John McCain: codes and contradictions

ST. PAUL, Minn. — Sen. John McCain's primary campaign for the Republican presidential nomination looked all but hopeless. He had risked the wrath of his party to push for an immigration overhaul and now, just months before the Iowa caucuses, his compromise was falling apart.

"Lindsey, my boy, this may bring us down," McCain said to Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. "But wasn't it fun?"

By this spring, when McCain, of Arizona, had astounded handicappers by virtually locking up the nomination, he found his victory hard to believe possible. "I tend to be fatalistic about these things," he explained.

As he accepts the nomination tonight in St. Paul, John Sidney McCain III stands at the pinnacle of a career defined by such ambivalence.

Time and again, he lunges for the prize, then lashes himself for letting his pursuit get the better of him — for doing favors for patron Charles Keating Jr., for stooping to ugly attacks on George W. Bush during the 2000 primaries, for outbursts of temper at lawmakers who get in his way.

His critics assert the McCain of 2008 is not the McCain of 2000, or even 2007. He has surrounded himself with former protégés of Karl Rove, whose tactics he once denounced, embraced positions he once repudiated and initiated attacks on Sen. Barack Obama's patriotism that some say resemble the rhetoric he regretted eight years ago.

Boxing and birds

McCain has always had contradictory impulses: He enjoys both boxing and bird watching, cites as favorite movies both "Viva Zapata!" and "A Fish Called Wanda," and quotes idols Henry Kissinger and Henny Youngman.

An avid gambler, he is drawn to big bets and long odds — whether picking 1-against-99 fights with his fellow senators over their official perquisites, or defying convention by picking as his running mate a little-known Alaskan with a reputation as an irritant-reformer. He is the most disruptive figure in the Republican Party, and, as of tonight, its standard-bearer.

Over the course of his 72 years, McCain has been called (and called himself) many things: charming bad boy, wise-ass, underachiever, warrior, coward, maverick, apostate, straight talker, liar, war hero.

The contradictions give rise to questions about the essential McCain: Is he an opportunist with a conscience or a man with so singular a moral compass that sometimes only he knows where it points?

In fact, McCain lives by a series of honor codes, instilled in him by his father (an admiral) and his father's father (also an admiral): One must never lie, cheat or steal. McCain would be the first to admit he has failed, sometimes spectacularly, at all three. But he also has perfected the familiar American ritual of coming clean and moving on.

"I think one of John's deepest needs is to be believed and trusted," said his brother, Joe McCain. After submitting to a forced "confession" as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, John McCain has said, he found relief from his shame by provoking guards to beat him.

McCain's aspirations were always grand. As a boy, he dreamed of an admiralty like his father's. As the Navy's liaison to the Senate, he set his sights on becoming a senator. In Vietnam, he had mused aloud to cellmates about becoming president.

But he exasperated himself with his self-defeating behavior — letting his barfly antics as a young pilot undercut his credibility as a Navy officer, or later jeopardizing his friendship with Ronald and Nancy Reagan by leaving his first wife for a glamorous heiress 20 years his junior.

For most of his political career, McCain was a straight-ahead partisan. He voted along party lines, crushed his foes by outspending them, and sought to run the Senate Republican Campaign Committee. His preferred public image — the straight-talking maverick — did not emerge until well after 1989, when he became caught up in the Keating scandal.

In a marathon news conference and nonstop media interviews, McCain became the foremost critic of his own poor judgment, and public repentance became his theme.

He wove his regret over decades of smoking Marlboros into his drive for a tobacco-tax overhaul. Then he said he felt ashamed of his own party for neglecting children's health by blocking the bill.

He even organized his best-selling 1999 memoir, "Faith of My Fathers," as a confession. Written with aide Mark Salter as a springboard to the 2000 presidential race, it catalogs his decades of misbehavior leading to the realization in a Vietnamese prison of the deeper satisfaction of "a cause greater than myself."

Winning can be imprisoning, McCain has found.

For much of the summer, he had seemed merely dutiful on the trail, going through the motions. His aides have since imposed a new discipline, shielding him from the media, scripting a daily message and reining in his tendency to improvise.

"At heart, he's a maverick, and the maverick doesn't like the corral," said Mark McKinnon, a close aide to President Bush and McCain who is not involved in campaign. "But the corral is where he is. And it's working."

McCain's advisers say he hoped to pick up his 2008 campaign where his 2000 race left off — bucking convention, running against politics. He started his run against Obama, the Democratic nominee, with an apology. Standing on the balcony of the Memphis hotel where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King was shot, he told a mostly black crowd he had erred years ago in opposing a federal holiday for King.

He toured the heavily black areas of the South, an unlikely trip for a Republican running against an African American. And for a while, he skipped over the attack lines against Obama that advisers had inserted into his speeches. When Obama declined his invitation to a series of town-hall-style meetings, McCain went solo, drawing scant attention from the media.

"None of it got through — nothing," Salter said of McCain's message.

By midsummer, McCain had put the campaign in the hands of Steve Schmidt, a former aide to President Bush (and fan of Ultimate Fighting). The campaign began a barrage of advertisements that ridiculed Obama as a celebrity, accused him of indifference to wounded U.S. soldiers, and asserted he put politics ahead of victory in Iraq.

He stepped up his behind-the-scenes courtship of influential conservative leaders with whom he had clashed in the past. And he abandoned past calls for the party to moderate its opposition to abortion to let activists draft what many called the most conservative platform in the party's history.

Adventure

If McCain has any ambivalence about the conduct of his campaign, he no longer displays it in public.

Friends say he wants to become president and is learning how to get there.

"John has always seen politics as an adventure," his friend, Graham said. "I'm trying to get him to think of it as a business."

The choice of Gov. Sarah Palin exemplified both. Her resolute opposition to abortion fired up conservatives to get out the vote. But McCain's advisers say he sees her the way he sees himself — as an upstart outsider who shook up her state's corrupt GOP establishment.

"The 'old McCain' is still there — look at the Palin pick," Salter said.

It also was a glimpse of how McCain might govern. In every speech, McCain vows as president he would put country first, but his notions of honor and disregard for his popularity can make him an unpredictable patriot.

He is a conservative committed to limited government, except when he sees a greater cause such as global warming, campaign corruption or children's health. He boasts he stood by the Iraq war long after the public turned against it but also says he would never risk U.S. troops abroad without deep public support.

His associates say McCain has come to see the presidential race in starkly moral terms, convinced the election of Obama would weaken America at a decisive moment for the security of the world. But McCain is also the first to confess not all his drives are so selfless.

"I didn't decide to run for president to start a national crusade for the political reforms I believed in or to run a campaign as if it were some grand act of patriotism," he wrote in 2002. "In truth, I wanted to be president because it had become my ambition to be president."

Information from the Los Angeles Times is included in this report.