Is John McCain Bob Dole?

Photo: Taryn Simon

Past the fourth dimension John McCain trundles into the ballroom of the Fairmont hotel in Dallas, he has already had what for most men his age would have been a very full mean solar day. He has met the printing at a Mexican eating place in San Antonio. He has held a boondocks-hall meeting at a barbecue joint in Houston. He has fielded yet another question about the "Due north American Wedlock," the latest conspiracy theory from the nutters who brought us the New Earth Order. He has uttered the salutation "my friends" at least twoscore times. And, oh yep, he has won the Republican primaries in Texas, Ohio, Rhode Island, and Vermont, dispatched that holy-rolling goober Mike Huckabee back whence he came, and secured his party's nomination for president of the United States.

So McCain is feeling pretty chuffed when he mounts the phase with his canary-yellow-suited, Barbie-blond gal, Cindy. The crowd earlier him is measly by Barack Obama standards, just a few hundred people, but it'south enough loud and lusty. The confetti cannons are loaded and artsy, the balloons pinned to the ceiling.

Out in the audience, Mark Salter and Steve Schmidt wait twitchy. The goateed Salter is McCain's chief wordsmith; the shaven-headed Schmidt his mouthpiece. Through experience, the 2 men accept learned that prepared addresses are non McCain's best friends—and teleprompters his mortal enemies. On a skilful day, McCain merely looks shifty when he's reading off a prompter, every bit his eyes rails the flowing text; on a bad day, he stutters, stammers, yammers, making him seem … well, let's non go there.

Equally McCain begins to speak, Salter and Schmidt position themselves and so they can run across both their boss and the behemothic flat-panel on the photographic camera riser directly in forepart of him. The speech is curt. It's going smoothly. McCain is nearly done. "Their patience," he is proverb of the American people, "is at an end for politicians who value ambition over principle, and for partisanship that is less a contest of ideas than an uncivil brawl over the spoils of power."

And and then … Oh, shit!

The screen goes blank!

McCain is flying blind!

Upwardly onstage, McCain wears a mask of misery. He shuffles some papers, blinks, smiles tightly, checks the prompter repeatedly. Schmidt and Salter, eyes bugging, heads swiveling, are in full panic mode. Ten seconds laissez passer. Then twenty, then thirty, then 40 without a give-and-take from McCain. The oversupply thanks and chants, filling up the expressionless air that threatens to throttle him on national TV—until suddenly, voilà, the text reappears and McCain picks up where he left off. Salter shakes his head. Schmidt shrugs and mops his forehead. Soon they're borer abroad at their BlackBerrys as if cipher momentous had occurred, let alone a almost-death experience.

By the standards of the McCain entrada, of grade, nothing momentous had occurred. Less than a twelvemonth ago, the Arizona senator really was kaput—or and then some of the states geniuses thought. His performance was bankrupt, his poll numbers anemic, his squad in tatters, his image muddied and muddled. Merely today McCain stands as good a take chances as whatsoever of the remaining runners of existence the next resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. His approving rating, according to Gallup, is 67 percentage, as loftier as it's ever been. In caput-to-head matchups, he runs roughly even with Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and his prospects seem to brighten each day that the rancorous competition between his potential rivals rumbles on. "The Democrats are destroying themselves," says GOP strategist Alex Castellanos, who recently signed on with McCain. "They're engaged in killing Obama. It's like killing Santa Claus on Christmas forenoon—the kids won't forget or forgive."

That McCain's political resurrection owed as much to the weakness of the Republican field—non to mention blind shithouse luck—as to his talent and dust makes it no less remarkable. Yet for all the hosannas being sung to him these days, and for all the waves of fearfulness and trembling rippling through the Democratic masses, the truth is that McCain is a candidate of pronounced and glaring weaknesses. A candidate whose chapters to raise enough money to beat back the tidal wave of Democratic moola is seriously in doubt. A candidate unwilling or unable to breathing the GOP base. A candidate whose operation has never recovered from the turmoil of last summertime, still skeletal and ragtag and technologically antediluvian. ("Fund-raising on the Web? Y'all don't say. Y'all can raise coin through those tubes?") Whose cadre of confidantes contains so many lobbyists that the Straight Talk Express often has the vibe of a rolling K Street clubhouse. Whose awkward positioning issues-wise was captured brilliantly by Pat Buchanan: "The jobs are never coming back, the illegals are never going home, merely we're going to accept a lot more wars." A candidate ane senior moment—or one balky teleprompter—abroad from existence transformed from a grizzled warrior into Grandpa Simpson. A candidate, that is, who poses an existential question for Democrats: If you lot can't beat a guy similar this in a yr similar this, with a vastly unpopular Republican war all the same ongoing and a Republican recession looming, what precisely is the point of yous?

McCain and reporters on the jitney in New Hampshire concluding Nov. Photo: Jacob Silberberg/Panos Pictures

The morning time after McCain clinched the nomination, I hopped onboard his entrada jet and flew with him to Washington, where he was scheduled to take a congratulatory lunch with George Westward. Bush. (The menu? Hot dogs.) During the flying, standing in the alley, I asked Schmidt—who channeled his ferocity on behalf of Bush in 2004, Dick Cheney in 2005, and Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2006—how McCain planned to deal with his infamous "100 years" remark nigh Iraq. "We trust the American people to be able to effigy this out," he said in a tone, combative and stagy, that chosen to mind vintage James Carville. "We don't remember the American people are stupid. Practice you think they are stupid?"

Well, to be honest, sometimes yes and sometimes no—simply that, as Schmidt was well enlightened, is beside the point. Every bit irrelevant, in the end, is the argument raging between the McCain and Obama camps over the proper and off-white interpretation of the sound bite in question. What's pertinent to the race alee is that McCain has been unwavering in his commitment to keeping U.S. troops in Republic of iraq for an indeterminate period of time. And that this opinion puts him on the wrong side of the public on ane of the two primal bug on which the general election is likely to turn.

"For the by yr-plus, the public has said they want to alter our policy and they desire to get out, and McCain has put himself squarely in the status quo corner," says the pollster Peter Hart. Indeed, according to a new Gallup survey, voters favor setting a firm timetable for troop withdrawal by a margin of sixty percent to 35 percentage. "There'due south no way the public is going to say, 'Well, we're going to reassess things now that we meet it from McCain'due south point of view,' " adds Hart. "His difficulty is that the public has figured this out."

McCain's difficulties may be fifty-fifty more pronounced on the 2nd pivotal outcome: the economic system. During the New Hampshire primary, McCain blurted out the domestic equal of his "100 years" gaffe: "The issue of economics is non something I've understood as well as I should; I've got Greenspan's volume," he said, though he later immune that he had yet to crack its spine. In fourth dimension, McCain would contend that he was only beingness momentarily glib; that he may be no economist, simply he has a firm grasp of the discipline. Yet repeatedly over the years, McCain—a former chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, listen yous—has said things strikingly similar, to everyone from The Wall Street Journal to David Brooks.

Fifty-fifty the about loyal Republicans limited concern about McCain's economic science gap. "He's never been peculiarly fluent in or showed much intellectual interest toward economic matters," says Pete Wehner, who ran the Office of Strategic Initiatives in Bush's White House. "Tin he speak fluently or compellingly about them? We'll soon see. But information technology would require him to elevator his game."

Problematic as McCain's lack of economical fluency may be, it's only part of what plagues him. Another is the substantive basis he occupies. "People don't realize that he's Bush Two on economical policy," says Mike Podhorzer, the deputy political managing director of the AFL-CIO. "When we tell people in focus groups where he is on wellness care, Social Security, and the minimum wage, they are shocked. And they immediately say, 'I have to reconsider what I think about him.' "

Painting McCain every bit Bush's twin volition plainly exist cardinal to the Democrats' strategy this fall regardless of whether Obama or Clinton wins the nomination. Every bit Hart notes, "McCain'due south unmarried greatest weakness is that many voters believe he will be office and parcel of the policies that Bush has promulgated." Podhorzer, for his part, is already at it, having recently launched a marriage-financed try designed to label him a "Bush McClone."

No sane person would assume that such efforts volition be a slam-dunk, given that McCain's media-amplified image runs counter to the notion that he's a clone of anyone, permit lone 43. "McCain has that reformist, maverick history that people identify him with," says Bush'south former media guru Mark McKinnon, who now plays the same office for McCain. "They know he'due south not a typical Republican and has had his bug with the president over time, so they don't see him as in bed with the president or the Republican Party that they believe has in recent years come to represent the status quo."

The evidence buttressing McKinnon's exclamation isn't hard to locate. Among independent voters, according to Gallup, McCain leads Obama by a spread of 42-29 and Clinton by 48-23. And an fifty-fifty more striking sign of his crossover appeal was cited by Karl Rove in a oral communication he gave terminal calendar month in Washington. "About twice equally many Democrats support McCain as Republicans back up Obama, and about iii times equally many Democrats support McCain as Republicans support Clinton," Rove said. "The media is all wired up near these 'Obamacans' … but the real story of this election is the 'McCainocrats.' "

President Bush and McCain leave the White House Rose Garden later Bush'south endorsement on March 5. Photo: Charles Dharapak/AP

The question is whether McCain's maverick persona, which is securely rooted in his renegade run in the primaries eight years agone, will concur up nether scrutiny. For every bit it should be clear to anyone paying fifty-fifty cursory attention, McCain 2000 and McCain 2008 are very different mammals—every bit evinced past his toadying to Jerry Falwell, his flip-floppy embrace of Bush-league's revenue enhancement cuts, and his failure to offer any kind of substantial reform agenda this time around.

And then at that place's the fact that many people at the highest levels of McCain's campaign are lobbyists or the employees of lobbying firms. The list has included Schmidt, campaign manager Rick Davis, and ane of his top strategists, the longtime K Street kingpin Charlie Blackness. Until recently, in fact, Blackness was beingness paid by his lobbying store while he "volunteered" for McCain; his decision to footstep downwardly from the chairmanship of his firm a couple of weeks ago—a development akin to Eliot Spitzer taking a vow of chastity—was designed to preempt criticism surrounding disharmonize of interest.

Fifty-fifty some Republican stalwarts are appalled at McCain's coziness with the influence-peddling manufacture. "Can you imagine a bunch of people working for Halliburton trying to elect Cheney?" says a prominent GOP consultant. "How tin can that be legal? Fifty-fifty if information technology is legal, information technology's never happened earlier. And information technology says a lot virtually what McCain has get. In 2000, he was the candidate of reform, of anger, of screw the system. Now he'due south the candidate of lobbyists, endorsements, and special deals with Beltway banks."

So if McCain is no longer the bracing iconoclast he was in 2000, who the hell is he?

"I'll tell you," this person says. "He's morphed into Bob Dole."

This was non my first meet with the McCain-is-Dole meme. I had first run across information technology dorsum in Jan, on the night of the final Republican debate, in Simi Valley, California, when McCain'south crabbiness and sarcasm onstage had prompted a former GOP player at present tilling the corporate field to make the comparison over dinner. As it turned out, the thought was as well being promulgated sub rosa by a number of Mitt Romney's senior strategists. A few days later, on the morning of Super Duper Tuesday, it popped out of Mitt's own rima oris. "There are a lot of folks that tend to call back maybe John McCain'south race is a bit like Bob Dole'due south race," Romney snarked on Play a joke on News. "That it's the guy who's the next in line; he's the inevitable pick and nosotros'll give it to him, and then it won't work."

Non surprisingly, McCain's people button back hard on the proposition that their guy might be Dole Redux. "I think that in many means he'south very un-Dole-like," retorts McKinnon. "He actually has actually practiced strategic sense. He'due south a very disciplined candidate in terms of delivering a bulletin. And Dole restrained those things that people liked best about him. There'due south a groovy side of Dole that we never saw. Nosotros'll always meet that with McCain."

Certainly it's true that Dole kept his sense of sense of humor—dark, ironic, acutely destructive—largely nether wraps when he was the Republican nominee in 1996. It's likewise truthful that McCain makes no effort to suppress his comic sensibilities, which are not only similar to Dole'south but as well to those of David Letterman, with whom he shares an analogousness. Similar Letterman and Dole, McCain is constantly offering a running sidelong commentary about himself and what he is doing, in the process winking, letting everyone know that, deep down, he considers it a chip of a sham. In New Hampshire, McCain routinely ended appearances on the stump past invoking Richard Daley's timeless dictum "Vote early and vote often." What other presidential candidate in history has ever left his audiences not with an adulation line or a rousing crescendo but a cynical joke virtually politics?

As Neal Gabler argued recently in the Times, this is no small function of why McCain is popular with the press: He is the meta-candidate—and journalists accept never met a meta they didn't like. The question, withal, is whether it's the platonic approach to claiming the hearts of voters. Though Letterman is pop, Leno always thumps him in the ratings, after all. On the other hand, McCain's propensities in this regard may exist the best counterweight against his increasingly geriatric bearing. "It's one of the few future-oriented things about him," says Alex Castellanos. "He's got that postmodern detachment and intolerance of bullshit that will keep you immature forever."

But few of the other likenesses between McCain and Dole can be spun so benignly. There's the septuagenarian-ness (McCain is 71; Dole was 72 when he ran). There's the physical frailty, courageously earned in war, that nevertheless serves as a abiding reminder of his advanced years. There'southward the legendary shortness of his fuse. (McCain has yet to have a full-on "Stop lying about my record" moment on the trail, but his testiness was on display the other twenty-four hour period in a widely YouTubed confrontation on his entrada jet with the Times's Elisabeth Bumiller.) There'south the firm confidence, as Fourth dimension journalist Mark Halperin has noted, that "being on Meet the Press is more than important than going to church—actually, that being on Run across the Press is going to church."

These are all superficial things, you might say, and you'd be correct. But Republicans cite deeper, more worrying commonalities between McCain and Dole. "Y'all'd wing around with Dole in 1996 and try to talk message, and all he wanted to know was who was going to be upwardly onstage with him at the next outcome," recalls an operative who worked for Dole in his pre-Viagra days. "Same deal now with McCain. He has no bulletin outside of Iraq. What's John McCain's health plan? What's his tax programme? What'due south his loftier-tech program? No one in a meg years can tell you."

Scott Reed, Dole's campaign director, doesn't disagree with many of these parallels. "Tin't lift their artillery above their heads, can't comb their ain hair—yeah," he says. "Teleprompter-challenged—right." But Reed points out a salient difference between 1996 and today. "What happened with Dole was that the Democrats were able to aim both bazookas at us," he explains. "They took all their primary money and used it to create the Dole-Gingrich 2-headed monster, and nosotros were never able to go upward off the mat. But the Democrats aren't able to do that now. They may never be able to exercise it."

Reed is correct. For all the wailing and gnashing of molars amongst Democrats well-nigh the damage beingness done to Obama and Clinton by their prolonged master tussle, the greater cost to the party may be the missed opportunity to unload on McCain this spring. To no small extent, presidential campaigns are battles that boil downwardly to a pair of competing efforts to define the opposition. Were BHO and HRC not all the same endeavoring to hack each other to pieces with metaphorical meat cleavers, Democrats could exist using their huge financial advantage to cast McCain in whatsoever mold they consider nigh damaging: Dubya II, Dole 2, Attila the Hun 2, whatever. Only instead it's the GOP that's getting a head outset in the definition derby—peculiarly concerning Obama.

Back in Nov 2006, a few days after the midterm elections, McKinnon and I were gabbing on the telephone nearly the hopemonger's ascent. "I think Obama would be a existent interesting candidate," he said. "And if it'due south McCain-Obama, that's a real win-win for the country. There'south this great documentary on Barry Goldwater, and it reveals that he and JFK were having conversations about how, if they were the nominees in 1964, they were going to spring on a plane and campaign together around the country—go from city to city, debating each other in a respectful style. Which is a really interesting idea, and just the sort of matter you could encounter McCain and Obama doing. Wouldn't that be peachy?"

"In 2000, he was the candidate of reform, of anger, of screw the system," says a Republican consultant. "At present he'southward the candidate of lobbyists, endorsements, and special deals with Beltway banks."

McKinnon isn't your typical political mechanic or your standard-make Republican. Until 1998, in fact, his résumé included only clients of the Autonomous persuasion—and not merely any Democrats, merely the likes of Michael Dukakis and erstwhile Texas governor Ann Richards. Even later on two presidential campaigns in the service of Bush, he remains a sensitive soul. So I wasn't totally surprised when he declared, "I'1000 gonna tell McCain that if Obama is the Autonomous nominee, I'm non gonna work confronting him; I'g only non going to make whatever negative ads against Barack Obama."

A noble sentiment, to be sure, and a pledge that McKinnon continues to insist he intends to honor—though many of his friends suspect he'll detect it hard to abandon ship when the moment of truth arrives. But information technology's non a widely shared feeling in the McCain campaign or the GOP writ big. If Obama is the nominee, you tin bet the mortgage money that there volition be no happy-pappy fly-arounds. (For one affair, McCain gives every indication of regarding Obama the same way that Clinton does: as a flyweight, a line-cutter, and a preening neophyte.) No, the GOP entrada against the Land of Lincolner volition be unrelentingly brutal.

The contours of that entrada are already coming into view—and not but by studying the early maneuvers on the Republican side. "Our strategy volition look a fair amount similar the one that Hillary is running confronting him now," a party official says. "It'll build on two things: commencement, that he's mode too inexperienced to be commander-in-chief, which not only polls incredibly well but has the virtue of being true; and, second, that he's way besides liberal."

When it comes to feel, Republicans believe the contrast between McCain and Obama will be apparently to see, and much more meaningful that it has been in the Democratic race. When it comes to liberalism, they invariably cite National Journal, which concluded that Obama had the most left-wing voting record in the Senate. "Is in that location any run a risk the Republicans would ever nominate the guy who'southward furthest to the right?" asks Reed. "Everyone throws around the Fifty-word similar it'southward a blood-red, but there'southward something there."

In the standard Republican playbook, charges of excessive liberalism are typically employed to propose that a Democratic candidate is a pansy. And, no doubt, the party's assault on Obama will include insinuations of limp-wristedness, peculiarly compared with McCain in the national-security arena. Only Republicans accept other objectives in mind, also, when they harp on Obama'southward purported left-wingedness.

For a start, they wish to associate him with a static, astern-looking creed. "Obama's a fantastic candidate in the sense that he understands that this could be a New Frontier election," Castellanos says. "So nosotros need to take some of the time to come away from him, and it won't be hard to do. He talks a cracking game, but his policies are former-style, Democratic, industrial-age stuff. We just need to rip the wrapping off and show that there'south nothing in the box."

Similarly, by calling Obama a liberal, the Republicans are impugning his grapheme by calling him a phony. In his recent speech in Washington, Rove, later on pummeling Obama every bit a liar (for what he sees equally various biographical embellishments), a would-be tax raiser, and a surrender primate on Iraq, lit into him as a fraud for his pretenses of postal service-partisan leadership. "During the three years he'due south been in the Senate, anytime there has been a big bi-partisan effort"—on judges, terrorist surveillance, war funding, immigration—"where was Senator Obama on whatever of those large fights? I'll tell you where he was. He was over at that place up confronting the wall, ironically watching everything proceed and voting 'no.' "

Naturally, the Republicans' attempts to define Obama as too liberal will extend to the cultural realm. They will portray him every bit elitist, effete—highlighting Harvard, Hyde Park, and his gutter assurance on the bowling lanes of Pennsylvania. They will tar him every bit arrogant, pointing to the helpful comment once coughed up past his wife: "Barack is one of the smartest people you volition e'er encounter who will deign to enter this messy thing chosen politics." (Deign to enter?) And, no doubt, they volition slam him as insufficiently patriotic, calling attention to everything from his eschewal of an American-flag lapel pin to his failure to put his paw over his heart during the national anthem at a campaign event in Iowa.

Patriotism will also be the Republican entry point into the flammable realm of race. No one close to McCain believes that he intends for his campaign to exploit or exacerbate the black-white divide in any explicit mode. But nor does anyone believe we've heard the last of the controversy over the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Already a group of conservative activists have posted to YouTube a video splicing together his virtually incendiary comments with shots of Obama and backed by beats from Public Enemy. Wait more from the shadowy world of 527s that disgorged the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

It would be comforting to dismiss all this equally the drastic flailing of a party in reject. Merely there are signs that the areas Republicans intend to target may prove soft targets. The pollster Scott Rasmussen tells me that Obama is already trailing McCain amidst white male voters by a whopping margin of 57-33—and that in both swing states and others, such every bit Virginia, that Democrats hope to capture, there has been "significant deterioration for Obama" and "a dramatic change in McCain's favor" since the Wright imbroglio erupted.

What makes these developments all the more disconcerting, of grade, is that they're taking identify even before the GOP has sunk its teeth into Obama. Not long agone, I'm told, Bill Clinton was talking to a friend about his wife'due south rival and made an interesting observation. The way Republicans beat Democrats, he said, is by turning them into caricatures—citing John Kerry, Al Gore, and Dukakis every bit examples. The reason that he, WJC, had survived is that he'd aggressively labored to deny them the opportunity. He'd been able to say, await a minute, I don't fit in the box you're trying to stick me in. The problem with Obama, Clinton went on, is that he's tailor-made for the container that the Republicans are devising in which to coffin him.

Now, Clinton is hardly a disinterested observer here. Quite the opposite. And it'south worth pointing out that his wife ain't exactly immune from caricature; the Republican cartoon of her is as vivid and damning as a Thomas Nast rendering. But the argument that Obama would be more hands crated than Hillary is really the only statement that her entrada has left to sway the remaining undecided superdelegates—though the way her people talk almost it isn't usually so blunt.

Instead, they prefer to speak most the electoral map. What they will tell you privately is they believe that if Hillary were the Democratic nominee, she could be confident of holding all the states that Kerry won in 2004, and she'd be well positioned to carry Ohio, Florida, New Mexico, Nevada, and Arkansas as well. Obama, by contrast, in their judgment, would notice it impossible to win either Florida or Ohio. Because of his difficulties with blue-collar whites, he would as well be difficult-pressed to hold Michigan—turning Virginia, Nevada, Colorado, and New United mexican states into must-have states. Could Obama bear all four versus McCain, a western senator with environmental cred and an disfavor to federal spending? Non bloody likely, the Clinton people claim. Thus Hillary'due south electability statement in a nutshell.

Castellanos agrees that Clinton would be a tougher opponent for McCain than Obama would exist—but says it has footling to practise with the map. "We don't desire the Clintons in a general election," he says. "It'southward bad for America, and they'll win." Why? "The Clintons don't show upward at a knife fight with a gun; they show up with a missile launcher. I hope the Democrats put a stake in her heart now, or we will regret it soon."

Yet nearly Republican operatives believe that Obama, even with the Wright millstone draped effectually his neck, would be a more formidable challenger than Clinton, and their reasons eddy down to three.

Kickoff, if Hillary were to win the nomination, the process by which she got there would likely hobble her. "If Hillary pulls this off, she will have undoubtedly alienated the African-American vote," Scott Reed says. "And she'll definitely have higher negative ratings than whatever politician in America."

2nd, they point to the money—Obama's unholy capacity to amass it, that is. "By September one, Obama could be raising $2 million a day," says a well-known Republican media savant. "That would enable them to do network-TV advertising buys, which no one has done in a serious way since 1976. They could exist putting up 500 points a calendar week in places similar Texas, Louisiana, Georgia—while McCain is doing nothing. That's an ugly world."

Finally, it remains the case that having Hillary's name on the ballot may be the only thing that would motivate the party's base to plow out in big numbers for McCain. "There's no doubtfulness Obama is a less highly-seasoned figure to Republicans than he was five weeks ago," says Pete Wehner. "But Obama is non radioactive to Republicans the way Hillary Clinton is—and whatsoever opposition Obama elicits from the GOP, it won't exist on the same intensity scale as that of Senator Clinton. Correct at present the Clintons are, to much of the GOP, in a category all their own."

In the end, of course, this conversation will almost certainly evidence academic. With each passing hr, the Democratic nomination slips farther from Clinton's grasp. On my nigh recent visit to the campaign's headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, it seemed for the first fourth dimension that reality was setting in. Staffers were bandying about futurity plans—plans that didn't involve the West Wing. "That's what you practise at the end of a campaign," one senior adviser said—a tacit admission the terminate was now in sight. As I headed for the elevator to leave, I ran into chief strategist Mark Penn. "Hiya," Penn said, so ambled on toward communications managing director Howard Wolfson's office.

The next morning came the story in The Wall Street Journal breaking the news of Penn's fateful (and fatal) confab with the Colombians, which must have occurred within hours of when our paths briefly crossed. And I realized that what I thought I heard as "hi" must accept been a "bye."

On March 31, McCain set off on his weeklong "Service to America" biography tour. I caught up with him on the third day in Annapolis, Maryland, where he was slated to speak at the U.South. Naval Academy, which he entered as a plebe in 1954. After leading the pledge of allegiance at a local diner, where scrapple-scarfing patrons huddled in booths beneath a sign that read succulent pancakes, maple syrup, margarine, he arrived at a grander setting: the Navy football stadium. Just no throng of midshipmen-cum-McCainiacs surrounded the candidate at the rostrum. In front of him instead were 60 folding chairs, occupied by wizened dignitaries; behind him were 35,000 seats, occupied by no i.

His speech that morn, like the others on the tour, sought to explain how a callow, shallow hellion became a human being of honour. At the academy, McCain said, he was "childish" and prone to "petty acts of insubordination." Simply then came the horrors he suffered in Vietnam, and the lesson Annapolis had sought to teach him took hold. "It inverse my life forever. I had found my cause: citizenship in the greatest nation on Earth." But McCain's next judgement—"What is lost, in a word, is citizenship"—sounded like a not sequitur, and that'due south considering it was. Incredibly, once again, the teleprompter was at fault: It had devoured a page of his script. (Memo to McCain HQ: Hire new tech back up!) But this time at that place was no drama: McCain just soldiered on through.

At the end of the tour, McCain's consiglieri declared it a success. "It was open-field running for us," McKinnon wrote me in an e-mail service. "While the Democrats continued to attack each other and claw their fashion to the bottom, McCain was able to communicate a positive message and create a compelling narrative about the values he learned growing upwards that make him best-qualified to be president."

In truth, McCain'due south message reached precious few. The press coverage of the tour was perfunctory when not derisory. (Jon Stewart dubbed information technology the "Monsters of Nostalgia Tour," cracking that information technology had "all the allure of an Atlantic City senior citizens' outing without all the awkward sexual tension.") "It was a missed opportunity," says a Republican strategist with feel running a presidential campaign. "He didn't say annihilation. He didn't drive a message. He should have been making news every day hammering Obama's weaknesses. That Annapolis spoken communication was ridiculous. The empty football field? What genius idea that was a practiced idea? The manner you do these deals is you programme to bulldoze a headline, a picture, and a story—it'due south a simple acronym, HPS. That'southward how you pattern every day on a national campaign. Simply I judge they missed the memo."

McCain'southward organization has been ramping up far likewise sluggishly in the eyes of some professional person Republicans. Though its high control—the then-called Sedona Five, which consists of Black, Davis, McKinnon, Salter, and Schmidt—is well regarded, it seems stretched besides thin. "It's a skeleton crew over there," said the same strategist. Astonishingly, the campaign has just iv full-time finance staffers and no significant online cadet-raking presence. In March, information technology reportedly raised just $4 million over the Web and through directly mail.

When information technology comes to media and strategy, nonetheless, the campaign is nearly at total speed. A best-and-brightest collection of Republican admen has been pulled together, and, possibly more than significant, talent from Bush World is start to migrate into McCain Land. The sometime Republican National Commission chairman Ken Mehlman is now an informal adviser. Quondam Bush speechwriter Matthew Scully is onboard every bit well. There are fifty-fifty rumors that Rove, the Architect himself, is funneling ideas through the pipeline. "In that location'southward no official/formal human relationship with Rove," McKinnon e-mailed coyly. "Karl is on Fox a lot. We picket a lot of Fox. Karl has get an open-source consultant." Simply one of the savviest Karlologists I know suspects that Rove is providing a steady stream of advice through multiple points of contact with the campaign and the national party.

The specter of another Rovean ballot will surely give endless Democrats a astringent case of the heebie-jeebies—and it should. Obama's difficulties winning downscale whites (and especially white men) are existent and potentially of enormous outcome. Some of this can exist blamed on the Clintons, just as some will be attributable to whatsoever mischievous and malign race-baiting is expert by Republicans this fall. Some must exist laid at the doorstep of Obama and Pastor Wright. And some to the racism that, much as nosotros might wish otherwise, remains alive in the country. But however one chooses to apportion blame, what'due south now quite clear is that Obama is unlikely to plow many red states, or even many purple ones, blue. The prospect of a landslide looks remote, especially confronting a candidate whose biography volition exist powerfully appealing to exactly the constituencies with which Obama is virtually vulnerable. "We practice electoral-college projections, and over the by few weeks, every shift we've made has been in the Republican management," says pollster Rasmussen. "A month ago, the Democrats were clearly favored. Now it's a pure toss-upwards."

A wealthy Autonomous donor of my acquaintance likes to say, "Sometimes panic is the appropriate reaction." Simply for Democrats, this is non that fourth dimension. Judging past almost any meaningful metric, the electric current political topography strongly favors the party this year. Unless Obama heedlessly gets shamed into accepting public financing—and trust me, the Obama people are no fools, and they take less shame than y'all'd imagine—he volition be the proverbial Mr. Universe at the beach, kick sand in McCain's face when it comes to ad and the basis game. His positions on the issues are more than popular than McCain'due south. He can't be blamed for Bush'due south war or Bush-league's recession. He is young and vibrant and inspiring, whereas McCain is not and not and non.

And indeed, McCain's historic period may evidence as a big hurdle for him as Obama'southward race is for him. According to Peter Hart's polling, 29 percent of voters say that America isn't ready to elect a president in his seventies. And among the groups who annals even higher percentages of concern are women, midwesterners, and blue-collar voters. One of the central challenges that McCain will face is to evidence that he isn't by his sell-past date, simply another doddering member of the shuffleboard set. Watching him move through the world—a rickety little human being with tiny, clawlike easily, barking out staccato platitudes—I frequently call up of the day in 1996 when I watched Bob Dole accept an errant footstep and fall off a phase in California, an accident that sealed his image as more AARP than C-I-C. The aforementioned danger is forever lurking for McCain.

Dorsum in New Hampshire, McCain announced one day that he might be just a i-term president—an utterance that was variously described as an unfortunate slip or another demonstration of his refreshing artlessness. Please. What McCain was doing—a risky move, but not a crazy i—was not just trying to assuage concerns about his age, but turn them to his advantage. "He's got to position himself as the correct guy for right now, the guy with the maturity to pb in an uncertain world," says Castellanos. "He can't be the candidate of the future, but he can be the candidate of the present who will proceed y'all safe and requite you lot a shot at the future."

And, hey, who knows, it might even work, for history tells u.s. that political contests between the nowadays and the future are ever close-run things. The trouble is that McCain is no longer a man of the moment we currently share—he's an advertisement for the past. And in a contest betwixt yesterday and tomorrow, tomorrow commonly has the upper mitt.

Encounter Also:
Heilemann on Romney's Push for McCain's VP Slot

Additional reporting by Michelle Dubert.

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