Over the next month, as it became clear Bush was moving toward ordering the troop surge, McCain became the most visible supporter of the new policy. In mid-December he visited Iraq and said he found “a steadily deteriorating situation,” which urgently required more troops. In early January he and Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman spoke at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, where he argued, “To be of value the surge must be substantial and it must be sustained.”
McCain’s passionate support for sending in more troops drew attacks from his potential Democratic presidential rivals. Rather than going after Bush, they gleefully aimed at McCain, the likely GOP presidential front-runner. John Edwards, appearing on ABC’s This Week, labeled the troop surge “the McCain doctrine.” “I think he’s dead wrong about this,” Edwards said.
McCain remained steadfast. One prospective recruit for his presidential campaign remembers what McCain told him when he came to interview for a job. “He said, ‘You can’t change my mind on Iraq, don’t even try. I’m not going to change my mind.’” Still, McCain talked frequently about the political impact, said Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina senator who was as close to McCain as anyone in Congress. “This I’ll always remember,” Graham told us. “We were coming back from Iraq on one of these early trips and it was just me and him sitting over dinner somewhere on the plane, and when you’ve got fifteen hours you’ve got a lot to talk about. And he said, ‘Lindsey, my boy, this one may get us.’”
Bush announced the new policy on national television from the White House library on January 10, 2007. He conceded that there had been too few troops in and around Baghdad and warned of additional U.S. casualties in the months ahead. But, he said, “to step back now would force a collapse of the Iraqi government.”
A Washington Post/ABC News overnight poll found 61 percent of Americans opposed to the troop surge, most of them strongly opposed. A bare majority of the public said they would like to see the new Democratic majorities in Congress block the plan. Even some military commanders opposed the plan. McCain remained one of Bush’s few allies. When asked by CNN’s Larry King how the war might affect his presidential candidacy, McCain said, “I would much rather lose a campaign than lose a war.”
The risk at that moment was that both might be lost.
The day after the president’s speech, McCain sat for an interview in his Senate office.18 He was subdued. It was late in the afternoon and outside dusk had fallen. The light in his office was low, adding to the somber mood. The surge policy appeared to fit neither of McCain’s standards for success: that it be substantial and sustained. The president had asked for about twenty thousand additional troops; McCain had recommended as many as fifty thousand. Some administration officials were already talking about a short stay for the additional forces. McCain said he had been assured by the president that morning the new forces would stay as long as needed. “I think it can succeed and I cannot guarantee success, but I can guarantee failure if we don’t adopt this new strategy,” he said.
We debated back and forth whether Democratic victories in the midterm elections of November signaled a mandate for the start of a troop withdrawal, rather than a surge. “It’s very important for us to be able to convince Americans that we can succeed,” he said. “I admit that this is a challenge to us. But I can make the counterargument that withdrawal means defeat and chaos. . . . I believe this is our only chance of success. I can’t elaborate much more than that, except to remind you that it’s been my position for more than three years.”
In interviews, McCain speaks quietly, particularly when the subject matter is difficult. And on this afternoon he was especially reserved. He seemed in conflict—not over the new policy but over the mess the administration had created. He said the war “will go down as one of the worst” blunders in the history of the American military.
His anguish was apparent as he talked about the damage the war had done. “Many things that have happened in the world that are unfavorable to the United States are the result of our weakness in the Iraqi conflict,” he said. Later in the hour he said, “One of the most frustrating things that’s ever happened in my political life is watching this train wreck. I saw it. Every hearing, every opportunity that I had—I said this is not going right, you’ve got to get more people on the ground here.”
He talked about the emotions he felt when he started to read Fiasco, the best-selling book by journalist Thomas E. Ricks. “I had to put it down,” he said. We asked why. “Because it’s so sad and it makes me remember the things that happened. We very appropriately grieve and mourn the loss of American lives. They’re our citizens. But think of what this has done to the average Iraqi, the families displaced, guys grabbed off the street and tortured and shot, bodies thrown on the sidewalk. It’s terrible. It’s heart-wrenching.”
He was asked about becoming the object of attacks from Democratic presidential candidates. Would he accept that the surge policy represented the McCain doctrine? “No, but I am willing to accept it as a McCain principle,” he said. “That is when I sign up, when I raise my hand and vote to go to war, that I want to see the completion of the mission.”
McCain advisers wanted him at least to express some differences with the White House over the size of the force—to put some distance between himself and the president. “I can remember a conversation when I said, ah-ha, this is your opening,” Graham said. “Get on the record now and say I’m not so sure this will work because we don’t have enough troops. Right idea, just not enough people. So you cover yourself basically. And he did say, I’m not so sure this is enough but this is all we got, this is what we’ll do.”
Three years of criticism of the Pentagon and Rumsfeld, three years of trying to be his own man on Iraq, were washed away with his embrace of the surge. He was once again a prisoner of war, hostage to the president’s plan and its success. McCain was still judged the most likely nominee in a field where no one stood out the way Clinton and Obama did in the Democratic race. But he was a man weighed down by the most important policy dispute in the country and by a campaign structure built for a different kind of politician and for a different campaign. McCain was the leader of the pack, but he was alone and unhappy.
The winter months brought little to cheer about. McCain went to Iowa in mid-February—three stops on a wintry Saturday. The crowds were decent and far from hostile. But even the conservative audiences seemed skeptical about the surge in Iraq. Flying across the state that afternoon, McCain told several reporters, “Looking around at the faces, I thought most of the people were willing to listen to what I had to say. But I also saw a lot of faces that hadn’t bought in to it. I didn’t see a lot of vigorous nodding.”
Early the next month, he decided to skip CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference), the annual gathering of conservatives in Washington. His two major rivals, Romney and Giuliani, did appear. Romney especially seemed to strike a chord. McCain’s absence drew fresh criticism from the wing of the party that had always viewed him with suspicion. His political position was increasingly precarious. Moderates who had once enthusiastically supported him now were backing away over Iraq and Jerry Falwell. But conservatives still did not trust him fully.
In mid-March he rolled out the Straight Talk Express for a tour through Iowa and New Hampshire amid stories critical of his campaign. “Everybody says, ‘We just want you to be like last time,’” he told reporters. “Last time we lost!” He took every question reporters threw at him in the back of the bus. “Well, what else?” he asked when their inquiries flagged. For a moment, it was easy to overlook his problems.
He visited Iraq and immediately created a controversy by offering an overly rosy description of conditions there. Before leaving the United States, he said in a radio interview, “There are neighborhoods in Baghdad where you and I could walk . . . today.” In Baghdad, an incredulous reporter asked him about that claim. “Yeah, I just came from one,” McCain said. He had visited the Shorja market
, but rather than a leisurely stroll, he was backed by heavy security—including a hundred armed U.S. soldiers, ten armored Humvees, two Apache attack helicopters overhead, and snipers overlooking the scene. Under questioning by Scott Pelley of CBS’s 60 Minutes, he offered a tepid apology for overstating things. “Of course I am going to misspeak and I’ve done it on numerous occasions and I’ll probably do it in the future. I regret that when I divert attention, but you know that’s just life and I’m happy frankly with the way I operate. Otherwise it would be a lot less fun.” No one saw the humor.
McCain made his formal announcement on April 25, 2007, in New Hampshire. The day was gray, the crowd modest, the excitement minimal. He stood on the banks of the Piscataqua River overlooking the Portsmouth Naval Ship Yard and presented himself as a commonsense conservative. He tried to separate himself from the president. He said he wanted to change Washington and hoped for a mandate decisive enough to prove that Americans wanted an end to partisan gridlock in Washington. “I’m not the youngest candidate. But I am the most experienced,” he said. “I know how the military works, what it can do, what it can do better, and what it should not do. I know how Congress works, and how to make it work for the country and not just the reelection of its members. I know how the world works. I know the good and the evil in it. I know how to work with leaders who share our dreams of a freer, safer, and more prosperous world, and how to stand up to those who don’t. I know how to fight and I know how to make peace. I know who I am and what I want to do.”
But McCain hardly knew himself or his campaign at that point. All the coverage of him was negative. Iraq was his albatross and, to the exclusion of everything else, now defined his candidacy—which greatly worried his advisers. “It showed principle on his part but there was a sense it was killing us,” one senior adviser said later. His efforts to reach out to conservatives like Jerry Falwell had been judged by the right as halfhearted, a case study in how not to do it, as one conservative told us that week. He trailed Rudy Giuliani in national polls; on the ground Mitt Romney was digging into Iowa and New Hampshire at his expense. McCain’s announcement day was more than a formal launching of the campaign; it was the opportunity for a badly needed fresh start.
McCain read his speech to cheers from the crowd. Afterwards he tried to hold a short press conference, but there was no stage, no microphone, and no sound system. He and Cindy were pressed up against the door of his campaign bus, with reporters chaotically trying to shout questions and straining to hear the answers. From Portsmouth, McCain’s entourage motored to Concord for television interviews, including one with Larry King in which McCain called for the resignation of Alberto Gonzales, Bush’s weakened attorney general. From there the campaign moved on to Manchester. Throughout the day, he rotated groups of reporters onto the Straight Talk Express campaign bus, as he had always done. But instead of the easy give-and-take of 2000, the atmosphere was more adversarial. Reporters, crammed into the tiny cubicle in the back that was McCain’s rolling lair, peppered him with questions about the war, about fund-raising, about the shaky state of his campaign. In Manchester, his last stop of the day, he arrived to a steady rain. An aide held an umbrella over him as he read the same speech he had given that morning. He spoke with little emotion while peering into a big flat-screen monitor behind the audience that served as a teleprompter. Backstage his advisers openly griped about the staging, which they did not think suited the candidate.
McCain had built a huge battleship of a campaign and now, almost four months into the new year, his discomfort was visible. He was not accustomed to being a front-runner and even less comfortable as the establishment candidate. He had agreed with his advisers that he needed to start early and do everything that past winners had done, but now they could see he was unhappy. “The campaign was not forced upon him early,” Weaver said later. “But he so dreaded it. He so dreaded it. I think he dreaded the pressure of being the front-runner. I think he dreaded the politicization of his position on the war. . . . I didn’t see him upbeat one day. And that’s not his general nature.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The Implosion
“This guy’s dead, nails in his coffin . . . fifth in a four-person race.”
—Senator Lindsey Graham on John McCain, July 2007
When the first-quarter fund-raising numbers were released in early April, Mitt Romney dominated the list of Republican candidates with $21 million. That put Romney almost in the same league as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and gave his candidacy a fresh burst of credibility. Rudy Giuliani was a distant second, with barely $15 million. McCain, who had spent almost two years building a fund-raising network, raised just $12.5 million. In previous years, that would have been respectable. But given all the hype and all the expectations, and a budget plan that had called for tens of millions more, it was a political debacle.
The campaign’s financial problems had surfaced months earlier. Terry Nelson took over as campaign manager in December 2006 and discovered there was no fund-raising plan. There were only a handful of major fund-raisers scheduled for January or February. Budget projections that called for McCain to raise $48 million in the first quarter were built on sand. In early January, Nelson went to Paris with his wife to celebrate their wedding anniversary. A few days after their arrival, he got a call from a campaign official overseeing the accounts. “We’re in the red,” he was told. From that day until summer, the campaign was never in the black. “We managed our budget against a deficit the entire time,” Nelson said.
Throughout January, the situation worsened. The political team was spending freely, only to be told by the fund-raising department that quarterly receipts likely would fall to no more than $36 million. Then, over a period of weeks, the estimates shrank repeatedly to less than $20 million. With each diminished projection, Nelson said he attempted to cut the operating budget but couldn’t do it fast enough. The first cut took it from $154 million to $137 million. In early February, it was cut again to $100 million. At the end of the first quarter, it stood at $78 million, half of the original projection. The bold plan of December was now inoperative. “We were slower getting started than we ever should have been,” finance director Carla Eudy said later. “We didn’t do as many events in the first quarter as we should have done. In some people’s minds it was going to be easier than it was. . . . I think basically we started the campaign from the expenditure side as a general election campaign and that was a mistake. . . . We should have seen what our fund-raising was going to be in the first quarter before we built up such an expenditure level that we couldn’t support it.”
The first-quarter shortfall forced drastic action. McCain asked his friend Tom Loeffler to oversee the fund-raising operation. Loeffler, a former Texas congressman and successful lobbyist, had supported Bush in 2000 and 2004 but was loyal to McCain. He once said he would “wash bottles and change tires on the Straight Talk Express,” if that’s what McCain asked. Steve Schmidt, a veteran of the Bush 2004 reelection who had just finished running Arnold Schwarzenegger’s reelection campaign and was a consultant to the McCain campaign, was called in to review the books. It was worse than he had feared, almost irretrievably so. McCain yielded to Weaver and Nelson and replaced finance director Eudy with Mary Kate Johnson, who was part of the Bush ’04 team. “To be completely honest, there was a sense of relief,” Eudy told us. “I just didn’t feel like the campaign was going in the direction it should go. I didn’t feel like there was a team effort or a team that had one thing in mind and that was John McCain only. It became my head on the chopping block and I was happy to take responsibility.” Campaign officials engaged in a pointed debate over why the shortfall had happened: Was it a failure of the fund-raising team to meet projections, or a failure of the political team to eliminate wasteful and extravagant expenditures when fund-raising slackened?
McCain said he was always dubious about the rosy projections. “I thought, Well, you know maybe we’re just a little slow getting starte
d,” he later told us. “You kind of think, well, maybe we can catch up. . . . I was worried, but obviously not worried enough to take the decisive action. And I did put the brakes on some things and demanded certain reductions, but obviously not nearly enough to adjust to the realities of the situation.” Weaver’s explanation was more direct: “We believed our own bullshit.”
Shortly before the campaign was due to report its dismal fund-raising numbers, the McCain top advisers met at the Phoenix Park Hotel to devise a strategy to deal with the coming public relations blow. The group included Weaver, Nelson, Salter, Loeffler, Schmidt, media adviser Russ Schriefer, and communications director Brian Jones. They settled on a damage control plan designed to show that the campaign’s financial woes were not slowing McCain down. He would give a major speech on Iraq at Virginia Military Institute after his trip to Iraq. Other speeches were planned. They would gear up for the formal announcement tour. They also prepared talking points for reporters for the day the numbers went out. Nelson called us the day the numbers were released. It was a painful conversation. “I’m going to give you a monologue,” he said as he laid out the grim numbers. “We obviously had hoped to do better. . . . We would like to place some things in context. . . . Hope is not a plan. . . . We have instituted a couple of steps and will institute more. . . . It’s something we’ve been focused on here for many weeks.” It was hardly a persuasive performance.
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