A defining moment of the “old” John McCain—as many Americans, even some of his friends, have begun to refer to him as he was before his run for the Presidency in 2008—took place in February, 2000, during his first bid for the White House, when he was challenging George W. Bush for the Republican nomination in the South Carolina primary. McCain had recently upset Bush in New Hampshire and was in a buoyant mood, vowing that, like “Luke Skywalker fighting the Death Star,” he would not only defeat Bush but reform a party corrupted by “big money” and, as he later put it, “agents of intolerance.”

People liked McCain because they thought him more honorable than other politicians. Illustration by Finn Graff

Within days, sordid attacks began to appear: flyers on car windows claiming that McCain, who had adopted an orphan from Bangladesh, actually had fathered a black child; recorded phone messages, or robo-calls, spreading rumors that McCain’s wife, Cindy, who had once been addicted to prescription painkillers, was a junkie; and lies, propagated by an obscure group of Vietnam veterans, suggesting that McCain had become a traitor while serving in Vietnam.

McCain’s response was decisive: he pulled from television his negative advertisements, and announced to supporters, “If we don’t prevail, my friends, we know that we have taken the honorable way.” On the evening of the primary, McCain and his family watched the returns in a hotel suite in Charleston. As the polls came in, showing that he had lost by more than ten points, Cindy wept. “How could they believe all that about you?” she said of the public.

McCain, after embracing his wife and children, headed down to a ballroom to deliver his concession speech. “I will not take the low road to the highest office in this land,” he said. “I want the Presidency in the best way—not the worst way. The American people deserve to be treated with respect by those who seek to lead the nation. And I promise you: you will have my respect until my last day on earth. The greatest blessing of my life was to have been born an American, and I will never . . . dishonor the nation I love or myself by letting ambition overcome principle. Never. Never. Never.”

In the final weeks of the 2008 campaign, it became clear that John McCain might lose more than the Presidency. On October 6th, slipping steeply in the polls, he held a rally in Albuquerque. Rather than speak off the cuff, as he preferred, he kept his eyes on a teleprompter. During the 2000 race, McCain was known as the “happy warrior,” but now his tone was harsh. Angrily waving a finger, McCain portrayed his Democratic opponent, Barack Obama, as a shadowy figure who never seemed to reveal his true identity. McCain noted that Obama’s campaign recently had to “return thirty-three thousand dollars in illegal foreign funds from Palestinian donors.” McCain urged the audience to wonder, “Who is the real Barack Obama?”

Before he even finished the speech, he and his aides had begun their now notorious campaign—sometimes in public, sometimes sub rosa—to supply insinuating answers to this question. Ads appeared accusing Obama, who had served on the boards of two charities with William Ayers, a founder of the Weather Underground, of being allied with a “terrorist.” Voters received flyers featuring a mug shot of Ayers and the words “Terrorist. Radical. Friend of Obama.” Then came the same kind of robo-calls that had savaged McCain in 2000, and that he had once denounced as messages of “hate.” McCain even hired one of the same firms that Bush used in 2000. The messages warned, among other things, that Obama had tried to stop doctors from caring “for babies born alive after surviving attempted abortions.” Meanwhile, McCain’s running mate, Sarah Palin, charged that Obama was “palling around with terrorists.” Other surrogates claimed that Obama was “anti-American,” a “guy of the street” who “used cocaine,” and had “friends that bombed the Pentagon.” According to Newsweek, Michelle Obama asked an aide, “Why would they try to make people hate us?”

Early on, McCain vowed that he wanted “the most positive kind of campaign.” But even though he sometimes seemed uncomfortable, shifting in his chair or looking away from the camera, he was at the heart of those personal attacks—demanding that Obama confess his relationship to a “washed-up terrorist,” and proclaiming that Obama would “lose a war in order to win a political campaign.”

As the rallies of McCain and Palin grew angrier—at the mention of Obama’s name, supporters yelled “Traitor!,” “Kill him!,” and “Off with his head!”—McCain seemed startled by what he had helped unleash. When, at one rally, a woman called Obama an untrustworthy “Arab,” McCain turned ashen and stammered, “No, Ma’am. He’s a decent family man.” Afterward, Ray LaHood, a Republican congressman from Illinois, who earlier had condemned the campaign’s inflammatory rhetoric, told me, “That’s the John McCain I know.”

Obama and his supporters decried McCain’s tactics. Yet some of the strongest criticism came from people whom McCain revered or who had long revered him. And it was not merely about strategy—the backbiting that always consumes losing campaigns. It was about the very nature of John McCain. In their eyes, at least, their hero was losing not only an election but his reputation—or, as one prominent backer put it, “his soul.”

William G. Milliken, a moderate three-term Republican governor of Michigan, was part of the unusual coalition that had made McCain an almost singular figure in American politics. Although for most of his career McCain’s voting record was consistently conservative, he was far more popular with centrist Republicans, independents, and many Democrats than he was with the Party’s base. His appeal was rooted less in ideology than in character: he presented himself as a figure who would never pander or betray his convictions. When he fell short of his principles, as in the 1989 Keating Five scandal—the Senate Ethics Committee found that he “exercised poor judgment” in helping a major donor—his willingness to lacerate himself in public only reinforced this impression for many.

Milliken, who served as governor from 1969 to 1983, had been a gunner in the Air Force during the Second World War, and he was amazed by the way McCain, after being shot down as a Navy pilot during the Vietnam War, had stoically endured more than five years in captivity. He was also impressed that McCain had challenged his own party by embracing campaign-finance reform. Though the two men disagreed on social issues, Milliken felt that McCain did not exploit such issues as “wedges” to divide the electorate. In 2000, McCain—in a move that, seemingly, no self-preserving Republican politician would make—took on two of the most powerful leaders of the Christian right, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. As McCain put it, “Neither party should be defined by pandering to the outer reaches of American politics.”

Many of McCain’s supporters were equally struck by his refusal to use his status as a war hero to impugn others’ patriotism, particularly in the case of David Ifshin, a student radical who, in 1970, travelled to Hanoi and delivered a scathing radio address against the Vietnam War. The North Vietnamese broadcast Ifshin’s words into the cells where McCain and other U.S. prisoners were being held. Sixteen years later, Ifshin met with McCain, who had once publicly criticized his actions, and apologized; McCain accepted the apology and later defended Ifshin on the Senate floor. Similarly, in 1994, McCain backed Bill Clinton’s efforts to normalize relations with Vietnam, offering cover to a President whom many conservatives had derided as a draft dodger. Clinton later called McCain “a great man.”

During the Michigan Republican primary in 2000, Milliken endorsed McCain, helping him carry the state. When McCain ran in 2008, Milliken again supported him in the state primary, even though McCain was up against Mitt Romney, whose father had been governor of Michigan in the nineteen-sixties; Milliken had served as his lieutenant governor. “I received criticism for not backing Mitt, but I thought McCain was the best person to be President,” Milliken said.

Yet, last month, Milliken expressed disbelief that McCain, after experiencing “the most disgusting aspects of politics” in South Carolina, had adopted the same methods against Obama. He said, “McCain keeps asking, ‘Who is the real Barack Obama?,’ but what I want to know is who is the real John McCain?”

In 2000, some prominent Republicans came to McCain’s defense, among them Frank Schaeffer, the son of Francis Schaeffer, an evangelist and anti-abortion crusader who is credited with helping to create the religious right. Schaeffer worked closely with his father, who died in 1984, but he felt that the movement had become extreme. In 2000, Schaeffer gave McCain his family’s imprimatur, vouching for him on Christian radio shows. Six years later, Schaeffer, who had a son in the Marines, co-wrote a book, “AWOL,” which spoke of the need for Americans to serve their country. McCain provided a blurb saying that the book illuminated “a more genuine and wiser patriotism.”

But, in October, Schaeffer, a lifelong Republican, wrote an open letter to McCain that said, “If your campaign does not stop equating Sen. Barack Obama with terrorism, questioning his patriotism and portraying Mr. Obama as ‘not one of us,’ I accuse you of deliberately feeding the most unhinged elements of our society the red meat of hate, and therefore of potentially instigating violence.” He went on, “You are unleashing the monster of American hatred and prejudice, to the peril of all of us. You are doing this in wartime. You are doing this as our economy collapses. You are doing this in a country with a history of assassinations.”

According to one of McCain’s longtime friends, the endorsement of Obama by General Colin Powell was “especially painful,” as there was no one whom McCain “admired more.” Equally devastating were criticisms made by John Lewis, the civil-rights leader and Democratic congressman from Georgia, whom McCain had idolized. In the 2004 book “Why Courage Matters,” which McCain wrote with his aide Mark Salter, a chapter was devoted to Lewis’s march against racism in Selma, Alabama, during which he was beaten nearly to death. Because of the actions of Lewis and his colleagues, McCain wrote, many Americans were “ashamed that they had not loved their country as much as the marchers; that they had not the courage to march into the force of such injustice.” McCain also praised Lewis for decrying incendiary black leaders, such as Louis Farrakhan, as “bigots.” McCain concluded, “I’ve seen courage in action on many occasions. I can’t say I’ve seen anyone possess more of it, and use it for any better purpose and to any greater effect, than John Lewis.” A month before the election, Lewis released a blistering statement accusing McCain and Palin of “sowing the seeds of hatred and division.” Though McCain publicly called the accusations “shocking and beyond the pale,” a campaign aide told me that when McCain first heard Lewis’s remarks he sat in silence inside the campaign’s official bus.

Even members of McCain’s inner circle expressed bewilderment and anger over his seeming transformation. One friend told me he thought that the man he had known for decades would never “take the low road to the highest office in this land.” Near the end of the campaign, a perception had set in, among the press and some of McCain’s former supporters, that the “old” John McCain was a fraud—a creation of consultants and a once fawning media. Reporters had often romanticized McCain and ignored evidence of his conservative ideology and his personal flaws—a fierce temper, impetuousness, and a tendency to demonize opponents. But the people who know McCain well, including many Democrats, believe—as the former Democratic Senator Tom Daschle put it—that McCain is a fundamentally “good man.” The friend of McCain said, “I would take issue with anyone who says that he was a sham. He was the real deal.” In this view, McCain’s fall in 2008 has an almost mythic cast—it is the story of a great man who, overcome by what he himself once called the “disease” of Presidential ambition, sacrificed all. “I don’t think he’ll ever recover,” another friend, who has been instrumental in his career, said. “My fear is that people who view the John McCain from the years ’96 to ’06 will think it was a political gimmick and what they’ve seen in the last five months is who he really is. If honor is your ideology, and you lose that, then what do you have left?”

After 2000, few politicians in America held greater moral stature than McCain. Though he remained unpopular with the right, his unusual coalition of supporters was rapidly growing. “I say to independents, Democrats, libertarians, vegetarians—come on over,” he liked to say. His defeat in South Carolina had seemed to confirm his virtue, especially to Democrats who had long suffered at the hands of Republican operatives such as Lee Atwater.

His popularity was largely driven by a single belief: that he was more honorable than other politicians. Todd Harris, one of McCain’s strategists in 2000, told me that he has never worked on a campaign more closely focussed on a candidate’s biography, and on that candidate’s ability to project integrity. Accordingly, McCain’s advisers let him speak to reporters for hours, unfiltered, on the Straight Talk Express. “It was a completely character-driven campaign,” Harris said. “Other than the push for campaign-finance reform, many people would be hard pressed to recall any real policy initiatives that we campaigned on.”

“Today we’ll be discussing the three branches of government­— executainment, legislatainment, and judiciatainment.” Facebook

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McCain’s heroic reputation was centered on his experiences in Vietnam, but it had increased in Washington. Unlike most U.S. legislators—who spend hours a day picking over the minutiae of budget projections or health-care policy, and tending to the mundane needs of constituents—McCain waged gallant, and often futile, crusades against the corrupt and the powerful. He took on the tobacco industry and repeatedly lost, enhancing his stature in defeat. In the Senate, his signature concerns—including campaign-finance reform and opposition to secret “earmarks” for legislators’ pet projects—were primarily ethical ones. Ivan Schlager, a former Democratic counsel to the Senate Commerce Committee, who worked with McCain during the nineties, recently told Time, of McCain’s approach, “It’s not ideological. It’s good guys and bad guys.”

Starting in 1999, with the help of Mark Salter, McCain published a series of best-selling books that championed his character-based politics. In “Character Is Destiny,” McCain said, “It is your character, and your character alone, that will make your life happy or unhappy.” And in “Why Courage Matters” he wrote, “Without courage all virtue is fragile: admired, sought, professed, but held cheaply and surrendered without a fight. Courage is what Winston Churchill called ‘the first of human qualities . . . because it guarantees all the others.’ That’s what we mean by the courage of our convictions.”