Game Change (33 page)

There was no ignoring the ramifications when it came to money, though. While Weaver and Nelson were spending like whiskey-addled sailors, the campaign’s early efforts to raise cash through direct mail and on the Web were falling flat. Many would-be contributors were turned off by McCain’s ardent support for Bush’s just-announced troop surge in Iraq. Making matters worse, McCain spent December engaging in a passive-resistance boycott against calling donors or attending fund-raisers.

By the start of 2007, the campaign was already more than $1 million in the red. And McCain had virtually no finance events on his schedule for the first two months of the year. The candidate was livid, but he blamed the problem not on the fund-raising, but on the campaign’s spending.

The first sign of trouble was when McCain made his maiden visit to his campaign fortress in Alexandria, Virginia, in the middle of January. Carrying a Starbucks cup, he walked into the war room and found sixty-odd people (some of whom were unpaid interns, though he didn’t know that) gathered there to greet him. He stopped in his tracks, his mandible dropping to his sternum. He turned in a slow circle, took it all in, mumbled a few words of greeting and thanks, and then stormed off in the direction of Nelson’s office.

“What the fuck are all these people doing here?” he yelled at his campaign manager. “Where are we getting the money to pay for all of this? What is it they do? Get rid of half of them.”

Not long after, McCain examined the personnel lists, looking for cuts, and grew incensed. “I am not fucking authorizing these fucking hires,” he insisted to Nelson. “Why do we need all these people? Who are these fucking Bush people? Where is the fucking money?”

McCain’s reaction to the spending was even worse on the road. When he hit the trail in the winter months of 2007, he saw evidence of excess all around him, and would call Nelson and Weaver in a fury. Why did there have to be a live band at one of his events? Why were there
two
boxes of donuts on his campaign bus?

Then there was the bus itself, an upgraded version of McCain’s fabled Straight Talk Express from 2000. The sleek new rig had deluxe furnishings, satellite television, a fancy bathroom, a full kitchen, and a big private office that doubled as a bedroom. Cindy mocked it as a “rolling Ritz-Carlton.”

As the cash crunch mounted into March and McCain’s fits became more frequent, Weaver reached a breaking point. Everyone is at fault for not vetting the fund-raising plan—including you, he told McCain.

“We started too fucking early,” McCain replied. “We should have waited. I shouldn’t be running right now.”

“We didn’t choose to be the front-runner,” Weaver said. “We
are
the front-runner. We have to conduct ourselves as the front-runner.”

Weaver warned McCain that the first-quarter fund-raising numbers were due out soon and they were going to be bad. He wasn’t kidding. Released in early April, the figures revealed that McCain had raised a meager $12.5 million—$35.5 million shy of the campaign’s original projections. Worse, he had finished third among his rivals; Romney led the pack with $21 million, while Giuliani had raised $15 million. The press coverage was brutal.

Weaver, Nelson, and Salter met McCain in his Senate office to talk about how to improve the balance sheet. Salter and Weaver bellowed back and forth with McCain, but they all agreed on the bottom line: if they didn’t fix their financial situation, they didn’t need to worry about laying people off. McCain’s campaign would be over before the race had even started.

“FUCK YOU! FUCK, FUCK, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!!!”

McCain let out the stream of sharp epithets, both middle fingers raised and extended, barking in his wife’s face. He was angry; she had interrupted him. Cindy burst into tears, but, really, she should have been used to it by now.

Cindy Lou Hensley had always looked like a beauty queen (or a senator’s wife) with her ice-blue eyes and flaxen waves and delicate mien. She first met John McCain in Hawaii, where he was a war hero still recovering from his injuries, still married to his first wife, Carol. Phoenix-born Cindy was just twenty-four, and wildly smitten with the dashing older man in his dress whites. Within a few months, she was a misty military wife, saluting and serving.

A quarter of a century and four children later, the dazzle had faded, even as the duty and the bond remained. But for all her taut Stepford smiles, Cindy was no typical political spouse. She was the sole heir to her family’s multimillion-dollar beer distribution business and chair of the company. She loved her home in Arizona, her job, her charities, and, above all, her children. While John spent months and months in D.C., she maintained her base and raised the kids. The setup worked for both of them.

When she was dragged back into campaign service in 2007, Cindy wanted to be an asset to her husband. But they were so fixed in their ways, so unused to compromise or relinquishing control, they could barely remain polite. John was impatient and indifferent, Cindy intent on asserting her needs. After an argument over a Secret Service detail—Cindy wanted the protection; John hated the intrusion—she flounced back to Phoenix. When you get it, call me, Cindy said, and I’ll come back on the trail, but otherwise I’m going home.

She summoned her husband out of campaign discussions to talk about Jimmy, over in Iraq. If their daughter Meghan, out on the stump, complained to her mother about blogosphere attacks on the family or annoying staffers assigned to her, Cindy would throw a fit. She’d agree to attend events and rallies, and then cancel abruptly.

The McCains fought in front of others, during small meetings and before large events, to the amazement and discomfort of the staff. Things could escalate quickly. She cursed him; he cursed her. She cried; he apologized. Cindy fought back, too. I never wanted you to run for this, she said. You ruined my life. It’s all about you. When it came time to film campaign videos of the couple, the camera crews had to roll for hours to capture a few minutes of warmth.

There were moments of tenderness, to be sure. When Cindy was depressed or overwhelmed, John was able to cheer her up or calm her down. He implored his staff to accommodate his wife, and refused to make any major decisions without her input. They were aware of each other’s quirks and needs, crazy about their children, and they talked to each other by phone all day long. They looked after each other’s health, and often served as staunch mutual protectors.

But there were also rumors. In the spring of 2007, whispers from Arizona reached Salter and Weaver that Cindy had been spotted at a Phoenix Suns basketball game with another man. The man was said to be her long-term boyfriend; the pair had been sighted all over town in the last few years.

Members of the McCain senior staff discussed the unsettling news, amid their growing concerns that Cindy’s behavior had been increasingly erratic of late. Weaver and others suspected that the Cindy rumor was rooted in truth. It was upsetting, Weaver believed, but not a threat. The legitimate press would never write about a spouse’s personal life—unless that spouse was Bill Clinton.

Then the campaign heard that a supermarket tabloid was working on the story. It could blow up at any time. At a meeting in mid-April, Team McCain prepared a full-bore media plan to deal with the fallout if the story broke. Soon after, Weaver delicately approached McCain. Did he know about this? Could he talk to Cindy?

McCain appeared distraught, but not surprised. He seemed aware of the situation, and, incredibly, suggested it was a matter he preferred be dealt with by the staff.

This is something a husband needs to do, Weaver told him.

McCain called his wife. She denied an affair. You’ll have to come out on the road with me, he told her. You’ll have to travel more now. People will need to see us together.

So she did. Davis, who’d always gelled with Cindy, was assigned to spend more time with her, and for a while she was by her husband’s side at rallies and town halls, just in case the story bubbled up—or bubbled over.

THERE WAS SILENCE ON the small charter flight from New York to New Hampshire on April 24. McCain was on his way, finally,
finally
, to officially kick off his candidacy the next day. Weaver, Salter, and Nelson were steaming mad. With no money, a feuding staff, and the stench of loserdom setting in, they’d been working for weeks on an idea for the announcement that would jolt McCain’s campaign back to life. The candidate had signed off on it—but now, just hours beforehand, he had changed his mind.

“I don’t want to do it,” McCain said to Weaver. “And I don’t want to argue about it.”

“This far down the road, you owe us a chance to discuss it,” Weaver angrily replied. But no discussion was forthcoming.

The idea was as simple as it was radical: a one-term pledge. McCain would promise that if he won the White House, he would spend four years in residence and then step down. The pledge would embody the theme that McCain cared only about solving the country’s problems and not about indulging his ambition. It would say that he was going to tackle the hardest issues—Iraq, immigration, ethics, entitlements, runaway spending—with no regard for reelection. It would mitigate what the campaign’s polling showed was his most significant liability: his age. It would be a bold statement about political sacrifice, a larger-than-life, maverick move.

Salter and Weaver had come up with the pledge and pushed it hard. McCain had reservations, but knew his campaign needed electroshock. His advisers plotted the rollout, taking extraordinary steps to keep the idea quiet, fearing that the loose-lipped McCain would spill the beans himself. The announcement speech was written. The press release was drafted. All systems were go.

But not everyone thought the pledge was a good idea. Some considered it crazy, in fact. One of them was Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican senator who was one of McCain’s closest friends; another was Rick Davis. They told McCain that the pledge would marginalize him and the office of the presidency. That it would make him a lame duck from day one.

A few hours before the flight to New Hampshire, McCain was with Cindy in New York at the Mandarin Oriental hotel, looking over his remarks. When Salter and Brett O’Donnell, McCain’s speech coach, arrived, McCain startled them by saying he was having doubts about the pledge. Meghan McCain entered the suite and trashed the idea, saying it was lame. Her dad now apparently agreed.

The next day, it was damp and chilly in Portsmouth for the kickoff. Dressed casually in a sweater, looking grim and awkward, McCain stood next to Cindy. His speech, having been hurriedly purged of all references to the pledge, was a disjointed mess. Later, in Manchester, McCain gave it again at Veterans Memorial Park downtown. Weaver looked around at the vast space and said, “You could have a fucking Rolling Stones concert here.” But the park was nearly empty.

MCCAIN’S CAMPAIGN WAS FORMALLY off the ground, but it remained a hugely troubled enterprise. The candidate was depressed and fatigued, feeling helpless, picked to pieces by something he couldn’t control. He contemplated how much better his life would be if he just pulled the plug on his campaign.
If I’d known this before, I never would have run
, McCain thought. “This wasn’t the campaign I wanted,” he told his advisers.

Long gone was the tough, spry McCain of the 2000 race, the cocky, joyous McCain of the Senate. This McCain was angry, angry every single day, as angry as Weaver had ever seen him. McCain knew what was being said about his implosion; he obsessively read the papers and the tip sheets, collected political gossip, and watched cable news. A mocking Maureen Dowd column could ruin his entire day.

“The press is out to get me” became McCain’s new catchphrase. No more was he accompanied by a merry band of accomplices filing stories about his charm. Now, trailing behind him, eager to catch every snort and frown, were stern scribes, overcaffeinated bloggers, and curious civilians with camera phones.

McCain was erupting over everything. At a scheduling meeting to discuss Meghan’s college graduation, McCain learned that the commencement was a multiday affair that would require him to make several round trips to New York. “How many fucking times do I have to go to fucking New York this week?” he yelled. “How many fucking times can you fucking graduate from fucking Columbia?”

Agitating him further was a policy debate about which he cared greatly, and for which he was catching major flak. The issue was immigration reform. With Bush’s support, Congress was taking up a proposal that would allow a path to citizenship for some illegal immigrants. In late May, McCain stood alongside Ted Kennedy and announced his support for the bill.

Weaver and Salter begged McCain to ease up. He was already the face of the Iraq surge. Now he was becoming the face of what opponents called “amnesty.” Just tone down the rhetoric, his advisers pleaded.

McCain refused. He was disgusted by Republicans in Congress and talk radio gasbags such as Rush Limbaugh who bashed immigrants. “They’re going to destroy the fucking party,” he would say.

As McCain’s town hall meetings devolved into shouting matches over immigration, the candidate let his frustration show through. He called Lindsey Graham in despair. Listen to these people, McCain said. Why would I want to be the leader of a party of such assholes?

BY THE TIME THE immigration bill collapsed in the Senate on June 28, 2007, the damage was done. The issue had more than injured McCain politically. It had thoroughly crippled his already lame and halting fund-raising. The second quarter had the same unhappy result as the first. He raised only $11 million, which left him just $2 million in the bank, and the political world switched from describing him as a “troubled front-runner” to predicting, and then assuming, he would be forced to quit the race.

McCain returned from a Fourth of July trip to Iraq with Graham more riled up than ever, but still capable of some gallows humor. “I’m the only one I know who would go to Iraq to get away from it all,” he said.

In that spirit, he had resolved to finally make some changes in the campaign. With his polling numbers receding both nationally and in key states, he blamed Nelson and Weaver for running things into the ground, and he wanted Davis to take over.