The McCain Surge

It was crowded. There were also two boom microphones, seven television cameras, ten still photographers, and at least a dozen print reporters.

This was not what I expected when I decided to join John McCain for the launch of his fall campaign. For much of the summer, the only stories about McCain’s campaign told of its demise and the imminent end of his political career. The conventional wisdom in Washington: He’s finished.

McCain has certainly had a difficult few months. His fundraising has been weak, his spending excessive, his campaign staff gutted. He favored Bush-style immigration reform; GOP primary voters do not. And he is the most outspoken proponent of the unpopular Iraq war among the candidates.

One commentator after another has informed us that McCain’s support for the war dooms his campaign. Even with positive reports out of Iraq from the unlikeliest sources–Carl Levin? Hillary Clinton?–the prevailing sense is that McCain is playing an unwinnable hand.

McCain thinks they’re all wrong, and he’s betting his candidacy on it. In appearances across southern New Hampshire last week, he spoke mostly about the war and the need to win it. This week, he will travel through several states with pro-war veterans in what his campaign is calling the “No Surrender Tour.”

If this were poker, he’d be all in.

Our first stop in New Hampshire became newsworthy for reasons having nothing to do with Iraq. Two students from Concord High School asked the kind of look-at-me questions that have more to do with impressing their peers than with grilling the candidate. (Reporters never do this.) One wanted to know whether McCain was worried that he was too old to be president and whether he thinks he might get Alzheimer’s in office. Snickers everywhere. McCain joked that his son thinks he’s old enough to hide his own Easter eggs, then punctuated his comments, with impeccable comic timing: “Thanks for the question, you little jerk!” The students loved it.

A second questioner sought McCain’s views on LGBT issues. McCain was confused by the acronym–short for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender–and after a clarification, the senator acknowledged differences of opinion with his interrogator. The student responded angrily. “I came here to see a leader,” he said. “I don’t.” McCain was unfazed. He told the student that such disagreements are “what America is all about,” smiled, and moved on.

Later that evening, I rode with McCain to the fire department in Bow, for a town hall meeting. A nondescript white van with two “McCain” stickers affixed to the back windows served as a poor man’s Straight Talk Express. The senator’s wife, his daughter Meghan, and a longtime family friend were waiting in the van with two staffers when McCain climbed in. After welcoming me to the van, he smiled broadly and gestured to those sharing the ride.

“I’m sorry you have to sit here surrounded by all of these jerks,” he said to great laughter.

I reminded him of the exchange at the school and said: “That’s the word of the day, isn’t it?”

“Oh yeah,” he said, as the memory of the morning registered. “Then there was that other question about the TB-GYN community,” McCain added, drawing laughter from the others in the van, most of whom knew the right acronym.

John McCain is having fun on the campaign trail–more fun than he did last spring when he was one of the frontrunners, and certainly more fun than during the summer of trouble. He is more carefree, more feisty, and more effective. Voters in New Hampshire seemed to notice.

When McCain dropped in unexpectedly at the Capitol Convenience store on Main Street in Concord, owner Mary Hill, a supporter, told him she could tell the difference. “Our friends were saying–old John McCain, he’s going down in the polls,” she said. “And I knew that’s when you were going to start to fight.”

McCain was very aggressive at the town hall meeting in Bow. He offered a harsh critique of the Bush administration and its conduct of the war in Iraq, saying the war “was mismanaged for four years” and caused “needless sacrifice.” He said that he was “the only one, the only one” of the GOP candidates who “said a word about this failed strategy of Rumsfeld.” He warned that his colleagues who want to set a date for withdrawal are in reality “setting a date for surrender.” He spoke against Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad and Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who recently declared his intention to fill any power vacuum left by an American departure from the region. These are serious times, McCain told voters, and I am the leader for such times.

McCain manages to communicate these themes without coming across as dour or pessimistic. In Bow, he told so many jokes that his appearance at times felt like a comedy routine. He told his sure-thing joke about the drunken sailor who wrote to say he was offended by comparisons of congressional spending habits and his own. He told a joke about a man who had his credit card stolen and after comparing the thief’s spending levels with his wife’s decided not to report it to the bank. He answered a question about illegal immigration by saying: “This meeting is concluded.”

It was, in the end, a strong performance in the state that gave McCain his signal triumph of the 2000 campaign. One veteran reporter who has covered McCain off and on since that victory told me he was reminded in Bow of the McCain of old. When McCain took questions after the event, a very earnest television reporter asked if he regretted calling the student in Concord a jerk. “You mean the kid who asked me if I was going to get Alzheimer’s? Nah. He was a little jerk. I’m kidding.”

As soon as we boarded the van for the short trip to a local restaurant, McCain checked his Blackberry for the score of the Arizona Diamondbacks game. (It hadn’t started yet.) We drove to the Siam Orchid, a Thai restaurant in downtown Concord, and I joined McCain for some dinner.

After we ordered, I read him comments that Hillary Clinton had made earlier in the day promising to begin withdrawing troops on the first day of her presidency. “It’s a declaration of surrender,” he said. “You know, the funny thing about it too is that at the Veterans of Foreign Wars, her speech said the surge is succeeding. She didn’t say the surge had succeeded. If she’d said it succeeded, of course then we’d all be calling for withdrawal.”

McCain believes the record of the Clinton administration will become a major issue if Hillary is the Democratic nominee. After all, she’s decided to campaign in part on the record of her husband’s administration. That administration missed several opportunities to kill Osama bin Laden, McCain points out, and we’re still paying for those mistakes. “There was the opportunity to bomb the bin Laden camp, and as you know they decided that that was not constitutional. And there were other occasions as well.”

Our conversation switched to the Republicans. “Some of these guys are sort of hedging their bets” on the Iraq surge, he said. “Their advisers are telling them: Look, don’t get too closely tied to it because they may be pulling out in April.”

“You care to name names?” I asked.

He paused, thought for a moment, and then got a temporary reprieve when the waiter delivered his dumplings. He offered to share them with his wife. “Have one, my little dumpling,” he said before breaking into a fit of fake laughter. “Ho, ho, ho, ho”–an exaggerated knee slap–“Ha, ha, ha. You are my little dumpling.”

He turned back to me. “Everybody gets embarrassed by me.”

“That was a good way for you to get out of a hard question–start joking with your wife.”

But he didn’t dodge: “I think it’s fair to say that the Romney and Giuliani campaigns have tried to distance themselves from this issue. I think it’s pretty obvious.” He would try to make it even more obvious at the Republican debate the following evening.

Over the course of the two days in New Hampshire it became clear that McCain is frustrated he doesn’t get more credit for pushing the change in Iraq strategy that has resulted in the improvements in the security situation there. He was in fact an early and lonely voice in the Senate pushing for more troops and a better strategy. At the Council on Foreign Relations in November 2003, he called for increasing “the number of forces in-country, including Marines and Special Forces, to conduct offensive operations. I believe we must deploy at least another full division, giving us the necessary manpower to conduct a focused counterinsurgency campaign across the Sunni Triangle that seals off enemy operating areas, conducts search and destroy missions, and holds territory”–an approach strikingly similary to that finally adopted with the surge earlier this year.

Review McCain’s speeches and interviews from 2004, 2005, and 2006, and you’ll find dozens of similar statements. “I was the only one to criticize Rumsfeld, at some cost,” he said at dinner. “You know, people were really critical of me when I was criticizing the strategy and Rumsfeld. Conservative Republicans who now today acknowledge the failure of Rumsfeld were saying I was disloyal.”

Since President Bush announced the surge, that criticism has mainly come from Democrats. In January, Senator John Edwards dismissed the surge as “The McCain Doctrine.” Says McCain: “I think that I’m beginning to be flattered by Senator Edwards’s characterization of the strategy.”

McCain no longer regards his position on Iraq as a liability, “because the facts on the ground are better.” And as long as that trend continues, he plans to press his advantage on Iraq by calling out Republicans he regards as soft on the surge. He did this at the debate last week in Durham, N.H. When Mitt Romney answered a question about Iraq by qualifying his assessment of the surge–it is “apparently working,” Romney said–McCain attacked.

“Governor, the surge is working. The surge is working, sir.”

“That’s just what I said,” Romney protested.

“It is working. No, not ‘apparently.’ It’s working,” he said.

At dinner the night before, McCain told me this debate would be the most important one yet. Then he won it in decisive fashion, with steady answers that demonstrated the leadership qualities McCain talks about on the campaign trail.

As it happens, that wasn’t an accident. Before the debate, Mark Salter, McCain’s longtime aide, gave the senator the same advice given young journalists: Show, don’t tell. Salter told McCain he should spend less time telling people that he is a strong leader and more time showing them. It worked.

It is far too early to start writing the McCain comeback narrative. But it is equally early to be writing his political epitaph.

Stephen F. Hayes is a senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD and author of Cheney: The Untold Story of America’s Most Powerful and Controversial Vice President.