. On paper, she gave every appearance of being a familiar Washington archetype: ambitious, workaholic, politically connected, thin and blond and pretty. But she was more a striver than a climber, more earnest than gimlet-eyed. Her clients were mid-level corporations, mostly telecommunications companies that no one had ever heard of. She didn’t work the social circuit or want to be a public figure; she had no interest in appearing on
Hardball.
She seemed slightly wonderstruck by how far she’d come. When her college newspaper interviewed her in 2002, she talked about the great view of the nation’s capital she had through her office windows, and proudly listed the celebrities she had been lucky enough to meet: Melanie Griffith, Bo Derek, Britney Spears, and Rudy Giuliani.

McCain was another boldface name with whom Iseman was acquainted by then. As the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee in the late nineties, he held sway over regulations that affected companies she represented. Iseman supported McCain in his 2000 race and helped him raise money for it. In February 1999, she and the senator flew down to Miami and back together on the corporate jet of one of her clients to attend a fund-raiser. The shared transport may have seemed like little more than a convenience to the lobbyist and the senator—but to McCain’s advisers, it looked like trouble.

With his wife three thousand miles away, McCain was on his own for months at a time when he was in Washington. As a rule, his aides saw no need to police him and had no desire to play chaperone. The level of scrutiny accorded the private life of an ordinary senator was minimal, anyway. But with McCain preparing for his first presidential bid, the glare of the spotlight was about to increase a thousandfold. Appearances mattered now more than ever. So when a rumor that McCain was having an affair with Iseman started flitting through Washington, his advisers blanched. Some thought it was true, some thought it was false, but they all feared that it could pry open a can of worms.

The Iseman problem never reared its head publicly in 2000, and the qualms of McCain’s team receded for years thereafter. But in the first half of 2007, just as McCain’s new campaign was launching and faltering in the same breath, a reporter from
U.S. News & World Report
began pursuing a story that McCain and Iseman had been sexually involved. Iseman denied it. The McCainiacs pushed back hard.
U.S. News
ran an article on McCain and lobbyists, but mentioned neither the allegation nor Iseman.

Now, in November 2007, the Iseman problem had returned with a vengeance.
The New York Times
was on the case, with four staffers assigned to the story.

Iseman’s colleagues at Alcalde told her that reporters had been calling and asking questions about her relationship with McCain. When one of them left a message for her, she refused to return the call. But she started to panic as she discovered the scope of the
Times’s
investigation. She called Rick Davis and told him about the unsettling intrusion into her life. “What is going on? Where is this coming from?” Iseman asked. “Is it Weaver?”

Iseman had known Davis, a fellow lobbyist, longer than she had known McCain. She trusted Rick—unlike Weaver, whom she loathed. Back in 1999, after the Miami trip, Iseman and Weaver had clashed, with Weaver instructing her to steer clear of McCain, and they hadn’t spoken since.

Davis tried to soothe Iseman, who sounded desperate and a little unhinged. But he shared her surmise that his former rival was the culprit. Ever since his departure, Weaver had been carping to reporters about the McCain campaign; Davis blamed him for some nasty leaks in the wake of the implosion. Within Team McCain there was a strong suspicion that all roads in the
Times
inquiry led back to Weaver.

But the sourcing behind the Iseman story was the least of the campaign’s worries about it. The perception that McCain, the great reformer, was too close to the capital’s influence peddlers had hurt him badly before; in 2000, the Bush campaign had skewered him mercilessly over that contradiction. Allegations of infidelity aside, the
Times
could do McCain damage on the hypocrisy front. The publication of the story might also incite more unwelcome snooping around in McCain’s bedroom—which would be bad enough by itself, but potentially devastating in a party dominated by religious conservatives who didn’t trust McCain to begin with. Already, as word had spread in media circles about what the
Times
was chasing, at least a half-dozen new delvings into McCain’s personal life had been undertaken by news organizations. At the same time, the campaign was coping with an incipient revival of the story about Cindy’s alleged extramarital wanderings; McCainworld heard that there might be an incriminating surveillance videotape of her and another man.

As November turned to December, the public picture of McCain’s campaign was all about revival. But privately, his advisers were living in terror. Behind the scenes, no single issue was consuming more of the staff’s time or psychic energy than the Iseman problem—and nothing was weighing more heavily on the candidate’s mind. Outwardly, McCain was coming on strong in New Hampshire, but inside, he was coming undone.

From early in the morning until late at night, he was distracted, tense, and gruff. Like Iseman, McCain was hearing that a wide range of his past and present associates was being contacted by the
Times
for the story. He dispatched friends with connections at the Gray Lady to try to penetrate its veil of mystery. “Where do you think we are on this?” McCain would ask. Umpteen times a day, he’d phone Davis, Salter, Black, or Schmidt, all of whom were dealing with the story in one way or another. What’s happening with the
Times
? Have we heard from them? What do they want? What do we have to do?

McCain’s attitude about the likely outcome was dark. “They’re out to get me, boy,” he’d say. Or, “They’re coming after us.” Or, “They’re going to fuck us.”

Finally, in early December, McCain decided he could take it no more. He thought the way the paper was handling the story was shoddy, its tactics bordering on harassment. He believed he had a solid relationship with Bill Keller, the executive editor of the
Times.
On a conference call with Davis and the rest of the campaign’s top brass, McCain said, “Fuck it, I’ll talk to Keller.”

McCain was astonished when, after reaching Keller, almost the first thing out of the editor’s mouth was: Is it true? “I have never betrayed the public trust by doing anything like that,” McCain replied, and then got off the phone in a hurry.

The next two weeks were a frenzy within the McCain camp as the
Times
appeared to be moving toward publishing the story—which, apart from whatever seamy stuff it might contain, was apparently going to take a substantial look at McCain’s efforts on behalf of corporate interests and their water-carriers. Salter was spending three quarters of each day doing nothing but diving into cardboard boxes, excavating ancient records, and pulling up documents in response to the
Times
reporters’ detailed questions.

On a parallel track, the campaign was preparing its defense strategy. Schmidt’s well-honed and long-held view was that you couldn’t go wrong in Republican politics by attacking the
Times.
To help with handling the media circus that was bound to ensue, McCain hired the Washington power lawyer Bob Bennett, who had served as Bill Clinton’s personal attorney during the Paula Jones sexual harassment case.

Meanwhile, Iseman hired a lawyer of her own—actually, her second—and was in a bad way. She felt sick, wasn’t eating, had lost a parlous amount of weight; her paranoia was stratospheric. She was talking with Davis constantly, sharing with him her answers to the written list of questions the
Times
had provided at her request—a degree of coordination about which few were aware. At the top of her reply, Iseman wrote, I am a private citizen. You are destroying my life. She again insisted that she never had a romantic relationship with the senator.

The McCain campaign braced for the story to run the week before Christmas, and sent Bennett to meet with the
Times
reporters. Then, on December 20, the Drudge Report blared an item with the headline “MEDIA FIREWORKS: McCAIN PLEADS WITH NY TIMES TO SPIKE STORY.” The banner was a reference to the Keller call, but the tantalizing part of the post was elsewhere. The reporters “hoped to break the story before the Christmas holiday,” it said, “but editor Keller expressed serious reservations about journalism ethics and issuing a damaging story so close to an election.”

The revelation that the
Times
was pursuing such an explosive line of inquiry caused the political world to gasp. The Romney campaign saw the item and worried that the piece would never be considered fit to print. For Romney, the publication of the story before New Hampshire would all but guarantee that he won the state. For McCain, the calculation was the converse: if the story ran, he was dead.

The whole thing was excruciating for McCain; fending off such personal attacks, true or false, felt like South Carolina all over again. “I do find the timing of this whole issue very interesting,” McCain told the Associated Press on the day the Drudge item appeared. “And we’re not going to stand for what happened to us in 2000.”

But Schmidt was certain that no act of defiance would be necessary at that point. They don’t have the story, he told McCain. If we get to Christmas and they don’t publish, we’ll be fine. They’re not going to put something out a few days before Iowa. It’s just not going to happen.

“I hope you’re right,” McCain replied, using one of his favorite expressions. What it meant was: Don’t bet on it.

*   *   *

IN THE DAYS BEFORE the New Hampshire primary on January 8, the McCain campaign was suffused in an aura of nostalgia: the Straight Talk Express crisscrossing the snowbanked byways, with McCain in the back of the bus cracking wise, the hack pack huddled around him. McCain’s town hall meetings were jammed, his wit and spontaneity on display. The Sunday before the vote, at an event in Salem, he was questioned by an audience member who objected to his support for Bush’s tax cuts as fiscally irresponsible. “You’re still in purgatory,” the man said.

“Thank you,” replied McCain. “That’s a step up from where I was last summer.”

McCain was openly, fanatically superstitious. In New Hampshire, he carried with him his lucky penny and lucky compass, and not only stayed in the same room in the same hotel as he did in 2000, but slept on the same side of the bed. And though such behavior might have struck some as obsessive-compulsive, it reflected his awareness of the role that blind luck had played in his revival.

Mark McKinnon, the former media adviser to President Bush who was now filling that role for McCain, observed that his current boss’s winning required that he draw a political inside straight. In the last months of 2007, McCain had been dealt the first two cards in that hand: the apparent success of the Iraq surge, and the reduction in the heat surrounding immigration. The results of the Iowa caucuses on January 3 delivered him a third. Huckabee trounced Romney by nine points, leaving McCain’s only serious competition in New Hampshire reeling. The fourth card came courtesy of the
Times
, which made good on Schmidt’s optimism and continued to hold back the Iseman story. And the fifth was slapped down in front of him by New Hampshire, where he won the primary by five points over Romney. Accepting his hard-earned victory, he told the crowd, “We are the makers of history, not its victims.”

McCain’s luck at the table continued in the Michigan primary on January 15, though it was less than evident at the time. In a state with the nation’s highest unemployment rate and a manufacturing base hollowed out to the point of collapse, McCain had chosen candor over pander—“Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he declared—and paid the price at the polls, losing to Romney by nine points.

Yet McCain’s long-run prospects were bolstered by the curious strategy pursued by Huckabee. With his energetic base of Evangelical support, Huckabee stood as McCain’s greatest threat in the next primary, in South Carolina, which came four days after Michigan. But seduced by the notion that his appeals to economic populism would play well in Michigan, Huckabee and his team decided to devote several days and a pile of cash—precious resources, of which he had little—to the state. Not only did Huckabee finish a distant third, but he also missed the chance to get a jump on McCain in South Carolina.

With all eyes transfixed on the Democrats, the Republican primary in the Palmetto State might as well have been occurring in Bora-Bora for all the attention it received. Yet in the contemporary history of the GOP, no contest had been a more reliable bellwether in determining who would eventually claim the Republican nomination. Since 1980, when Lee Atwater pushed his native state to the front of the presidential calendar, every winner of South Carolina had gone on to become the party’s standard-bearer.

The McCains were nervous as they entered the sprint to primary day. The polls showed a tighter race than John had hoped it would be after his victory in New Hampshire, his lead over Huckabee in the low single digits. Cindy, still scarred by the memories of 2000, was uncomfortable every moment she spent on the ground. And her husband was only minimally less haunted. The possibility of another crushing loss in South Carolina—one that, in light of McCain’s still-threadbare financial circumstances, might effectively end his campaign—filled him with dread.

In one crucial respect, however, the McCain of 2008 was a very different animal in South Carolina than the McCain of 2000. No longer the insurgent, no longer the rabble-rouser, he was the candidate of the Establishment. His most loyal supporter, Lindsey Graham, was the state’s senior senator, and had done yeoman’s work in corralling the endorsements of local elected officials early on—and holding them in place during the dark days of 2007. At events across South Carolina in the days leading up to the balloting, McCain stood arm in arm with those officials. He also basked in the glow of the support of the state’s war veterans, some of whom had turned viciously against him in 2000. In almost no other way had McCain’s campaign wound up resembling the Bush model, but he was grateful for these two exceptions.