Democrats claim McCain and his party nearly parted

WASHINGTON — Sen. John McCain never fails to call himself a conservative Republican as he campaigns as his party's presumptive presidential nominee. He often adds that he was a "foot soldier" in the Reagan revolution, and that he believes in the bedrock conservative principles of small government, low taxes and the rights of the unborn.

What McCain almost never mentions are two extraordinary moments in his political past that are at odds with the candidate of the present: His discussions in 2001 with Democrats about leaving the Republican Party, and his conversations in 2004 with Sen. John Kerry about becoming Kerry's running mate on the Democratic presidential ticket.

There are wildly divergent versions of both episodes, depending on whether Democrats or McCain and his advisers are telling the story. The Democrats, including Kerry, say that not only did McCain express interest but that it was his camp that initially reached out to them. McCain and his aides say the Democrats were the suitors and McCain the unwilling bride.

Either way, the episodes shed light on a bitter period in McCain's life after the 2000 presidential election, when he was, at least in policy terms, drifting away from his own party. They also offer a glimpse into his psychological makeup and the difficulties in putting a label on his political ideology over many years in the Senate.

"There were times when he rose to the occasion and showed himself to be a real pragmatist," said Tom Daschle, the former Senate Democratic leader from South Dakota, who was one of those who met with McCain in 2001 about switching parties and who is now supporting Sen. Barack Obama. "There were other times when he was motivated by political goals and agendas that led him to be much more of a political ideologue."

In the spring of 2001, McCain was by most accounts still angry about the smear campaign that had been run against him when he was campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination in the South Carolina primary the previous year. He had long blamed the Bush campaign for spreading rumors in the state that he had fathered a black child out of wedlock, which Bush aides denied. McCain was also upset that the new White House had shut the door on hiring so many of his aides.

"Very few, if any, of John's people made it into the administration," Daschle later wrote in his book "Like No Other Time." "John didn't think that was right, that his staff should be penalized like that."

McCain had begun to ally himself with the Democrats on a number of issues, and had told Daschle that he planned to vote against the Bush tax cuts, a centerpiece of the new president's domestic agenda. McCain often made "disparaging comments" about Bush on the floor of the Senate, Daschle recalled.

Still, Democrats were stunned when, by their account, John Weaver, McCain's longtime political strategist, reached out to Thomas Downey, a former Democratic congressman from Long Island who had become a lobbyist with powerful connections on Capitol Hill. In Downey's telling, Weaver posed a question to him over lunch that left him stunned.

"He says, 'John McCain is wondering why nobody's ever approached him about switching parties, or becoming an independent and allying himself with the Democrats,' " Downey said in a recent interview.

Weaver recalls the conversation differently. He said that Downey told him that Democrats, eager to find a Republican who would switch sides and give them control of the evenly divided Senate, had approached some Republican senators.

"I stated they couldn't be so desperate as they hadn't reached out to McCain," Weaver said in an e-mail message last week.

Whatever transpired, Downey raced home and immediately called Daschle. It was the first step in what became weeks of conversations that April between McCain and the leading Democrats, among them Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and John Edwards, then a senator from North Carolina, about the possibility of McCain's leaving his party. One factor driving McCain, Downey said, were his bad relations with the Republican caucus.

"They had booed him once when he came in," Downey said. "It was bad stuff in the caucus. He didn't see his future with these guys."

Mark Salter, one of McCain's closest advisers, said that McCain, although flattered, never took the idea of leaving the party seriously.

The effort became moot in May when Sen. James Jeffords of Vermont abandoned the Republicans and changed the balance of power. But less than three years later, McCain was once again in talks with the Democrats, this time over whether he would be Kerry's running mate.

Two former Kerry strategists said last week that Weaver went to Kerry's house in Georgetown a short time after Kerry won the Democratic nomination in March 2004 and asked that Kerry consider McCain as his running mate. Weaver said in his e-mail message that the idea had come from Kerry. Whatever the case, both sides say that Kerry was so enthusiastic about the notion that he relentlessly pursued McCain, even to the point of offering him a large part of the president's national-security responsibilities.

McCain, who has rarely spoken publicly of his talks with Kerry, said last month that he dismissed the vice-presidential offer out of hand. "He is, as he describes himself, a liberal Democrat," McCain said of Kerry when he was asked about the episode by a participant at a public forum in Atlanta. "I am a conservative Republican. So when I was approached, when we had that conversation back in 2004, that's why I never even considered such a thing."