Going Into Battle

Sen. Lindsey Graham was watching on TV. McCain's friend, who had sharp political instincts, saw an opportunity. As he later recalled, he thought, "Oh, boy," as he reached for the phone to call McCain. "Look at this!" he exclaimed to the candidate, who was also watching. "Who the hell does this guy think he is? And who are all those Germans, and what are they cheering about?" To Graham, Obama's speech was all about Obama, grandstanding for a bunch of foreigners.

Other McCain advisers were having similar thoughts and inspirations. That weekend, the senior strategy team met at a hotel near McCain's house in Phoenix to ponder how to turn Obama's big moment against him. McCain, his wife and Graham joined at the end of the meeting to see what they had come up with.

Schmidt took the lead. Obama was flying so high that McCain's guns could barely reach him, he said. So the answer was … make him fly a little higher, until the voters saw that he really was nothing more than a hot-air balloon. "This guy is acting like a celebrity," Schmidt said. "He is a celebrity. Only celebrities draw 200,000 people. Presidents do, too, but he's not a president. He's the biggest celebrity in the world. OK, let's give him that. Let him have that. But then we get to ask, do you want a celebrity running the country?"

Graham immediately perked up. "That's great!" he exclaimed. McCain nodded. "Yeah," he said. Schmidt quickly got to work on an ad. On July 30, the "celebrity" ad went up and was quickly flashed around the country on news shows and YouTube. "He's the biggest celebrity in the world," a breathy announcer declares, while images of Obama's Berlin speech are juxtaposed with shots of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears.

Most pundits huffed at the ad as trivial and a cheap shot. But it dominated the news cycle for several days, something McCain had failed to do for months. Obama didn't get much of a bounce from his trip, despite the heavy, overwhelmingly admiring press coverage. The ad had helped stall Obama's momentum and, with some voters, raise doubts about his depth of experience. Schmidt's status rose: his chippy, in-your-face attack mode seemed to work.

Still, McCain's own adman, Mike Hudome, was unsettled. He told a NEWSWEEK reporter that Paris Hilton and Britney Spears were not his style. Friends and colleagues would stop him and say, "Hey, Mike, the celebrity spot?" Hudome would hasten to tell them that the spot was all Schmidt's doing. Hudome liked Schmidt, but he felt bad about the direction of the campaign; under Schmidt, it was being run more like a traditional political campaign, going negative and sticking to the sound bites. He worried that the campaign was forfeiting "the real McCain maverick message." And yet he had to concede the ad worked.

McCain himself seemed grouchy and unhappy on the campaign trail. He was doing fewer town-hall meetings, and his aides, upset when no one laughed at the candidate's tried and-true jokes at one particularly sorry affair in Belleville, Mich., decided they'd better start packing the hall with McCainiacs. (The audience was full of undecided and skeptical voters; the campaign had been trying to make a point with the press and Obama by daring to plunge the candidate into true arenas of democracy—i.e., before unscreened voters.) Before long, McCain's "town halls" were almost as tame as George W. Bush's in 2004, when the president spoke to by-invitation-only crowds.

McCain chafed at his handlers from time to time. But as one close aide explained to a NEWSWEEK reporter, he did not mind sudden course shifts in his campaign. He was a fighter pilot, an improviser, not a "steady as she goes" sailor. All through his political career, he had been willing to tack away from the fleet. He was regarded as quirky and unpredictable by his stodgier, more conventionally partisan colleagues. McCain may have bridled at doing fewer town-hall meetings or cutting off the press, but he was able to reconcile any qualms about going negative by regarding change—in this case, a tougher, sharper-edged approach—as not only necessary but desirable. "There aren't very many politicians who are instinctively as good as John at saying, 'I got it. New campaign? No problem'," said a close adviser. "His whole career is all over the map. This is not like Ronald Reagan—'Here's what I believe, I've never changed in 20 years.' This is John McCain, so change is a little bit quicker. He's like, 'OK'."

McCain did not, in any case, resist taking a few jabs at Obama. McCain did not really respect his opponent. He can be forgiving, but he can also hold a grudge, and for him politics is deeply personal. He felt that he had been betrayed by Obama in the Senate, and that Obama, as he put it, lacked guts (a critical test to the macho McCain). McCain's essential world view, bred into him by his Navy-admiral father and grandfather, is that of a warrior. In his bestsellers, McCain made clear that the personal quality he extols above all others—even courage—is honor. Over time, egged on by his subordinates, he came to believe that Obama was a nice enough young man, but somehow lacking in this most noble of warrior virtues.

McCain was fairly bipartisan in his likes and dislikes; he was just as willing to denounce a Republican pork-barreler as a Democrat, and he would gladly work with Democrats he could trust. Indeed, in "Worth the Fighting For," he recounts his close friendship with, and deep respect for, the late Morris Udall, a liberal Democrat from Arizona. McCain was always ready for friends across the aisle. At first he thought he had found one in the young Obama. As a freshly elected U.S. senator in 2005, Obama had approached McCain and told the senior senator that he didn't want to be a party hack—that he wanted to be more like him. "McCain is always on the lookout for guys like that," recalled Salter.

McCain decided to ask Obama to collaborate with him on ethics reform. McCain was part of a bipartisan group with Sen. Rick Santorum, a conservative Pennsylvania Republican. Obama showed up at one meeting of the Santorum group—but never again. (According to Santorum, McCain gave Obama a "syrupy" welcome when he walked into the room.) Obama had publicly stated that he was open to working with Republicans on ethics reform, and he had privately assured McCain of his cooperation. But then he backed out, without first calling McCain. Salter assumed that Obama had been yanked back by Harry Reid, Democrat from Nevada, the fiercely partisan Senate majority leader who did not like freshmen wandering off the reservation.

What really irked McCain and Salter was the way Obama backed out. He wrote a somewhat formal letter to McCain, thanking him for the chance to participate in the Santorum working group but saying he preferred his own party's legislation. Before the letter made it to McCain, it was leaked to the press, probably by someone in Reid's office. Salter was incensed when he learned of Obama's intentions by reading the newspaper. He fumed: How dare this junior senator throw McCain's generosity back in his face! And do it so publicly!

McCain was also miffed, and he instructed Salter to ghost-write a letter back to Obama: "I would like to apologize to you for assuming that your private assurances to me regarding your desire to cooperate in our efforts to negotiate bipartisan lobbying reform legislation were sincere," Salter's draft began, dripping with contempt, and just grew more sarcastic: "I understand how important the opportunity to lead your party's effort to exploit this issue must seem to a freshman Senator, and I hold no hard feelings over your earlier disingenuousness. Again, I have been around long enough to appreciate that in politics the public interest isn't always a priority for every one of us."