Arizona Powerhouse

Arizona Sen. John McCain may be the most intriguing figure in Washington today. His challenge to George W. Bush--the overwhelming choice of the GOP financial and elected establishment--for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000 was the most effective insurgent presidential campaign in a generation. McCain touched such a popular chord, especially with moderate and independent voters, that he returned to Congress as one of the few legislators ever whose stature was enhanced by a losing presidential run.

Since Bush took office, McCain has continued the ideological odyssey that began in his 2000 race. McCain arrived in Washington during the 1980s as a conventional small-government Republican. But, with Theodore Roosevelt as his model, he has become increasingly open to federal action on a broad range of problems. McCain isn’t a policy junkie, and the depth of his knowledge on some domestic issues sometimes runs only a sound bite deep. But rarely has Washington seen a politician rethink his fundamental beliefs so completely after he arrived.

This evolution has opened deep divides between McCain and most of his Senate Republican colleagues, few of whom have voted for his major legislative initiatives since the 2000 race. But it has made him a magnet for Democrats looking to construct centrist coalitions in the closely divided Senate. McCain has seized the opportunity. Once a gadfly and maverick, he’s now building more alliances across party lines than any senator in recent memory. McCain is co-sponsoring so many major bills with Democrats that his has become the most hyphenated name in Washington: everything from McCain-Hollings (airport security) to McCain-Kennedy-Edwards (managed care reform) to McCain-Kerry (improving automotive fuel economy) to, of course, McCain-Feingold (campaign finance reform). It’s a measure of McCain’s continuing power as a symbol of reform that every congressional Democrat seriously considering a bid for the party’s 2004 presidential nomination is now co-sponsoring legislation with him.

Alas, almost none of this rich story comes through in veteran Washington journalist Elizabeth Drew’s new book on the senator, “Citizen McCain.” Focusing narrowly on McCain’s drive, with Democratic Sen. Russell Feingold of Wisconsin, to pass the campaign finance reform legislation that Bush finally signed earlier this year, Drew gets utterly lost in the details. The result is that this thin book feels both skimpy and padded. It contains more than anyone might ever want to know about the backstage negotiations on the rule that governed debate on the campaign finance bill in the House of Representatives. But it offers no history or broader perspective to frame its ostensible subjects: McCain and the effort to limit money in politics.

Drew never fully grapples with the largest questions swirling around McCain and the campaign finance reform bill. Nor does she ever seriously question whether the new campaign finance limits (primarily the ban on previously unregulated soft money contributions) will change Washington as much as its authors believe, though there’s considerable evidence that ideological polarization is a greater problem in Congress than special interest influence. Though accurately recording McCain’s sharpened skills as a legislator, the book doesn’t assess whether he’s become such a lightning rod for other Republicans that his name on a bill guarantees increased resistance from conservatives (including those in the White House).

“Citizen McCain” simply drops the reader into the Senate in January 2001, explaining virtually nothing about the decade-long legislative struggle over campaign finance reform that preceded the final drive. Nor does it adequately consider the impact of McCain’s 2000 race, which provided a critical injection of momentum for the reform effort and undoubtedly influenced Bush’s decision to sign the bill. It doesn’t help that Drew renders her story in lifeless prose that veers toward stenography. The overall effect is like being trapped on the Senate subway with a conscientious but very dull, and not particularly insightful, tour guide.

McCain is such an interesting subject, and he provided Drew with such unusual access, that the book still has its moments. McCain admirers will enjoy the comrades-in-the-foxhole irreverence of his interaction with his staff. Students of Washington will be fascinated by the way he manages his relationships with his Senate colleagues, such as Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, a sometimes ally who became an adversary in the final struggle over the campaign reform legislation. But the book’s narrow perspective and enervating presentation ultimately defeat even McCain. He never really comes to life, even after the book abruptly switches gears three-fourths of the way through to recount his role in the weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. In other hands, the story of McCain and his staff scrambling out of their Capitol Hill offices on the chaotic morning of the hijackings might have been riveting; here the account of their movements carries all the drama of a travel itinerary.

Finally, in the largest disappointment, Drew offers few insights about McCain’s broader impact on the political landscape. No one can predict exactly where McCain is going; even the senator, who reacts better than he plans, probably doesn’t know for sure. Some supporters would like to see him challenge Bush as an independent in 2004. More recently, two liberal magazines have suggested he run in 2004 as a Democrat (a prospect that his opposition to abortion alone would seem to make implausible).

McCain has brushed aside all those ideas and, at 65, recovering from skin cancer, it seems unlikely he would enlist for the rigors and long odds of another presidential campaign. But even without another bid for the White House, McCain is developing a reform-oriented agenda with potentially enormous appeal to independent and centrist voters in both parties. Even though most of his initiatives are likely to be blocked, he could be playing a role similar to that of the great Senate progressives of the 1920s whose (mostly failed) legislative crusades helped define the agenda for Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Some future centrist president from either party (or even an independent party that doesn’t today exist) may owe McCain a debt for the ideas he is developing now. But it will take another author, with a wider lens, to track the trajectory of McCain’s thinking and explain how his evolution may tilt the balance of power in a nation now divided almost exactly in half between the two major parties.