Ken Herman: Memories from the campaign trail,
It was a long and storied life that — literally, figuratively, personally and politically — had its high points and low points.
I was on hand during one of the political low points. It was in October 2007, and to say John McCain’s second bid for the presidency wasn’t going well would be an understatement.
Lest we forget, let’s dig up this nugget from an October 2007 “Gallup Election Review” assessment of the state of the race for the 2008 GOP presidential nomination:
“Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani has held a statistically significant lead in every Gallup national preference poll since February, averaging a 12-point lead over former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson the past three months. Arizona Sen. John McCain is third . ... Fifty-one percent of Republicans nationwide say they would vote enthusiastically for Giuliani next November should he be the party’s nominee. McCain, Thompson, and (Mitt) Romney are not generating the same level of enthusiasm among the party base.”
So that was the backdrop as I hit the campaign trail in South Carolina for a few days with what was then, at best, McCain’s bare-and-aching-bones campaign. Here’s what I wrote at the time:
“One walks with a distinctive gait, the product of knee and shoulder problems. Another hobbles on heels and crutches. The third turns 96 in February. Meet the campaign team:
GOP presidential candidate John McCain, wife Cindy with a knee injury suffered while shopping and the candidate’s mom, Roberta.
“Give one of them a fife and two of them drums, and you’d have a living version of the enduring tableau from Archibald Willard’s ‘Spirit of ’76’ painting. Patriotic as the day is long, but a bit worse for wear as the battle drags on.”
Those few days in South Carolina was all anyone would need for a telling glimpse of the determination, humor and patriotism that made McCain a man for all times in America. Optimistic in the face of polling data that offered little cause for optimism, McCain sailored on as even his own mom had doubts.
“It doesn’t look good,” Roberta McCain told me during the trip, “but like he says, he’s been the underdog before.”
(At the end of the trip, she invited me to visit her at her Washington apartment, a visit that made for a memorable video.)
On that campaign trip, McCain confronted the issues of the day head on. He did the same with non-issues of the day, including one topic that wasn’t exactly top-of-mind for most voters: ABBA.
The senator professed an unflinching, unapologetic love for the Swedish singing group.
“Nobody says they like them,” McCain said during a bit of straight talk on his Straight Talk Express bus, “but they sold more records than anybody in the history of the world, including the Beatles. But everybody hates them. You’re a no-class guy if you like ABBA.”
And then, in a flash of the comedy stylings of John McCain, he summed it up with the brand of sarcasm he also often employed in introducing a journalist as a jerk:
“Hypocrisy!” he proclaimed about the general impression of ABBA.
He followed that up with a mock promise to have ABBA music playing in every White House elevator if he became president. At least I think it was a mock promise. It’s among the many things our nation will never know about a presidency we never had from a man many consider among the best never to live in the White House.
McCain’s stump speech was a mix of humorous asides and serious assessments of where his nation and his party were at that moment in American history. His support of his nation was unwavering. Not so much for his party.
“We came to power in 1994 to change government, and government changed us,” he told the small audiences that came out to see him during that South Carolina swing.
Back on the campaign bus, McCain was not hesitant in identifying mistakes he had made in his life. Taking heat for jokes that some found objectionable was not among those mistakes.
“I think there is not enough humor in what we do,” he told me. “I know that several times I have gotten into trouble for using humor, but I will continue to use humor.”
And he used humor to deal with near-death experiences, which is among the best ways to do so. During his Navy career, he piloted no fewer than four flights that didn’t end precisely as planned.
“All of them were maintenance problems,” he joked. “One went into the bay in Corpus Christi. One I damaged but landed, and that impacted some power lines in southern Spain. Another I ejected from as a Navy instructor in Meridian, Miss. And the other was when I was shot down.
“So it’s really kind of 3½, because the one when I hit the power lines, the wings were damaged but it was flyable again.”
McCain said the combined experiences of those four flights offered a valuable lesson for life: “Don’t crash and burn.”
You know the rest of the story of 2008. In one of the more impressive comebacks in recent political history, McCain wound up with the presidential nomination. (Anybody know what that Giuliani guy is up to these days?) Barack Obama defeated McCain in November 2008, and the GOP nominee settled back into his role as a lion of the U.S. Senate, where he served until he died Saturday, nine years to the day after another Senate lion — Ted Kennedy — died of the same pernicious cancer.
And you know the rest of the story of John Sidney McCain. It’s a great and uniquely American story of a man openly self-aware of his accomplishments and his mistakes.
A footnote: One of the reasons that McCain brought his mom on that South Carolina trip was to make a point about genetics and his age — then 71, which was old, some thought, for a presidential candidate. Roberta McCain was an entertainingly vibrant, feisty and strong 95-year-old at the time, and her son liked to point out that his mom’s twin sister, Rowena, was likewise.
McCain regaled audiences with stories about how his mom, into her 90s, liked to go to France around Christmas and how on her most recent visit there she’d been denied a rental car because of her age. So she bought one. Roberta McCain now is 106. A nation shares her grief.