A Soft Spot For A Hard Charger

For weeks now, we've had a projected winner in the press primary. The same profane maverick who drives Republican Party regulars to distraction is beloved by the ever-expanding throng of vaguely liberal, if increasingly unideological, reporters and talking heads. It's swoon season on John McCain's bus, the "Straight Talk Express." One famous network correspondent was heard telling colleagues recently that he might even quit his million-dollar-plus job and volunteer in a McCain White House.

Why the soft spot for the hard charger? Part of the answer is simple access. Reporters can be bought cheap with a little cooperation when we need it. For years, McCain has reliably returned press calls with a candid line or two. And unlike most politicians, McCain readily, and a bit self-consciously, concedes error, pounding his head with his fist like the late Chris Farley ("I'm so stupid sometimes!") when he lands in trouble.

McCain has the media's ironic detachment about the process ("That is an excellent question--one that I'd prefer to duck," he said in a candidate forum last week). The energy other politicians absorb from handshaking he gets from sparring with the press, even with local Arizona reporters more suspicious of his rap. Walter Shapiro, a columnist for USA Today who admires McCain, says journalists are always looking for the psychological effects of his five-and-a-half years of captivity in a North Vietnamese prison, and maybe this is one. "I think he suffers from 'conversation deficit,' and he's trying to make up for it," Shapiro says. "He talks to the press for hours while other candidates hide behind their briefing books."

The Vietnam experience is powerfully attractive to reporters, who respond as readily to courage and character as anyone else. "It's the story, stupid," McCain's adman, Greg Stevens, said this week in unveiling the campaign's first television ad, a bio spot that covers some of the same territory as McCain's harrowing best seller, "Faith of My Fathers." But the appeal to the press--and perhaps to voters--is less the story itself than the grace with which he handles it.

I first got to know McCain just after I traveled to Vietnam in 1995. He was instrumental in the U.S. decision to establish diplomatic relations that year, but what I remember most was the ease with which he joked about his captivity. "Did you see the Communist Party plaque [near the Hanoi lake where my Navy plane was shot down]? It said I was Air Force! Can you believe it?" Some analysts have ascribed the press adoration of McCain to baby-boomer guilt over not serving in Vietnam, but it's more like awe over his lack of bitterness. He's not hung up on Vietnam, and he won't refight all the old battles of the 1960s. In fact, he's gone out of his way to be friendly to antiwar activists.

This is the essence of why so many of McCain's fellow conservatives loathe him. He has no time for the predictable resentments they nourish, and he lets them know it. Like his hero Teddy Roosevelt, he lives large and is willing to break china inside his own party, which always makes good copy. The ex-prisoner takes no prisoners. He actually seems to say what he thinks, even if it's inconvenient, which is a mind-blowing concept in Washington.