A rebel, a patriot, an indispensable senator

McCain wanted to ‘raise hell’ and he did. Often.

Politics is often a slog, but once in a while a moment of sheer exhilaration can slam you with what is possible.

One of those moments for me was a John McCain rally on the snow-covered banks of the Piscataqua River in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. John Fogerty’s Centerfield blared (“Put me in, coach, I’m ready to play, today”) and McCain was flanked by his partners in anti-establishment mischief — Sens. Lindsey Graham and Fred Thompson.

“He’s one of the worst movie actors that I’ve ever seen,” McCain said jokingly of Thompson. “No negative campaigning!” the late senator, indeed a movie actor, shot back. They were giddy, with good reason. It was February 2000, and McCain was headed for a massive New Hampshire primary victory over Texas Gov. George W. Bush.

Broad appeal, up to a point

McCain and his campaign and politics itself quickly fell to earth with a thud — in the next few weeks in South Carolina, and over the next 15-plus years. But back then, he was as pure a maverick as I’ve ever seen in politics. As he liked to say, “Gov. Bush is going to be out there raising lots of money. I’m going to be raising lots of hell.”

That instinct — to rebel, to protest, to say the truth as he saw it — never left him. You saw flashes of it even as he became part of the GOP establishment and its 2008 presidential nominee.

There was no categorizing John McCain, who died Saturday at 81. I first spent time with him in 1997 in Arizona, as he prepared to run for re-election to the Senate and weighed a 2000 presidential bid. He was calling to cap CEO pay at that time, a theme he revived when Wall Street crashed at the end of his 2008 White House campaign. He was also demonstrating what I thought were maverick impulses by going seatbelt free as he drove us around Phoenix. (Was the senator breaking the law?)

In response to my anxious “seat belt?” whispers, his press secretary said he had trouble putting it on due to the injuries to his arms from torture as a POW in Vietnam. I felt mortified, and even more anxious, when she mentioned it to him and he awkwardly buckled on the belt while driving.

McCain’s first presidential campaign was like a rolling season of West Wing: idealized and idealistic, an improbably successful seat-of-the-pants venture that operated on a primary-toprimary basis. John Weaver, his top strategist, compared it to match point golf. The trademark symbol of the campaign was the Straight Talk Express bus, on which McCain would hold forth with reporters about the movies he loved and the books he read, make jokes and news way too often for anyone to get any sleep, and entertain VIPs who wanted to say they had been on that magic bus at that magic time.

Listening to McCain interact with voters was often bracing. When a New Hampshire textile mill worker wondered whether his son would be able to find a mill job, McCain said he should aim higher for his kids, maybe hightech. When a woman complained about health care, he told her she should move from the White Mountains to a big city if she wanted top care.

McCain’s biography, honesty, humor and crusades against special interests and big money in politics gave him broad appeal — up to a point. I’ll never forget his rousing populist speech to a horde of fans and guests at a fancy resort. An out-of-town couple applauded wildly until he said he was against abortion and for gun rights. “Oh for Pete’s sake,” the woman said angrily, and stalked out of the ballroom. The same thing happened several years later, minus the anger and stalking out, when my liberal New York parents came to hear McCain speak at the National Press Club in Washington. It was more of a wistfulness: We like this guy so much, we wish he was on our side.

In fact he was often on their side, and mine. He was concerned about climate change and adamantly against torture. He wanted to limit corporate pay, corporate welfare and corporate political money. And he worked across the aisle on campaign-finance reform, immigration, veterans and the environment. Some of his bipartisan projects came to fruition, some did not, but he was always in the middle of things trying to make Congress work. That was the difference between McCain and so many of today’s Republicans.

McCain’s mission accomplished

McCain had his zigs and zags. His selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his 2008 running mate will be studied for decades, possibly centuries, as a disastrous example of the first major decision a presidential nominee must make — and in this case a decision that inadvertently served as rocket fuel for a nascent conservative movement away from facts and toward tribalism. His reaction to the financial collapse at the end of the 2008 campaign was less than reassuring, as were his swerves to the right to win Senate primaries against Tea Party opponents.

In the Donald Trump era, McCain had to endure — of all things — Trump’s insults to his military service. In his final months, he helped block repeal of the Affordable Care Act, tried to make Trump understand that Russia was not our friend, and pleaded with the Senate to restore itself to greatness or at least some semblance of thoughtful procedure. He was pleasing some people some of the time, and infuriating many people all of the time. As usual.

McCain told me more than 20 years ago that he didn’t want to have any regrets “on the day I leave the Senate or lose my ability to influence events.” Mission accomplished, Senator.