Game Change_ Obama And The Clintons, McCain And Palin, And The Race Of A Lifetime Part 15

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 f.u.c.king 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 a.s.sholes?

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 a.s.suming, 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.

After one last climactic shouting match in the Senate office, Nelson announced that he was quitting, jumping before he was pushed. Weaver, out of frustration, disdain for Davis, and solidarity with Nelson, decided to say sayonara, too.

McCain wanted Weaver to stay. They were brothers-in-arms from 2000, and no one, including McCain himself, had spent anything like the amount of time that Weaver had thinking about how to get him elected president. But too much poison had flowed between them.

With Weaver's conspicuous departure, McCain lost his wingman, and was visibly uncomfortable answering reporters' questions about the situation. "I'm very happy with the campaign," he repeated stiltedly, making himself seem deluded in addition to desperate.

McCain was on the verge of losing Salter, too. Close to Weaver, disillusioned by the spiteful family feud, he told McCain that he'd continue to write his speeches, but little more. But McCain pleaded with Salter to stay-"Forget about this s.h.i.+t; we're friends, we've been friends for twenty years"-and Salter relented.

McCain's highest priority was fixing the money situation. Davis took over the shriveled operation, its staff shrunk by Nelson at McCain's insistence from nearly three hundred to around forty, and zeroed out every other possible expense. Publicly, the moves were seen as the slow winding down of the operation. McCain had gone from a campaign bleeding internally to spilling its entrails all over the carpet.

The candidate gave pep talks to his remaining staff, his donors, his backers. In every case, he tried to be upbeat about his chances without sounding ridiculous. He showed more emotion than usual in thanking people for sticking by him.

With his closest friends, he was more torn. "I guess I never should have f.u.c.king run," he said. "I'm gonna do what I need to do, everything I need to do, and then we'll probably lose." He knew he risked further embarra.s.sment, but he was willing to take the hit: I know they're gonna make fun of me. I know what they're gonna say. I watch cable. I get it.

McCain went to New Hamps.h.i.+re on July 13, trailed by national reporters who hadn't covered him for months but who wanted to be present at the cremation. Jimmy McCain, who almost never campaigned with his father, came along. The senator was quietly defiant, vowing to stay in the race, with the Granite State the key to his comeback.

Cindy and Salter weren't dreaming of a resurrection. They were worried about John, about his entire career being defined by a botched mission of a few months. Their goal was to wrap up the campaign without further damage to his reputation or a plunge deeper into debt. "He's not gonna be the nominee," Salter told one of his colleagues. "I just want the campaign to last long enough so we can tell people one last time, 'Go f.u.c.k off. We made it this far.'"

McCain had a series of conversations with Charlie Black, a longtime friend and Republican strategist-and another Was.h.i.+ngton lobbyist. Despite all the speculation, McCain wasn't inclined to leave the race right away, but he wanted to know if he still had a chance to win. He was irritated and sad, burdened with a sense of responsibility for letting everyone down.

There was a narrow path back, Black told McCain, mostly because the other candidates seemed so weak. Giuliani? He would never roll up his sleeves and do the hard work. Romney? Conservatives would never fall in behind him; he was the moderate former governor of Ma.s.sachusetts, for heaven's sake. The others? Please. McCain stood head and shoulders above them all. It was like what happened with Ronald Reagan in 1980, Black reminded McCain. The Gipper had been the front-runner, but his campaign ran out of money at the end of 1979 and his staff was in turmoil. Reagan had come back, and so could McCain.

Black advised McCain that he needed to adopt a distinctly un-McCain-like approach: he needed to lower his profile. He had to do whatever he could to get as little national media attention as possible. "Every time you get covered it's going to be, 'That idiot McCain was the front-runner and screwed up his campaign,' " Black said. "So our goal is to be off the radar screen.

"Look," Black added, "for the next three months, all the stories are just gonna say, 'McCain's dead and buried.' Your only job is to keep your head down, go to those early states, and keep right on campaigning. We'll see where we are after Labor Day. If we aren't dead and buried, we're in this."

Chapter Sixteen.

Running Unopposed.

RUDY GIULIANI TOOK LITTLE personal pleasure in the prospect of McCain's demise. The two men were friends, and not just faux political friends. They actually liked each other. They'd first met at New York's City Hall in the late nineties, when Giuliani was mayor. They bonded over sports, baseball in particular, with Giuliani touting his beloved Yankees and McCain his Arizona Diamondbacks. In that awful autumn after the Twin Towers fell, when their teams met in the 2001 World Series, they'd made a show of attending several of the games together. More than once in the course of the 2008 presidential, Giuliani had said publicly that if he weren't running, he would probably be supporting McCain.

Not that Giuliani didn't see the political upside for him in the unraveling of his pal's campaign. He would've had to be blind to miss that-and Giuliani had an eagle eye when it came to his own advancement. Since he entered the race in February, he had led the field in virtually every national poll, riding his celebrity as "America's Mayor" and his bra.s.sy reputation as a hero of 9/11. With his hawkish profile on national security and moderation on social issues, Giuliani was chasing many of the same voters as McCain. In the wake of the maverick's meltdown, he seemed positioned to scoop them up, along with a chunk of McCain's donors. He looked like the new front-runner.

Yet to the members of the politico-industrial complex, Giuliani's candidacy was a chimera. The idea that the Republican Party would select a man of his background and views as its nominee struck them as implausible when they were being polite, risible when they were being honest. They contended that Romney was the runner to watch in the aftermath of McCain's implosion. Or maybe Fred Thompson would be the one to seize the moment; the former Tennessee senator and Hollywood actor, familiar from his regular role on Law & Order Law & Order, had been making noises for months about a late entry into the race. But Hizzoner? No way.

McCain himself agreed. Even at his lowest depths, he never felt threatened by Giuliani. Asked why by his advisers, McCain would shrug and say, "Rudy's Rudy."

Giuliani's defects, from a conservative point of view, were readily apparent. He was pro-choice, pro-gay rights, pro-gun control. He was thrice married, and had carried on a public affair with wife number three while going through a messy divorce from wife number two. When the latter, Donna Hanover, kicked him out of Gracie Mansion, he cohabited with two gay men. There were pictures all over the Internet of him in drag-face painted in rouge, head adorned with a blond wig, shoulders draped in a feather boa-from a New York variety show.

And those were just the liabilities that Giuliani brought into the campaign with him. The past six months had exposed more. He had fallen far short of his fund-raising goals. He had failed to master the retail politics rituals of Iowa and New Hamps.h.i.+re, never shedding his swollen entourage or his preference for photo ops over town hall meetings and intimate voter coddling.

Most puzzling was his timidity. Giuliani was supposed to be a tough guy, but in the face of attacks by his opponents, his performance had been as limp as an overcooked Chinatown noodle. Challenged in debates, he would bare his cartoonishly big teeth and respond with lame jokes. When his advisers, trying to fire him up, showed him vicious direct-mail attacks on him by the Romney forces, Giuliani would just chortle. He never discouraged his aides from producing negative TV ads against his foes, but whenever they showed him a new spot or proposed script, he invariably rejected it.

Giuliani's aides were at a loss to explain his softness. Some attributed it to his bout with prostate cancer in 2000. Others thought he feared that getting tough would provoke retaliation. Still others believed Giuliani didn't want to be president badly enough to a.s.sail his fellow Republicans. But mostly, when his advisers were trying to make sense of the bizarreness of Giuliani's behavior, they talked about his wife-and the operatic piece of psychotropic theater that was the Rudy and Judi Show.

JUDITH NATHAN HAD BEEN in the spotlight since 1998, after she and Giuliani collided one night at a cigar bar. The tabloid coverage of her had never been flattering, but once her husband entered the presidential race in early 2007, it turned into a horror show.

First came the story that Judith had actually been married twice-not once, as she had previously suggested-before wedding Rudy in 2003. ("JUDI GIULIANI'S SECRET HUSBAND REVEALED.") Two weeks later, she suffered a far worse headline: "JUDI'S JOB WITH PUP-KILLER FIRM." Years earlier, it seemed, she had worked for a medical supply firm that, yes, exterminated puppies as part of its sales demonstrations.

Rudy's famously thin skin was a suit of armor compared to the gossamer sheath that enveloped Judith; after every negative story, she became hysterical. The press hates us, she howled to her husband's advisers. They hate Rudy. They love Donna. And, "They're f.u.c.king me!"

Judith had the same view, also loudly expressed, of the press staffers a.s.signed to her. They're all out to get me, she'd say. n.o.body gives a s.h.i.+t about me.

Three successive communications teams tried to a.s.sist her, but found it hard sledding. She refused to provide the background information that would enable them to defend her and which only Judith had at her disposal. When they asked about the details of the puppy story, she professed selective amnesia. "I don't remember exactly what happened back then," she said. "It was a long time ago."

She was equally evasive about her whereabouts, insisting that aides never call or email her directly, but instead stay in touch through her a.s.sistant. So mysterious was she that Rudy would joke, I'm going to make her the head of the CIA if I win.

One cool night that summer, in the private room of a New York restaurant, the Giulianis convened a group of about a dozen campaign advisers and friends of Judith's to discuss rehabilitating her image; she called them Team J. As they sat down to dinner, each attendee was handed a sheet of paper by Judith's a.s.sistant: a nondisclosure agreement that swore them to silence about the evening's talk.

With wine flowing, Judith observed that her press coverage had not been to her liking. She wasn't being handled well, wanted to get back to basics. "What role should I play?" she asked the group.

Rudy's pollster, Ed Goeas, tried to be helpful. "First of all, you're his third wife. What you should be is humble," he said.

Judith scrunched up her face and pouted.

Humility wasn't Judith's strong suit. Nor was leaving Rudy to his business. She called him constantly when he was traveling without her, no matter where he was or what he was doing. On several occasions the calls arrived when Giuliani was meeting with donors or making speeches. He invariably picked up the phone. "h.e.l.lo, dear," he said when she interrupted him while he was onstage addressing the annual meeting of the National Rifle a.s.sociation. "I'm talking to the members of the NRA right now. Would you like to say h.e.l.lo?"

His staff concluded that Giuliani had no choice but to answer Judith's calls, because ignoring her risked dire consequences-more dire than wrecking some speech. To the NRA members, Rudy apologized, but added, "It's a lot better that way."

TEAM GIULIANI FACED a problem more imperiling, if less sensational, than Judith. Of the early-voting states, Iowa and South Carolina had proved inhospitable to the mayor's liberal leanings, and New Hamps.h.i.+re voters, who should have been a natural fit, were not taking to him, either. The campaign had always been premised on the notion that Giuliani was a national candidate-that his strength in places such as New York and California would carry him through. The question was how he could survive until those states started voting on Super Tuesday. The answer was Florida.

The Florida primary on January 29 was the fifth contest in the Republican race. The Giuliani strategy was to do well enough in New Hamps.h.i.+re to allow him to stay alive until the vote in the Suns.h.i.+ne State, then win there and be off and running.

Taking Florida was a credible objective. Replete with transplants from New York and elsewhere in the Northeast, and with large urban and suburban pockets of centrist Republicans, the state seemed fertile ground for Giuliani's pitch. It was one place where McCain's expected immolation would boost Giuliani on primary day. But the mayor had his eye on a more concrete a.s.set that he wanted to swipe from John: Florida governor Charlie Crist.

Crist had been elected the year before to the top job in the ultimate battleground state. With his lean frame, snow-white hair, and perpetual tan, he was the most popular elected official in Florida, a prodigious fund-raiser, and a topic of endless fascination. Though Crist's political skills were respected, many insiders saw him as something of a cipher. In becoming governor, he had won a bitterly contested GOP primary after facing down dual allegations of having fathered a child out of wedlock and being gay.

McCain had endorsed Crist in his primary fight; Giuliani had remained neutral. Crist expressed grat.i.tude to McCain on a regular basis, including several reaffirmations of a promise to endorse McCain's presidential bid. "Don't worry, I'll be there at the right time," Crist a.s.sured him.

But now that McCain was tanking, Crist seemed to be reconsidering his options. "I campaigned my a.s.s off for him," McCain groused to his lieutenants. "And now that f.u.c.ker is not going to keep his end of the bargain."

McCain was right to be worried, for even Crist's closest allies often said of him, "Charlie is all about Charlie." Crist's political team was aggressive and demanding. Jim Greer, his handpicked Florida state party chairman, started actively exploring what the governor could receive in return for his endors.e.m.e.nt, suggesting to Giuliani directly that a "right of first refusal" on the VP slot might do the trick. The Charlie Bazaar was open for business.

One fine July weekend, Giuliani made his play, inviting Crist to fly up and spend the weekend in the Hamptons. Giuliani and Crist played a round of golf. They smoked cigars at the Giulianis' home in Bridge-hampton. And they shared an epic meal. Sitting outside under a stand of trees with Judith and a handful of their respective advisers, they talked long into the night about the paths that had carried them to prominence. The evening went splendidly, the Giulianis thought. Crist was reveling in the courts.h.i.+p. The endors.e.m.e.nt seemed within Rudy's grasp. He invited Crist back to his house the next morning for a private conversation.

When Crist arrived, Giuliani made his appeal-and was thrilled with the reply.

"I'd like to support you," Crist said.

The next day, Giuliani shared the news with his aide Tony Carbonetti. "I think we got him; it went very well," Giuliani said.

Carbonetti was familiar enough with Giuliani's lexicon to know what that meant: Rudy thought it was a done deal. Seeing Giuliani's strong poll numbers in Florida, Crist had apparently concluded that Rudy was the horse to ride. Carbonetti, a no-nonsense fixer who'd been Rudy's chief of staff at City Hall, followed up with Crist's main political guy, George LeMieux, flying to Tallaha.s.see to meet with him and plan the endors.e.m.e.nt.

Giuliani's team so valued their new prize that they proceeded to build their entire fall strategy around it. Their secret plan was to start running TV ads in New Hamps.h.i.+re in November, followed shortly thereafter by a surprise trip to Florida to claim the Crist endors.e.m.e.nt. Then a cla.s.sic fly-around to all the state's major cities, for a series of press conferences and fund-raisers. After that, Crist and Giuliani would travel together to New Hamps.h.i.+re for some joint campaigning. The publicity, money, and show of force that Crist would confer in Florida would so impress the national media and the voters of New Hamps.h.i.+re that the endors.e.m.e.nt would have a gigantic spillover effect.

Over the next few months, Giuliani was buoyed by the confidence of having a prepackaged bombsh.e.l.l tucked in his breast pocket. Crist's close friend and top fund-raiser, Harry Sargeant, was helping Giuliani raise money, a heartening sign that the political families were engaged. Even as he began to slip in the polls, Rudy remained serene.

Until, that is, his campaign began hearing the same message over and over from their allies in Florida. No one could quite pin down what it meant, but the message filled Giuliani with unease: There's a problem with Crist.

THE CANDIDATES LINED UP at the urinals, Giuliani next to McCain next to Huckabee, the rest all in a row. The debate was soon to start, so they were taking care of business-and laughing merrily at the one guy who wasn't there. Poking fun at him, mocking him, agreeing about how much they disliked him. Then Willard Mitt Romney walked into the bathroom and overheard them, bringing on a cras.h.i.+ng silence.

Romney was the guy on whom much of the smart Beltway money had been betting from the start. His resume was impressive: former CEO of Bain and Company and founder of Bain Capital; savior of the blighted 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics; one-term governor of Ma.s.sachusetts. His pedigree was glittering: his father, George, had been a governor of Michigan and a presidential candidate, too. His personal life was impeccable: he had married his high school sweetheart, Ann, with whom he had had five strapping sons. He was well spoken and terrific looking, with blindingly white choppers, a chiseled jaw, and a helmet of glossy dark hair.

Romney was running a textbook Republican campaign. He had hired a squad of A-list consultants, pollsters, and media wizards. He'd raised more money than anyone in the field and had millions of his own to draw on. He'd courted the GOP Establishment; worked to neutralize the most vocal potential sources of opposition; racked up oodles of endors.e.m.e.nts; and carefully tailored his policy positions to appeal to social, economic, and national security conservatives, the three legs of the Republican stool.

But Romney's efforts to get right with the right landed him in trouble. For most of his life, he had been a middle-of-the-road, pro-business pragmatist, unequivocally pro-choice, moderate on tax cuts and immigration. Running against Ted Kennedy for the Senate in 1994, he pledged that he'd do more for gay rights than his opponent, and declared, "I don't line up with the NRA" on gun control. By 2008, Romney had reversed himself on all of this, which quickly gave rise to charges of hypocrisy and opportunism. Even before he announced his candidacy, a YouTube video began making the rounds that captured him firmly stating his liberalish social views, comically juxtaposing them with his newly adopted arch-conservative stances. From then on, the flip-flopper label was firmly affixed to Mitt's forehead.

Unlike Giuliani, Romney had no reticence about slas.h.i.+ng at his rivals. But the perception of him as a man without convictions made him a less-than-effective delivery system for policy contrasts. The combination of the vitriol of his attacks and his apparent corelessness explained the antipathy the other candidates had toward him. McCain routinely called Romney an "a.s.shole" and a "f.u.c.king phony." Giuliani opined, "That guy will say anything." Huckabee complained, "I don't think Romney has a soul."

His own team's view was more generous, but no less d.a.m.ning. For all Romney's business ac.u.men and affectations-he sometimes gave PowerPoint presentations instead of stump speeches-his advisers found him indecisive, an incorrigible vacillator. He would wait and wait, asking more and more questions, consulting with more and more people, ordering up more and more data. The internal debates over his message and even his slogan went on for months, without end or resolution.

By the summer, Romney was stuck in single digits almost everywhere except New Hamps.h.i.+re, where his status as a former Bay State governor and the owner of a vacation home on Lake Winnipesaukee made him a quasi-hometown boy. In trying to explain his failure to catch on, his advisers pointed to another issue, which they shorthanded as TMT-The Mormon Thing. For the Evangelical portion of the Republican base, with its suspicions about Mormonism, Romney's religion was a significant roadblock. (Friends of President Bush would call him from Texas and say of Romney's chances, You've got to be kidding; he's in a cult.) Compounding the problem was the candidate's unwillingness to talk openly about his faith, until it was too late.

Worse, Romney had a propensity for stumbling into the wrong kind of headlines. There was the story about how his gardeners were illegal aliens. There was the one about the time that he and his family went on vacation and put their dog in a crate strapped to the roof of their car for the twelve-hour drive. Oh, and also the one about his "lifelong" devotion to hunting, which turned out to mean he'd done it twice. "I'm not a big-game hunter," Romney said, then explained that his preferred prey were rodents, rabbits, and such-"small varmints, if you will."

Romney found his failure to break through frustrating. "It's not fair," he said to his aides. He was being defined as a flip-flopping Mormon-or a Mormon flip-flopper. He couldn't fathom why the caricature of him was sticking, had no ability to see himself as others might. When Romney's staff showed him the devastating You-Tube video, his first reaction was, "Boy, look how young I was back then."

THAT TWO CANDIDATES as flawed as Giuliani and Romney were the best poised to step in and capitalize on McCain's implosion was stark testament to the weakness of the rest of the Republican field.

There was Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas. He was looking good in Iowa, with his cheeky quips and syrupy drawl. But he was raising no money and had limited appeal outside his rural, religious conservative base.

There was Fred Thompson, around whom buzz continued to build all summer as he dithered over taking the plunge. But once he finally hit the trail in September, his candidacy was one long snoozefest, both for the voters and apparently for him; Thompson behaved as though he would rather have been anywhere but on the hustings, ideally in his La-Z-Boy.

And then there were the other entrants: Sam Brownback, Tom Tancredo, Ron Paul, Tommy Thompson, Duncan Hunter, and Jim Gilmore, all of whom were such long shots that they were better described as no shots.

Of course, that described McCain, too. Or so everyone in politics thought.

"HEY, BOY, IT'S JOHN. How ya doing?"

By the summer of 2007, McCain had added a new number to the speed-dial list on his phone. The cell phone was the one piece of modern technology he understood, and it was indispensable to him. McCain lived by the speed dial, was forever calling up and checking in with a wide and sundry orbit of confidants and confreres. The circle of calls was a perfect reflection of McCain's character and of his approach to politics and campaigns. He wanted to hear from a lot of people. He wanted to talk about what he wanted to talk about, not what he was supposed to talk about. He wanted to do it spontaneously, randomly, on his schedule. McCain would listen to everyone, take in their advice, then bounce that advice off the next person in the loop, and so on, ad infinitum. The circle of calls was not designed for the making of firm decisions. More often, it abetted avoiding them. It fed McCain's solipsism; he was the only fixed point. But although the circle was an infinite loop, it wasn't a closed circuit. Every so often, a brand-new voice would be jacked in.

Steve Schmidt lived in Sacramento, California, and barely knew McCain, though in their handful of encounters they'd hit it off. At thirty-six, with a Kojak-bald head, a linebacker's frame, and a Bluetooth headset invariably plugged into his ear, Schmidt was a strategist who had run the rapid-response unit for the 2004 Bush campaign, headed up d.i.c.k Cheney's press shop, and orchestrated the confirmation hearings of John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court. Wanting out of national politics, he'd moved to California to manage the reelection campaign of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. He was put on retainer by the McCain campaign when it was still operating under the Bush model, but he had given up his fee in March when the roof started to cave in.

With his campaign in free fall, McCain called and asked Schmidt, "Will you help me?"

"I will help you, but it's your campaign now," Schmidt said. "Everyone a.s.sumes it's over. You have nothing left to lose. You should do what you want to do." Schmidt's a.s.sessment of McCain's prospects matched those of Davis and Black: McCain probably wasn't going to be the Republican nominee. But it wasn't impossible, and at least now he had a clean slate on which to redraw his approach.

Schmidt's conversations with McCain quickly grew in frequency. He was talking to the candidate at least three times a day now, trying to help guide him toward a path to revival-but occasionally thinking, Holy s.h.i.+t, how the f.u.c.k did I get in the middle of this monstrosity? Holy s.h.i.+t, how the f.u.c.k did I get in the middle of this monstrosity?

The first call would come like clockwork around eight in the morning, as Schmidt took his dog on a six-mile walk past the manicured lawns of the gated communities that surrounded the one where he lived. One August morning when Schmidt and McCain were gabbing, the talk turned to Iraq. The two men had a bond on the subject of the war. As a White House staffer, Schmidt had been sent to Baghdad to help figure out how to sell the conflict to a skeptical American public. He'd come back from his a.s.signment so disillusioned that he declined to prepare a written report on his findings. He told the White House chief of staff that it wasn't in the administration's interest to have him commit his pessimistic views to paper. Like McCain, Schmidt believed that the war had to be won and that the Bush administration had bollixed the job. Both men had devoured the recent spate of books that chronicled just how bad things were; both had close relatives serving in Iraq.

When McCain talked to Schmidt on the phone, the candidate was always resolute: under the leaders.h.i.+p of Army general David Petraeus, the troop surge was working. But on TV, McCain was hedging, saying it might work, it could work, it was working in some ways. Rather than run away from his own position, Schmidt insisted, McCain should embrace it. The Senate was about to debate the surge policy, with the Democratic candidates pus.h.i.+ng their party to the left and forcing a vote that would mandate a troop withdrawal ahead of what the White House planned. This is a big, defining issue, Schmidt told McCain.

Your strategic imperative is completely different from every other candidate's, Schmidt said. Romney's strategic imperative is to win the Iowa caucuses. Giuliani's is to win in New Hamps.h.i.+re, then take Florida. Yours is to create a comeback narrative. You are a reader of literature. You understand what a narrative arc is. You were on top and then you fell, and now we're at the part of the story where, before you can have any hope of winning, we have to create the comeback. And the way you create the comeback is by making this race about something other than your political fortunes. It's gotta be about a cause greater than self, which is what your campaign is supposed to be about. The thing this campaign ought to be about now is stopping the Democrats from surrendering in Iraq at the moment when we're winning.

Schmidt proposed a low-budget campaign tour of the key states, with McCain accompanied by some of his POW buddies and other veterans. Put together a caravan, the strategist said. Stay in cheap hotels. Do American Legion halls and VFW posts. Down some beers at night. Have some fun.

McCain loved the idea. The campaign, once so big and bloated, now was reduced to a simple mission, just as it should be. "That's right. I'm gonna do it," he told Schmidt. "I'm gonna do it."

On September 5, Schmidt's galvanizing advice about his message on Iraq still ringing in his ears, McCain appeared with the other candidates at the University of New Hamps.h.i.+re for a debate. With Petraeus scheduled to testify before Congress the following week on the progress of the surge, Romney was asked a question about his att.i.tude toward troop withdrawals. "I don't have a time frame that I've announced," Romney said. "The surge is apparently working. We're going to get a full report on that from General Petraeus . . . very soon."

McCain spoke next-and let Romney have it. "Governor, the surge is is working. The surge is working, sir. It is working." working. The surge is working, sir. It is working."

"That's just what I said," Romney replied.

"No, not apparently," apparently," McCain said sharply, cutting him off. "It's working!" McCain said sharply, cutting him off. "It's working!"

A week later, the No Surrender Tour commenced in Waterloo, Iowa, and from there continued to New Hamps.h.i.+re and South Carolina. The crowds were small, the staging often ragged, the events in cramped, dark, smoky rooms. But the impact was apparent-and not just on the press narrative, but on McCain himself. He was now at the center of a high-profile fight where he had moral certainty that his cause was just and his fear of the opposition was nil. He was distancing himself from the White House's mushy rhetoric and slamming the totems of the left. Surrounded by friends, he started joking again, enjoying himself, some of his confidence returning. Fatalistic as ever, he tried to keep his excitement in check. But his political nerve endings began to tingle.

My G.o.d, I might be pulling this thing back in, he thought.

MCCAIN FLEW DOWN TO Florida to raise some money. A fund-raising event had been set up for him on October 2 at the Governors Club in Tallaha.s.see. As long as he was in the neighborhood, he arranged to pay a call on the governor himself. If he couldn't get Crist to endorse him, at least he might be able to hold him neutral.

One of McCain's top Florida supporters, Kathleen Shanahan, was with him when he finished up the donor event. On the way to the statehouse, she verbally took McCain by the lapels and shook him. She was worried that if she didn't say something, McCain, being McCain, would almost certainly sit down with Crist, make small talk, tell some jokes, and waste the moment.

"Don't go over there and bulls.h.i.+t your way through this meeting," Shanahan said. Crist was under all sorts of pressure from Giuliani, Romney, and Thompson, and there was no telling which way he might jump. "You have to be serious; you've got to tell him why you need Florida, why you need Charlie, why you can win."

"I hear you," McCain a.s.sured her.

McCain marched into Crist's office and got down to business. He followed Shanahan's script to the letter. No one likes Rudy Giuliani more than me, McCain said, but he's not going to be the nominee of this party, and you'd be wasting your support if you endorsed him. There's no way he's going to win. You should support me. I'm going to win this nomination. My campaign is revived.

Afterward, Crist told his advisers that he cared about McCain, was grateful for his backing in the governor's race. He might not endorse John in the end, Crist said, but otherwise, the senator's speech had convinced him. He intended to remain neutral-for now.

A few weeks later, in early November, the Giuliani people got the word from Florida that Crist's endors.e.m.e.nt was being suspended until further notice. Giuliani tried to reach Crist, but he was out of the country, on a Latin American trade mission-having taken Giuliani's nomination strategy with him.

Giuliani's campaign was in a precarious place. Bernard Kerik, the mayor's former driver and then police commissioner and business partner, whom Giuliani had lobbied Bush to nominate as federal director of homeland security, had just been indicted on corruption and tax evasion charges. Worse, on November 27, Politico reported that Giuliani's mayoral office had allegedly used murky accounting practices to cover up government funding of his security during secret visits to Judith's Southampton condo when she was his mistress. Together, the stories created the kind of political-personal reek around Giuliani that many had predicted would be as likely to derail his presidential bid as would his liberal positions on social issues.

Without Crist's endors.e.m.e.nt, Florida was almost certainly gone for Giuliani, though he would gamely continue to stump there. Where else did he have to go? Among the first four states, Giuliani's people believed New Hamps.h.i.+re was their only shot. But his poll numbers there were falling fast, which led him to throw in the towel on the Granite State. In doing so, Giuliani was making the single significant change-in strategy, personnel, or message-he ever attempted in reaction to his campaign's decline. He was also helping pry the door open for the resurgence of McCain.

NEW HAMPs.h.i.+RE WAS THE only state that mattered to McCain. He knew he was in a binary situation: If he lost the primary, he was through; if he won it, he'd be the front-runner again, and this time, when it counted. Had it been any other state, McCain's emerging sense of optimism would have been even more guarded than it was. But being all-in on New Hamps.h.i.+re? That wasn't too bad. Man, he loved that place.

And why not? New Hamps.h.i.+re had given McCain his nineteen-point win over Bush in 2000, the greatest political victory of his life. More important, it was the perfect place for the kind of campaign that he had to run now. It was small, intimate, pure retail, and everybody already knew him. McCain was flat broke, after all. He had no staff. He had no pollsters. All of it was gone. Instead of the Cadillac campaign that his advisers once had in mind, he was driving around in the political equivalent of a Ford Pinto-with a hamster wheel for an engine, and Rick Davis sprinting furiously on the thing to keep it spinning. And weird as it might sound, McCain preferred it this way. Living off the land, guerilla-style, hand to mouth. In a way, the collapse of his campaign had been the best thing for McCain, because when the campaign disintegrated, so did the crippling campaign dysfunction.