The trip to Iraq deepened McCain’s commitment to make more changes. Lindsey Graham, who was also on the trip, recalled his mood. “This guy’s dead, nails in his coffin. He felt pretty bad I can tell you. We were out of money; we were fifth in a four-person race. He had lost confidence in his campaign team and he hadn’t made decisions about how to change yet, but he was thinking about it.” McCain could not understand how he had fallen so fast. “He’s a human being. You can just tell it on his face. You can hear it in his voice,” Graham said.
In Iraq, McCain and Graham attended a reenlistment ceremony and a naturalization ceremony. McCain was so moved by the spirit of the troops that he told Graham he was determined to take back his campaign and keep going. Graham said, “We were all on the plane and he says, you know, if these guys can do this, we can get this campaign back on track. If they’re willing to reenlist for another term we’re going to get this campaign back.” He returned back from Iraq, said one of his advisers, “and his mind was set.”
On the flight, McCain called Weaver and said he wanted to meet on Monday. Salter, who was in Maine that weekend, spoke to McCain by phone on Sunday. McCain was very cool. The next morning, Weaver and Nelson met McCain in his Senate office. They believed the agenda was Iraq. For weeks they had been working to revise McCain’s Iraq message away from the surge, hoping to make Iraq a less central focus of his daily stump speech. They were working on a document that laid out the details of the new message and assumed McCain wanted to review where they were. Instead, McCain asked to see the budget. Nelson said he had not brought the budget but could be back within the hour. Then the meeting quickly deteriorated into an argument about the state of the campaign’s finances. Weaver recalled, “He looked at me and said, ‘John, how did we end up in this situation?’”
Weaver was irritated at having to relitigate the entire matter. He complained that the structure of the campaign had impeded sensible decision-making. He said his resignation had been on the table for two weeks and McCain could exercise it whenever he wanted. He then left the room. “At that point, I knew it was over,” he told us. Nelson stayed behind briefly. He told McCain he was prepared to resign whenever the candidate wanted. He left and caught up with Weaver. “I said [to Weaver] he doesn’t have confidence anymore,” Nelson told us. “You can’t stick around if he doesn’t have confidence.” Weaver had one more conversation with McCain that night. “I said I don’t want to have any more arguments with you,” Weaver recalled. “If you want to make a change, I urge you to consider the ramifications internally. If you make it precipitously, you’re going to greatly damage your campaign and your candidacy. People will walk out the door.”
The next morning, Nelson and Weaver resigned. When word first leaked, there was a press frenzy. Reaction was spontaneous and unanimous. The departures were seen as a crippling blow to McCain’s campaign. Other resignations followed. Davis pleaded with the remaining advisers not to quit. Civil war erupted, with the warring camps using the media to tell their stories.
Davis’s side weighed in through a Robert Novak column that trashed Weaver and Nelson for mismanagement and extravagant spending. Three members of the communications team—Brian Jones, Danny Diaz, and Matt David—were considering leaving but had been asked to stay on long enough to see McCain through a trip to New Hampshire. The column infuriated Jones. He would not stay to be part of an effort to tar Weaver and Nelson. Salter begged them not to leave. Jones agreed but was alarmed by the almost tribal nature of the infighting.
McCain was terribly distraught—“It was as ugly as it could get,” a McCain confidant told us later—and briefly talked about shutting down the entire campaign. Salter told others of his concerns that McCain might drop out, but later insisted to us that McCain never seriously considered it. Quitting was simply not in his nature.
Determined to show the campaign was alive and well, McCain went to New Hampshire that weekend. There he uttered his memorable line that “contracting a fatal disease” was the only thing he could think of that might prevent him from being a candidate at the time of the New Hampshire primary, then six months into the future. He spent the night in Vermont, reminiscing with Salter, Jones, his son Jimmy, who was soon to ship off to Iraq with the Marines, and several reporters. He talked about his esca pades in the Navy, of meeting Lucky Luciano in a bar in Rome, of seeing Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in Paris, of a brief fling with a former Miss Brazil. It was all captured brilliantly by GQ’s national correspondent Robert Draper. “This was the McCain he wanted us to know,” Draper wrote. “A man brave enough to lose it all. The kind of man who never seems to win anymore.”
The next morning he held a town hall meeting at an American Legion post in Claremont, New Hampshire. The small second-floor room was stained with smoke and packed with people. Salter hung out in the back, pacing nervously as the candidate fielded questions. Months later Salter told us that he believed reporters were on a death watch that weekend, like “vultures on a . . . wire. Is he actually going to clutch his chest and drop dead of a heart attack right here, right before our very eyes and cameras?”
The second questioner asked McCain about the state of the campaign. He had watched television the night before and the pundits were sounding the death knell. What did the candidate have to say about all that? McCain showed he hadn’t lost his sense of humor. “I should have called on your wife,” he quipped. He took off his blazer and set it aside. “Look,” he said in a serious tone, “I’ve had tough times in my life. This is a day at the beach compared to that.”
The room erupted in applause. In the back, Salter applauded the loudest.
CHAPTER TWENTY
No Surrender
“We believe . . . we have a superior product to market.”
—Rick Davis, McCain’s campaign manager
John McCain was no longer master of his fate. Once his campaign collapsed, he was dependent on the shortcomings of his opponents to find a way back. Had any of them seized command of the race, he would not have had a chance. Mark McKinnon, his campaign’s media adviser, said, “He had to draw to an inside straight over and over and over again. A hundred things had to happen, most of them improbable.”
In the immediate aftermath of the implosion, McCain’s advisers had only one goal: to preserve his dignity and salvage his reputation. They anticipated an almost certain end to his candidacy, exactly when they did not know, but their belief was that his second campaign for the nomination would end as had the first, in defeat and disappointment. They were determined that it not end in humiliation. One adviser who remained in the campaign then said, “Part of sticking around was just to help restore his honor, just help the old soldier get his medals back.” Another adviser said, “Our first concern was, get this guy’s reputation as an effective campaigner back, as a guy with stature in the politics of this country. So if he returned to the Senate he’d still be a person of influence, a dealmaker and all the things he had become.” McCain sought a respectable end as well, win or lose. “There was one part of it that aroused my competitive spirit,” he later told us. “Since I never considered dropping out, I just said we’ll do the best we can and we’ll run an honorable campaign and one that we can look back on and say even if we lost we ran an honorable campaign.”
On the trip to Iraq, McCain and Graham had talked through the options. “I said okay let’s go down the list,” Graham said. “Name somebody here we can’t beat. And we went through each one of them as to how we could beat them.” Mitt Romney was beginning to take hold in Iowa and New Hampshire, but conservatives still doubted his reliability. Mike Huckabee was not yet a factor. Fred Thompson was still in the exploratory stages and all talk. Rudy Giuliani led the polls but his liberal views on abortion and gay rights still left him at odds with the base—far more so than McCain. “My line was we’re the most reliable conservative who can win in November,” Graham said.
The question was how to get to the general election. For advice, McCain t
urned to Charlie Black, a veteran Republican strategist who had been a young operative in Reagan’s 1980 campaign and later built a lucrative lobbying and consulting business in Washington while advising many Republican candidates. Black was the campaign’s most experienced senior adviser and McCain asked him for his best judgment, knowing Black would give him an unvarnished assessment. Was it possible for him to win the nomination, given the campaign’s financial problems? Black came back to McCain and said yes, he had as good a chance as anyone else in the field and told McCain he had a sophisticated strategy to get there. “What is it?” McCain asked. Black said he told him, “Be the last man standing.”
McCain’s implosion opened the way for four other candidates to take control: Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, Mike Huckabee, and Fred Thompson. Each had a profoundly different strategy for winning the nomination, and from early July to the eve of the Iowa caucuses, they all sought to prove they were ready to lead the party.
First up was Romney, who was moving quickly even before McCain’s collapse. For years, Iowa Republicans had staged a straw poll in Ames for presidential candidates in the summer before the caucuses. Over the years, the straw poll had become a significant, and expensive, early test of the Republican field, a daylong political carnival with consequences. Candidates who didn’t meet expectations were often driven to the sidelines.
In June, sensing Romney’s organizational advantage in Iowa and determined to avoid embarrassment, McCain and Giuliani announced they would not participate. That left Romney with an unfortunate choice. He had decided earlier that he would participate in any event that measured the candidates against one another: debates, forums, straw polls. But competing in Ames meant spending a million or two million dollars to rent buses for supporters, buy their tickets, feed them barbecue, provide entertainment, and handle logistics. Romney’s team had seen the straw poll as an opportunity to beat McCain and Giuliani and vault him securely into the top tier. Now his advisers worried that with those two out, he would be expected to win easily. A victory would produce limited payoff while gobbling up valuable resources. But to drop out would risk demoralizing his Iowa team, offend party activists, and possibly hurt his chances to win the caucuses in January. Committed to his early-state strategy, he decided to compete all out.
August 11 was warm and sunny, perfect for a daylong political picnic, and thousands turned out in Ames. Romney told supporters, “Change begins in Iowa and change begins today.” He won easily with 32 percent of the votes. Giuliani ran eighth with 1 percent and McCain tenth with less than 1 percent. But the real story was that, in a battle for religious conservatives, little-known Mike Huckabee had defeated the better-known Sam Brownback for second. Romney’s advisers tried to ignore Huckabee, spinning his victory as evidence that he was the true conservative in the GOP race, in contrast to Giuliani or McCain. Huckabee claimed he was the conservative candidate in a state where Christian conservatives had major influence in the caucuses.
That day, Romney’s advisers talked over their post-Ames options. Should they spend heavily to win Iowa if McCain and Giuliani were not likely to campaign actively there? Should they focus more heavily on New Hampshire? “We should have pulled the plug on Iowa,” Romney adviser Ron Kaufman said later. He did not mean quit Iowa entirely but that Romney should scale back the operation significantly. “Knock back the TV. Don’t spend time in Iowa. Don’t have two fronts. Go to New Hampshire and take on McCain.” Instead they decided to stay. Winning Iowa, even under changed circumstances, would start the slingshot strategy designed to propel him to the nomination. Kaufman regretted that he did not make that case forcefully once Romney had won the straw poll.
At that time, however, Romney’s advisers worried little about McCain causing problems in New Hampshire. If anything, they anticipated a battle there with Giuliani. They saw little chance for McCain to rise again. One staffer argued vigorously for attacking McCain after his campaign imploded. “He’s not dead yet, let’s stomp on him,” Myers said this staffer argued. She and Romney disagreed. She said, “Mitt said no. Rudy was getting bigger and bigger. . . . We had other fish to fry.”
Romney’s straw poll victory, coupled with McCain’s apparent demise, changed the dynamic of the race in a way that proved detrimental to Romney’s strategy. In Ames, his advisers began to argue that the Republican race was now a two-person contest between a real conservative (Romney) and a faux conservative (Giuliani). But they badly misjudged the new post-McCain dynamic. In fact, the race was quickly becoming everybody against Mitt.
McCain plotted his comeback by taking a leaf from Barack Obama. He would be audacious. Instead of steering away from the divisive Iraq issue, as his advisers had been urging for months, he would make Iraq the central pillar of his campaign. He would salvage his nomination by campaigning all-out for the surge.
A new member of his inner circle was the principal architect of this strategy. Steve Schmidt, built like a linebacker with a shaved head, had run Bush’s rapid-response reelection operation with such tenacity that Karl Rove dubbed him “Bullet.” After that he joined Vice President Cheney’s staff, later helped a beleaguered Arnold Schwarzenegger win reelection as California’s governor, then became a consultant to McCain’s campaign, where he and McCain developed a close relationship. He could be terse and abrasive. During a phone call in the summer of 2007, after McCain returned from Iraq, Schmidt grilled McCain like a prosecutor: Are we winning? he asked. Yes, McCain said. You believe that? Yes. What happens if we leave? We lose. So it’s de facto surrender if we leave? Yes. You have to say that, Schmidt told him. McCain said that’s what he was saying every day. Schmidt disagreed. “You’re telling people things are a little bit better,” he recalled telling McCain. “You’ve got to say what you believe on this. If you believe we’re winning there because of a new strategy, then you need to say that.”
In September, Army General David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, and Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, were scheduled to testify before Congress about the surge. The hearings gave McCain a platform to reinvigorate his candidacy. Schmidt told him, “What I think you should do [is] take every dime this campaign has, get all your veteran buddies together, start in California and drive across the country to New Hampshire and then down to Washington saying, ‘We’re not going to surrender. . . .’ He got it immediately.”
Thus was born the “No Surrender” tour and the strategy to force McCain back into contention for the nomination. In August, on one of his trips to New Hampshire, McCain held a town hall meeting in tiny Wolfe boro. Lynn Savage, whose twenty-two-year-old son, Matthew Stanley, had been killed in Iraq on his second tour of duty, asked McCain if he would wear a bracelet with her son’s name on it. McCain said he would wear the bracelet every day. Stanley’s mother asked him to make one more pledge: Do everything in your power to make sure my son did not die in vain.
Few people were paying attention to McCain. To the political community, September loomed as the month Fred Thompson would announce his candidacy and potentially reshape the Republican race. McCain’s advisers were determined to make September the moment he once again became a viable candidate. For that he needed three things: a successful debate in New Hampshire; positive testimony from Petraeus; and a No Surrender tour that solidified his message on the war and kept Iraq at the center of his comeback strategy.
On September 5, Republican candidates debated at the University of New Hampshire. Charlie Black had said McCain’s only path to victory was to win the New Hampshire primary. The rest of the country might not be paying attention to this debate, but New Hampshire voters, those McCain needed most, were. McCain had disappeared for most of the summer, ignored by the press and his competitors. The debate would be his moment to reemerge, and for once he knew what he wanted to accomplish. The opportunity came when Romney said, “The surge is apparently working.” McCain jumped him. “Governor, the surge is working,” he said. “The surge is working, sir. It is working.” Rom
ney protested, “That’s just what I said.” McCain kept up the attack. “No, not apparently—it’s working!”
That night, in Burbank, California, Thompson announced his candidacy on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. It seemed a clever way to take attention away from the other candidates.
The next week Petraeus gave a cautiously upbeat report on the surge, blunting Democratic efforts to force Bush to accept a timetable for withdrawing troops. General Petraeus had given surge supporters like McCain a boost in credibility, permitting them to argue that they had been right from the start.
The No Surrender tour followed. McCain visited VFW and American Legion halls, accompanied by Vietnam and Iraq war veterans. He attacked the liberal group MoveOn.org, which had sponsored a scurrilous newspaper ad calling Petraeus “General Betray Us.” He criticized Hillary Clinton, who had told Petraeus his assessment of the situation in Iraq required “the willing suspension of disbelief.” McCain said acidly, “It’s a willing suspension of disbelief that Senator Clinton thinks she knows more than General Petraeus.”
September marked a turning point for McCain. Not that he registered big gains in the polls. Not that his rivals suddenly began worrying about him. But it helped restore his confidence. When he looked back, McCain pinpointed that debate as the beginning of his comeback. “We didn’t see an immediate response in the polls,” he told us, “but what we did see was a little uptick in town hall meetings and people saying, ‘You know, I think I’ll give this old guy a second look.’ And I think that started us at a very slow but very steady path back up in New Hampshire.”
The Battle for America 2008 Page 32
