The Final Days

Mark Salter, McCain's closest aide, had become increasingly isolated during the final weeks of the campaign. On the morning of the last debate, he had found the candidate stewing in his hotel room. McCain had become riled up after watching some conservative pundits on Fox urging him to lay into Obama that night. Campaign manager Rick Davis was also urging the candidate to take a more aggressive posture toward Obama on the Lewis comments. Davis argued that Obama had tried to bait Hillary Clinton, and she had called him out on it. Davis wanted McCain to do the same. Once again, Salter found himself as defender of the McCain brand, arguing that the candidate needed to stay dignified and not stoop to conquer. But McCain himself disagreed; he wanted to give Obama a chance to repudiate Lewis' comments. The discussion became heated. As he sometimes did when he was angry and frustrated, Salter stalked out of the room to have a cigarette.

The polls continued to look grim for McCain as the campaign entered the final weekend. He was trailing by an average of 8 points in 14 battleground states—falling further behind in nine and leading in none. On Halloween, a top McCain aide told a NEWSWEEK reporter that McCain's odds of winning were roughly equal to "drawing to an inside royal flush." But McCain, who loved to joke "it's always darkest before it's completely black," seemed unflustered, even happy. His aides had seen this mood before. McCain did not mind being the underdog; he seemed to almost glory in battling for a lost cause. "The crazier things get, the calmer he becomes," said Matt McDonald, a senior adviser to McCain.

Salter was not surprised by McCain's attitude. Years before, McCain had told him how he idolized the character of Robert Jordan in Hemingway's "A Farewell to Arms." Salter had written a chapter about Jordan in the book he coauthored with McCain, "Worth the Fighting For." Salter (in McCain's voice, and clearly imagining McCain) described Jordan as "a man who would risk his life but never his honor." The title of the chapter was "Beautiful Fatalism," after a phrase Hemingway had used to describe warriors "who stayed loyal to a doomed cause." That pretty well described John McCain as he entered the last days of the long campaign.

On a bus trip through Central Florida, McCain was tired but cheerful, exuberantly shaking hands with shoppers at an open-air market and humbly thanking a veteran of the Navy's submarine service. He made two brief, humorless statements to his former friends in the press. The crowds turned on the reporters, yelling, "When are you going to stop lying to America?" McCain-Palin supporters had embraced Joe the Plumber, and Palin, with her crowd sense, broadened the franchise to include Tito the Builder and Angela the Hairdresser (and Barack the Wealth Spreader). Irrepressible, Lindsey Graham had started calling his Senate pal "Joe the Biden," which McCain found inexplicably hilarious.

There wasn't much laughing on a bus ride through Pennsylvania. McCain sat alone in the back with his friend and aide Steve Duprey. "How are we doing in New Hampshire?" the candidate asked Duprey, who had been the New Hampshire GOP chairman. McCain had a great fondness for the Granite State, where the independent-minded voters had given him overwhelming majorities in the Republican primaries in 2000 and 2008. Duprey hesitated, but looked McCain in the eye. "We're probably going to lose," he said. McCain looked genuinely shocked. "How did that happen?" the candidate asked, shaking his head. It wasn't just Obama, Duprey told him.

In truth, McCain's "ground game," as the get-out-the-vote effort is sometimes called, was not strong. In many states, the McCain campaign was out-organized as well as outspent by Obama. Duprey believed that McCain's political director, Mike DuHaime, and the political operation did not understand New Hampshire. DuHaime, who had run the ill-fated Giuliani campaign, practiced off-the-shelf Republican red-meat politics. Duprey's own son had received a mailer highlighting McCain as pro-life. Duprey, like many New Hampshire Republicans, was pro-choice. Duprey told McCain, "I'm a supporter of Planned Parenthood. If they are mailing something like this to me, who else are they mistargeting?"