Almost President (41 page)

That alliance did not happen in the first few years after the campaign in part because McCain had developed a negative opinion of Obama well before their campaign began. While both were in the Senate, McCain accused Obama of reneging on a deal for the two of them to work together on Senate ethics reform. He questioned whether Obama had the courage to stand up to the special interests in his party as McCain had proudly dissented from Republican positions on so many occasions. But there were also those who thought that McCain was simply jealous of the news media's infatuation with Obama. Obama, meanwhile, sensed McCain's disrespect and returned it in kind.

Obama had been in the Oval Office less than a month when McCain began complaining that the administration was not reaching out in the spirit of bipartisanship, and friends said McCain was miffed that Obama did not reach out to him as the leader of the opposition party to help craft legislation. McCain became an especially harsh critic of Obama's proposals to reform the nation's health insurance system, a measure that received virtually no Republican support. When Obama convened a summit with Republican and Democratic members of Congress to discuss how to forge a bipartisan compromise, McCain attended and chided Obama for failing to live up to his campaign promises. Obama interrupted, saying “the election's over,” to which McCain testily responded, “I'm reminded of that every day.”

McCain was known for having a sharp temper. Further, friends have said that McCain's survival through more than five horrific years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam left him with the conviction that he had a destiny to fulfill. Having also lost to Bush in the 2000 Republican presidential primaries, McCain was twice denied the presidency by men he deemed less deserving than himself.

Following the 2000 election, McCain had been a thorn in the side of Bush's presidency, too, and seemed to relish thumbing his nose at Republican orthodoxy. He pushed his McCain-Feingold campaign finance legislation into law over Republican objections, he broke from the GOP position to support a patient's “bill of rights” in the regulation of health management organizations, supported more stringent background checks for certain gun purchases, and initially opposed significant elements of Bush's proposed tax cuts. McCain's unorthodox positions even led Kerry to send feelers out to determine if McCain would consider being his running mate in 2004 on a type of “national unity” ticket—an idea McCain quickly dismissed as unfeasible.

Realizing that his “maverick” status, if unabated, could alienate the Republican base and cost him his last chance at the Republican presidential nomination, McCain began altering a number of his positions during the 2008 campaign. The McCain who had once advocated reform that included a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants now focused almost exclusively on border security. The McCain who had initially voted against the Bush tax cuts now favored extending them. The McCain who had once opposed repeal of the
Roe v. Wade
Supreme Court decision on abortion now said repeal “wouldn't bother me any”—and he claimed to no longer even favor rape and incest as exceptions where abortion might be appropriate.

McCain seemed to have abandoned even his signature issue, campaign finance reform, and dropped his support for a cap and trade system to combat climate change and instead strongly supported more domestic drilling for oil. Most disconcerting of all to many of his admirers, given the moral authority on which he, as a former POW, could talk about torture, he brokered a “compromise” with the Bush administration on how it could treat detainees accused of terrorist activities. Critics said the policy allowed the administration to ignore the Geneva Convention if it chose to do so.

After Obama's election, McCain continued to tack to the right. He had previously said he would favor allowing gay men and women to serve openly in the military once the joint chiefs of staff endorsed the idea, yet when the joint chiefs did so in 2010, McCain maintained his opposition. McCain even denied that he had ever considered himself a political “maverick,” when that had been a key theme of his presidential campaigns. Some credited this shift to the political right to McCain's having a strong Senate primary challenge in 2010 from someone even more conservative than he. Friends also say the 2008 campaign changed McCain. A former chief of staff, Grant Woods, acknowledged that McCain's views on immigration, for example, changed in part because he felt betrayed by Hispanic voters, who overwhelmingly supported Obama despite McCain's years of championing immigration reform. “When you carry that fight at great sacrifice year after year and then you are abandoned during the biggest fight of your life, it has to have some sort of effect on you,” he said.

Others insist it was all a manifestation of McCain's ornery temperament.
Washington Post
columnist Dana Milbank said it was McCain's “antipathy toward President George W. Bush [that] led him to seek common cause with Democrats to thwart a Republican president. Now his antipathy toward President Obama has made him a leading Republican hardliner.” McCain allies countered that a liberal news media had been quick to applaud McCain's differences with a Republican president as “courageous” but now expressed disapproval when he did not offer uniform support to a Democratic one. Some observers believe he took certain positions just to earn media coverage, and others simply believe he enjoyed “being a pain in the ass.” There was “an element of truth in each charge,” McCain said.

It may also be true that a news media awed by McCain's Vietnam experience simply misjudged McCain's fundamental political philosophy, that while he cast some votes counter to Republican orthodoxy he was, as one friend said, “fundamentally . . . very conservative.” Perhaps, but the record indicates McCain became far more conservative after Obama's election. A
National Journal
analysis of one hundred key votes found McCain tied with four other senators as the most conservative member of the Senate in 2010. More typically in his career, the
National Journal
said, McCain had ranked as “near the 45th” most conservative member of the Senate, which meant that he had previously been one of the least conservative Republican members of the Senate.

If McCain's visibility was due to a sense of obligation to lead opposition to the Democratic agenda because he was the most recent Republican standard bearer, then he was simply returning to a tradition only recently abandoned. But even though McCain, seventy-two years old when he ran in 2008, is unlikely to seek the presidency again, aides said McCain intended to stay politically relevant. One aide told
Vanity Fair
in 2010 that service in the Senate is “McCain's whole life, his reason for being,” and another said there is no chance McCain will one day “go off and set up a global education foundation.”

No losing presidential nominee has been named secretary of state since Charles Evans Hughes in 1921. Kerry had hoped to become Obama's first secretary of state, a post that went instead to Hillary Clinton. Descended from the prominent Winthrop and Forbes families, Kerry's father was a career Foreign Service officer, giving young Kerry an interest in foreign affairs almost from birth. His family moved around the world, including time spent in divided Berlin, where an adolescent Kerry once snuck into the Communist half of the city. In part to keep young John out of such trouble, Kerry was sent to boarding school in Switzerland.

While this background enhanced Kerry's deep interest in foreign affairs, it also left him without a sense of place, of being from somewhere.
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Back in the States, Kerry continued to struggle to fit in at the exclusive St. Paul's preparatory school in New Hampshire, where his relative lack of wealth, his Catholic faith, and his Democratic politics stood out among the preppie WASP student body. Kerry would later bond with Obama, friends said, as a “fellow outsider.”

Their shared politics, faith, and initials led Kerry to adopt John F. Kennedy as his political hero. Kerry even once had the opportunity while still a schoolboy to go sailing with Kennedy, and he had briefly dated Jackie Kennedy's half-sister. Kerry joined the Navy after a Kennedy aide came to Yale following Kennedy's assassination and told the students that serving in Vietnam would help fulfill Kennedy's legacy. Kerry even became skipper of patrolling gunboats known as “Swift boats,” similar to the PT boats Kennedy had commanded during World War II.

Kerry's war record would be a matter of some dispute during his presidential campaign, but official records label him an aggressive commander who earned three Purple Hearts, the Silver Star, and a Bronze Star. Disenchanted with the war, after his discharge he became active in the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Well spoken and well groomed, Kerry, the former champion debater, was viewed by the Nixon administration as perhaps the most dangerous anti-war protester in the country.

In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April 1971, Kerry famously asked, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” But he also earned the enmity of many veterans and others when he alleged that American atrocities in Vietnam were not isolated incidents, but were widespread, systemic war crimes that represented the “accepted policy” of the U.S. military and government.

Kerry used his renown as an anti-war activist to launch a political career. He chose Massachusetts as his home, though in his second bid for Congress he betrayed his lack of roots by establishing residence in three separate congressional districts while he mulled which one to run in. Choosing the Fifth Congressional District, Kerry tried to connect with district residents when he proclaimed, “I learned to walk in the Fifth District,” a reference to the year his family lived there when he was a toddler.

After losing congressional races in 1970 and 1972, Kerry took a ten-year break from electoral politics while he finished law school and became a prosecutor. In 1982, he was elected Massachusetts's lieutenant governor and two years later was elected to the U.S. Senate. For twenty-five years, Kerry seemed “the perpetual junior senator from Massachusetts” as he served in the shadow of the state's senior senator, Edward Kennedy. Never particularly interested in legislation, Kerry instead led investigations into U.S. foreign policy. His efforts helped spur congressional inquiry into what became known as the Iran-Contra scandal. Later, he and McCain, bonded by their war experience, spearheaded the effort to normalize relations with Vietnam.

Kerry's fascination with foreign affairs led to some snide remarks back in Massachusetts that Kerry had become “senator for the world.” At times, he seemed the caricature of a senator, a man with a stentorian speaking style that struck many as pompous. His positions were often so nuanced that it seemed he could argue both sides of an issue with equal conviction with one journalist concluding, “He lacks a center of gravity.” In 2004, however, he seemed the ideal presidential nominee for the Democrats.

The circumstances around the 2000 election immediately gave Democrats high hopes of recapturing the White House in 2004 as George W. Bush entered office in controversy and his term began sluggishly. Then, on September 11, 2001, Islamic extremists from the group Al-Qaeda flew hijacked commercial airliners into the twin towers of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, while a fourth plane crashed in rural Pennsylvania. All told, some three thousand people were killed in the terrorist attacks, and the nation rallied to Bush and his call to take the fight to the perpetrators of this evil act.

Bush had widespread support for attacking Afghanistan, where Al-Qaeda's leaders were believed to be hiding with the support of that nation's Taliban government. But when Bush then expanded the war to include Iraq, even though there was no provable link between Iraq and the terrorist attacks, his support began to erode. American forces had quickly overrun Iraq and deposed its dictator, Saddam Hussein, but the United States government seemed unprepared for what to do with Iraq once it was conquered. An insurgency against the American occupation would eventually claim the lives of more than four thousand American servicemen and women.

But the Democrats were wary of being too aggressive in challenging Bush and the wars. In 2002, Republicans had made electoral gains by charging Democratic candidates with being weak on what Bush termed “the war on terror.” Even Georgia Democratic senator Max Cleland, who lost both legs and an arm as a soldier in the Vietnam War, was defeated for re-election after his patriotism was challenged because he had questioned the constitutionality of some Bush policies. Democrats wanted a presidential candidate who could correct the course of U.S. foreign policy but be inoculated against charges of being unpatriotic. Kerry, the former war hero turned anti-war activist, fit the image.

Kerry reinforced the desired narrative in his nomination acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, which he began with a sharp salute and the greeting, “I'm John Kerry and I'm reporting for duty.” Not surprisingly, the service records of Kerry and Bush immediately were scrutinized. Kerry seemed dumbfounded that his record was challenged by veterans still angry about his earlier allegations of atrocities committed by U.S. GIs, while Bush seemed to get a pass for sitting out the war while in the National Guard.