McCain: No second chance

Arizona Sen. John McCain shook up his top campaign staff this week because he had gained so little traction in his bid tow in the GOP presidential nomination. He was running out of money, and out of options. The surprise is not so much that his candidacy is collapsing, but that it came so quickly and dramatically. His performance on the road to the White House has been, to put it gently, rocky. Changing advisors may help a little bit, but what really needs to change is the candidate himself.

Where is the straight-talking McCain of yore, the candidate who scared the dickens out of the GOP establishment in the 2000 primaries?

At 70 years of age (71 in August), he has lost the fire that made him a compelling political figure. In this campaign, from the beginning, McCain has done everything wrong. He tried to shake off the maverick image that was the basis of his public appeal. He groveled before the very right wing evangelical demagogues he once bravely scorned, seeking their approval.

Instead of challenging the party establishment, he sought to become a part of it. He embraced the policies of his former adversary, President Bush. He was not sincere, and it showed. Charlie Cook, perhaps the best unbiased political expert in the country, looked at the sudden collapse of the McCain campaign and declared the candidacy over. The prospects that it can be revived are slim indeed. McCain's prospects may not be dead yet, but they are on life support.

What happened to McCain is reminiscent of the fate of Sen. Henry Jackson, D-Wash., in the 1976 Democratic primaries. Like McCain, Scoop Jackson entered the competition as the clear front-runner. He had the experience and formidable political stature, and he was much admired in his party. Although a domestic liberal, he was a hawkish anti-communist who backed the Vietnam War and spawned a collection of backward-looking Cold War neo-cons who turned up later at Ronald Reagan's side and still bedevil Bush administration foreign policy thinking. Jackson raised enormous sums of money, as McCain initially did, on the assumption that he would be the nominee. But he spent it too early and too freely -- campaign manager Bob Keefe loved those lobster dinners in New Hampshire -- and by the primaries Jackson was out of money and out of gas. McCain similarly raised $24 million and has spent all but $2 million of it on a bloated staff, chartered planes, limousines and other luxuries. Jackson went down in political flames and an unknown ex-governor named Jimmy Carter, operating on a relatively modest budget, took the big prize.

McCain, too, is on the wrong side of history, as was Jackson on the Vietnam War. McCain defends the misguided war in Iraq despite mounting evidence that the administration's so-called "surge'' is having only mixed results, at best. Even the president's Republican base is unhappy and many are now calling for a gradual withdrawal of U.S. troops.

McCain returned from a trip to Iraq on the day he axed his key staff members, delivering a speech which echoed President Bush's defense of the U.S. invasion and our continuing presence there.

He made no mention of a previous trip, during which he paraded down a marketplace street in a bullet-proof vest with hordes of military helicopters hovering overhead and armed military guards walking beside him. He was ridiculed for saying how safe and normal he felt there, as though his extraordinary military protection were invisible.

His campaign also suffered from his support for immigration reform, which GOP conservatives derided as amnesty and blocked in Congress. On that issue too he stood with Bush -- but Bush won't feel the heat from angry voters because he never has to face them again. And then there is the disappointing rejection of campaign finance reform, McCain's signature issue. The conservative-dominated Supreme Court filleted it last month, demolishing its central thrust of controlling big money contributions from corporations, institutions, wealthy individuals and unions. McCain didn't make any big-bucks GOP friends with that issue, either. Campaign finance reform has been one of McCain's favorite themes, and it played well in 2000. He had a good time criticizing the Clinton administration's fund-raising efforts, particularly attacking Vice President Gore for dialing for dollars from the White House, a violation of the law.

But an indication of how chaotic the McCain campaign has become is that the candidate himself spoke to his top fund-raisers on his cell phone from the Senate Republican cloakroom on Tuesday, following his abrupt staff shake-up.

As McCain of all people should know, soliciting contributions inside a Senate facility is a violation of that body's ethics rules and, depending on what was said, a potential violation of federal criminal law as well. McCain stood in third place nationally among Republicans in a USA Today-Gallup poll this week, behind former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani and former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson, who still hasn't announced. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who is fourth, has raised more money than McCain. McCain isn't doing well enough to go the course now. The only question left is how long he will struggle to keep up a losing game.

Marianne Means writes for Hearst Newspapers. Her e-mail address is means@hearstdc.com.