Lindsey Graham: Not a punchline

The event would mark Graham’s introduction to the presidential campaign stage, in front of hundreds of members of Iowa and national press, and hundreds more Iowa farmers. The quality and reception of his remarks would likely bear on the trajectory of his candidacy, should he decide to run for president. But, roughly 12 hours before he was set to speak, Graham was puzzling not over his message, but whether to wear a tie.

“A sweater and khakis?” the South Carolina senator mused in a restaurant at the Embassy Suites where he was staying. No one would wear a necktie to an event like this, he thought.

The next day, following a string of candidates in suits and ties, Graham showed up at the fairgrounds in Urbandale wearing a jacket and open collar, and he posted the breakout performance of the day. He delivered an impassioned defense of immigration reform and a sober assessment of foreign affairs, punctuated with jokes that had the crowd in stitches.

But fewer than a dozen reporters stayed afterward question Graham, and not all of them were convinced of his political intentions.

“Is your trip to Iowa because you’re serious about running for president, or the platform that it provides for these points?” asked Jason Noble, a Des Moines Register reporter.

“The weather,” Graham chuckled before answering: “I’m serious, I want to test the waters.”

With Graham’s apparent entrance into the 2016 fray, many Republicans have privately and publicly wondered: what’s the punchline?

The Republican field already appears to be one of the strongest in years, with many candidates having spent months building their networks, tinkering with their messages and raising money. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush might bring in as much as $100 million by the time he launches his campaign. Graham figures he will need between $10 million and $12 million to get in the game.

At a recent Washington fundraiser for Graham’s fundraising committee, Security through Strength, myriad bold-faced names paid homage to Graham, who is one of the respected voices in the Republican Party on foreign affairs, whether or not he runs for president. Republican mega-donor Sheldon Adelson, in town for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to Congress, ambled out of a stretch limo and into the Capitol Hill Club. Marco Rubio’s finance chairman, Wayne Berman, was listed on the invitation. And at least five current senators attended. But it was not clear how deep their support went.

“This is not endorsement time,” said former Sen. Joe Lieberman, one of Graham’s close friends who attended. “I came out to say, ‘Thank you, Lindsey.'”

“Everyone knows Lindsey can’t win,” another person who attended said more bluntly. “But they feel that he’s going to be an important contribution to the debate.”

There is widespread speculation that Graham is running for president to make a point — and indeed, he is making them. Graham sees a world flirting with disaster. If the president accepts a bad deal with Iran over nuclear proliferation, “we’re on the road to Armageddon,” Graham said. If lawmakers do not reform entitlements programs to cut spending, “we will blow America up ourselves,” he says.

But Graham doesn’t think steering the debate and winning need be mutually exclusive. Quaint as it might sound — and to political cynics, perhaps it will — he thinks the right credentials and message at the right time could win votes.

“Stand by,” Graham’s wingman and best friend Sen. John McCain told the Washington Examiner. “A lot of people are going to be surprised.”

By all accounts, Graham is smart and strategic, and he is not blindly ambitious. If he weren’t a politician, one South Carolina Republican operative mused, Graham might be an operative himself. He doesn’t embark on fools’ errands, and to date, he has not run a race he did not win.

“He has an aw-shucks attitude that I think causes many to underestimate the force that he is in political terms and the way in which he thinks through issues at a deep level,” said Rep. Mark Sanford, a South Carolina Republican.

Graham says he began to consider running for president after he won his primary last year. Thought to be a prime target, he won the war before the first shot was fired. He raised an impressive sum of money, and then scooped up competing consultants — “he got the Hatfields and the McCoys,” as one South Carolina Republican put it. When one potential primary challenger, Rep. Mick Mulvaney, signaled that he wanted a spot on the House Financial Services Committee, Graham appealed to House Speaker John Boehner to close the deal, two sources said. Mulvaney was content to stay in the House.

Graham won the primary with 57 percent against six opponents, avoiding a run-off, and did so while talking frankly about dicey issues including reforming entitlements and immigration.

“If I can do it in South Carolina, I can do it anywhere,” Graham told the Examiner.

A Republican presidential primary stacked with governors touting their Washington-outsider bona fides will pose a new challenge, however, with Graham poised to run on the strength of his Senate record. In two decades in Congress, Graham has stressed pragmatism over intransigence, often finding more in common with Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat who he described as “someone you can do business with,” than Sen. Ted Cruz.

“When it comes to a broken Washington, I think I’ve been more of a solution than the problem,” Graham said during an interview in his office.

During President Obama’s first term, Graham built a reputation as one of the Republicans who was most willing to work with the White House, hardly a badge of honor in a Republican primary. The New York Times tallied 19 visits by Graham in the first 18 months of Obama’s presidency. But Graham hasn’t been back since September 2013, when he and McCain memorably stood in the White House driveway vouching for the president’s plan to confront Syria on chemical weapons, even as Graham faced his primary at home. After being summoned to the White House by the president and huddling for more than two hours, the three men had hashed out an accord.

The next week, the president changed tack. Graham never got a call.

“I really felt burned there,” Graham said. “Politically, that hurt me and hurt John, but we tried to do it for all the right reasons.”

If Graham no longer discusses policy with the president, he has begun to offer counsel to his potential Republican adversaries. Bush has called Graham to discuss foreign policy on multiple occasions, as have Scott Walker and Chris Christie, Graham said, and he has gladly offered advice — to the frustration of some of his aides.

“To me, my competition is not them as much as it is, I want to try to get the party in a good spot when it comes to national security,” Graham said. “When one candidate calls another potential candidate, I think it shows that they have confidence in who they are.”

Graham has never lacked political confidence, but he received a crash course in the subject when he watched McCain narrowly win a Republican primary, and lose a presidential race, in 2008. Graham was a regular fixture on the campaign bus, helping McCain with his talking points and bringing levity at tense junctures.

“I think the charm of Sen. McCain was being himself,” Graham said. “His comeback in 2008, after running out of money, being off in a ditch, embracing the surge … when it was unpopular, proved to me that a man or a woman with a firm sense of who they are and willing to tell people something they don’t want to hear, there’s a market for that.”

Graham is rarely one to sugar coat things. He was raised poor in Central, S.C., where his parents owned the Sanitary Cafe, a liquor store-bar-restaurant-pool hall. Graham, his parents and his sister, Darline, lived in two rooms in the back, until they could afford to buy a trailer. Graham credits his sense of humor to his father, F.J., “the funniest guy I’ve ever met in my life.”

But Graham’s “life was completely thrown in a ditch” when, while he was in college, his mother was diagnosed with advanced Hodgkin’s disease. “Your mom’s not gonna make it,” her doctor told Graham one day as he worked in his family’s liquor store. On the night she died, his father was in a different hospital following a prostate operation, and Graham rushed to make it to his mother’s bedside on an empty tank of gas. “The hardest thing I’ve ever had to do was tell my dad that my mom died,” he said.

Graham’s father died suddenly 15 months later, leaving Graham, along with an aunt and uncle, to care for Darline, then 13 years old. Graham drove home on the weekends to spend time with her and later paid her way through college.

“You can hear elements of that story weaved into his appreciation for government help, for hard work, taking responsibility for yourself,” said former Sen. Jon Kyl, a friend of Graham’s.

On military and security issues, Graham’s Air Force background is apparent. As a judge advocate, Graham became the foremost foe of the Air Force’s drug testing program, proving their urinalysis unreliable in case after case.

“I was the king of pee,” Graham said.

One of Graham’s cases, involving a captain who tested positive for drugs, caught the attention of “60 Minutes.” When Graham won the case and the program aired, the Air Force was forced to overhaul its testing.

“Lindsey was making history,” said Pete Carey, who worked closely with Graham as a JAG, and who attended one of his events in New Hampshire.

His trial experience came in handy later as a manager of Bill Clinton’s impeachment proceedings in the ’90s, when Graham grabbed the spotlight with pithy one-liners like, “Is this Watergate or Peyton Place?” But Graham says he isn’t eager to re-litigate Bill Clinton’s administration in a campaign, as Sen. Rand Paul has done.

“I have a firm opinion about Bill Clinton from that episode,” Graham said, “but that’s behind us now.”

And although Graham remains critical of Hillary Clinton’s response to the Benghazi attacks as secretary of state, he credits her with helping him to pass a law giving reservists year-round access to military health care. Graham drew the idea from his own experience as a colonel in the Air Force reserves, and Clinton took up the cause with him.

“It’s one of my finest accomplishments, and I will be forever grateful to her,” Graham said.

One potential hitch in Graham’s plan to run for the presidency is that he genuinely enjoys being in the Senate. He hasn’t figured out how he would put his legislative work on hold for a national campaign, he conceded.

“It’s going to be hard, actually,” Graham said. “What I’ve got to do is realize, I’ve got a day job, and the world’s on fire and falling apart, and I need to be working on a budget, and I’ve got to find a way to replace sequestration. There’s things that have to be done in 2015.”

Graham appears so frequently on Sunday talk shows because he has few interests outside of work, according to people who know him well. Unmarried and with no children, his only hobbies, one South Carolina Republican operative noted wryly, are playing golf and traveling to war zones with McCain.

But Graham does enjoy movies. His favorite film is “Casablanca,” a romance set against the backdrop of war. In Graham’s favorite exchange, Capt. Renault asks American ex-pat Rick what brought him to Casablanca, to which Rick replies he came for “the waters.”

“The waters? What waters? We’re in the desert,” Renault says.

Rick shrugs. “I was misinformed.”

On his first trip to New Hampshire this month, Graham hoped to test the waters, icy as they appear. He has arrived later and with far less buzz than many other candidates, and with a more skeletal campaign infrastructure. Still, his team sees opportunity. Graham reasons he can do well in the Granite State, where McCain won twice and where voters will appreciate Graham’s blunt style and knack for retail politics.

“The beauty of New Hampshire is it gives these lesser known, less well-funded candidates a shot,” said Steve Duprey, a Republican National Committeeman from New Hampshire and a former senior adviser to McCain, who will remain neutral this cycle.

Duprey hosted a dinner for Graham on his first evening in the Granite State, organized by an aide to Sen. Kelly Ayotte and attended by roughly 20 influential New Hampshire Republicans, including Mitt Romney’s former state finance chairwoman Beverly Bruce, Manchester Mayor Ted Gastas, and Gregory Slayton, appointed by President George W. Bush as ambassador to Bermuda.

Later, Ayotte called Graham for a followup during an interview with the Examiner.

“It was a great event, the world’s nicest people there,” he said sleepily into his flip phone. “I think if I come to New Hampshire enough I can do well. I’ll do as many dinners as you set up. I’ll do bar mitzvahs, whatever it takes.”

The next morning at Politics and Eggs, a traditional early stop for presidential candidates, Graham arrived wearing a purple sweater in a room filled mostly with suits. “The man who told me you wear a sweater to Politics and Eggs, he was a sweater salesman apparently and a Democrat,” Graham said in his quirky drawl, to laughs.

But his speech quickly turned more sober. He called the fight against radical Islam “a generational struggle” and “the 1930s all over again.” Graham apologized that the U.S. would need troops to fight the Islamic State. “I am so sorry we have to go back,” he said.

At one point, in a moment evocative of George W. Bush rhetoric, Graham recounted his memories of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, when he joined lawmakers on the steps of the Capitol. The story had been on his mind, as he had related it during an interview the night before, too.

“The chances of us getting hit again are great,” Graham had told the Examiner. “It’s more likely than not that we’ll get hit again, and I hope we respond accordingly. That we will take care of the wounded, bury the dead, and go after these guys. Because that’s the only way we’ll survive, is to keep the war over there as much as possible and to keep these guys on the run.”

“Don’t mean to be a downer,” he added, his characteristic light tone gone, “but that’s sort of what drives me.”