A Hero's Welcome: John McCain is Back! - 6 April 2001

An old, waggish friend of mine drops in on me almost every other week and tosses a small newspaper on my desk, waiting with the slightest hint of a chuckle to see how I'll react to the paper's front page headline.

The paper, though decidedly not a tabloid - being carefully, quietly, written and almost scholarly in tone - proclaims its main story with a front page black, bold headline.

I've learned, down the years, never to let my friend down. I glance at the headline and I give out a gasp of horror, delight, astonishment anyway.

The first week in March I gasped aloud, which is quite a trick if you're a normal breather, and exploded with a blasphemy.

"My God," I cried, "he's back." And so, astoundingly, he was.

The headline proclaimed "Napoleon escapes from Elba. Is marching toward Paris with 1500 men!"

By the way I forgot to tell you, the newspaper is called Old News and reports historical events as if they'd happened yesterday, with the appropriate dateline, this one, as I recall, said "Cannes ..." (on the Mediterranean shore of France) "Cannes, March 1st".

Well if talks had titles this one could be entitled "McCain is Back. Wins first battle of Washington".

Ah yes, now let me see - Commander McCain - would he be the same as Senator McCain? The same.

And before we come to the surprisingly bloodless battle of Washington let me remind you of a name and a man who, through the late winter and the early spring of 2000, stirred this country with the prospect of a war hero president.

His emergence as a presidential candidate was all the more dramatic since three months earlier, certainly by New Year's Day 2000, we knew - we all knew, from the massive evidence of the polls and the word of the party leaders - that the contest would be between Vice President Gore, for the Democrats, and the overwhelming Republican choice of George W Bush, Governor of Texas.

But then in February, suddenly, the primary election in the tiny, but vastly influential, New England state of New Hampshire was won by a stranger - a senator from Arizona, a small, compact, bouncing man with a blazing message, a message of outrage at the system he maintained had corrupted both parties - the system of financing election campaigns.

Now if Senator John McCain had been nothing more than a small, bouncing man with a grievance and a gift of the gab I don't believe he would have been a threat to anybody.

But the popular awareness of McCain's crusade emerged at the same time as our learning the appalling story of his five and a half years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

I don't intend to indulge the relish in pain and grief typical of so much television interviewing but I think the gist of the story ought to be told to explain why McCain's political crusade endowed him overnight with a hero's halo.

Commander John McCain was a combat aviator - what the army calls a bomber pilot - in 1967 in the Vietnam War.

He was on an aircraft carrier when a North Vietnamese missile hit its ammunition dump and turned this huge ship, thereabout the length of six city blocks, into a raging holocaust from which McCain was rescued and taken to a sick bay, badly burned and wounded but not as bad as the men he saw all around him who were burned beyond saving.

After time in the hospital McCain was assigned to another limping ship and he flew four or five uneventful missions over North Vietnam.

But the day came when a Russian surface to air missile blew the wing off McCain's plane as he flew over Hanoi.

He broke both arms and a knee and had internal wounds. He fell in the lake, he was rescued by a small, angry mob of natives who broke his other leg and stabbed him in the groin.

He was imprisoned in a single cell for several months with the skimpiest medical aid. Interrogated, left at nights in his own stew, half the time semi-conscious.

After several months the North Vietnamese heard that his father was an American admiral, soon to become the admiral - the commander in chief of all US naval forces in the Pacific.

McCain was taken from his filthy hospital, put in a clean room and urged to sign a confession about his part in this monstrous war against the peace-loving North Vietnamese. They offered to let him go in consideration of his father's glittering rank.

In consideration of the same, McCain told them in short, expressive words to get lost. So they took him back to prison and for another four and a half years beat him, interrogated him and along with two precious navy mates subjected him to all the subtle and hideous tortures that have been used by tyrants from Genghis Khan to Stalin, from Caligula to Castro.

At last McCain was released - a broken body, but miraculously, just, mobile. And with an unbroken spirit, thanks, he wrote, "To the faith of my fathers" - the title of a harrowing but modest memoir.

And if you wonder what that faith is it is the very simple, very tough faith of the code of conduct of the United States Navy.

In 1982 he was elected to the Senate.

So in February 2000 it was this hero, with a gift for believable indignation, who proposed a bill he'd been urging on the Senate for five years, a campaign funding reform bill.

His surprising victory over the presumed nominee Bush in New Hampshire last March was followed by an amazing triumph in one of the largest Midwest industrial and farming states: Michigan.

The morning after the Michigan primary the country took fire. It appeared that the disgust with free-for-all campaign funding burned through party lines and rallied dissident Republicans, Liberal Democrats, uncounted greens, and most threateningly, a majority of independents.

Well it was a morning glory. What few of us were sufficiently cool to notice at the time was that both New Hampshire and Michigan were open primaries, that's to say every registered voter could vote whatever his party.

The succeeding ones were Republicans-only primaries and Bush romped home.

In the meantime Senator McCain reluctantly stayed loyal to the party but went on in public about the vulgarity and the huge expense of the system.

So what is the system?

It was reformed for the umpteenth time after the Watergate scandal and President Nixon's abdication.

And it was defined in the late 1970s in a campaign reform bill, which holds today, in which every citizen can contribute a $1,000 limit to any particular candidate for office. This is known as "hard" money.

But a person, corporation, a union, any organised group can give all the money in the world for the general upkeep of a political party. It is called "soft" money and in no matter what amount soft money is pliable enough to be slipped, sub rosa - under the counter or between the sheets - to a particular candidate.

Indeed normally and deftly that is what the party organisations do with lots of it, the rest financing television ads with a strong emphasis on the virtues or the promises of the candidate they manage not to name.

Five hundred million dollars were raised by both parties in last year's presidential election.

In New York state alone, apart from other elective offices, there was what both parties chose to see as a crucial Senate race in which Mrs Clinton was running for the Democrats and her election was obviously expected to do wonders for redeeming the low estate into which her husband had brought the Democrats.

Well the Republicans had a young, unknown challenger but they raised $20m for the party. The Democrats raised 28 millions, nine millions of which was "soft" money directed Mrs Clinton's way. She won.

You can see why both parties in Congress - the Democrats quietly, the Republicans noisily - are against any reform.

Senator McCain nevertheless, once Governor Bush was in the White House, swore that he would push his bill. It is jointly sponsored with a Democrat, Senator Feingold.

When the new Congress assembled no Republican dared deny McCain and he was allowed a two-week debate to present his bill to the Senate.

The two weeks are over and in spite of a general misgiving that all sorts of wounding amendments would cripple the bill at birth it came through. Mavericks deserted from both sides and it passed by the remarkable tally of 59 to 41.

The single great triumph of the bill was the defeat of a Republican amendment everybody thought would be the crippler, which said that if any clause of the bill was found in a test case to be unconstitutional then the whole bill was invalid. It didn't work.

Under the new bill the "hard" money limit to specified individuals has been doubled to 2,000.

"Soft" money, unless strictly regulated for use by the party and not for individual candidates, is totally prohibited.

Also no corporation, labour union or other interest group may pay for broadcast advertising of particular candidates within two months of a general election.

Last Monday sounded like VE Day, it was a noble victory. However, it is only the end of the war's beginning.

Next it must go to the House where immense Republican energy is being mobilised to weaken the bill beyond recognition.

Whatever bill emerges from the House then goes to a conference of Senate and House election committees. They devise a bill which then goes back to the Senate for debate and passage and finally once more to the House.

If anything resembling the rosy McCain-Feingold infant grows from the final baptism you will begin to hear what Senate McCain dismisses as unthinkable: A revival chorus for the old hero of Vietnam for president in 2004.

On the other hand any one of the intermediate battles could be his Waterloo.

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