A New McCain on the Campaign Trail

The New York Times

A New McCain on the Campaign Trail

By ADAM NAGOURNEY

VIENNA, Ohio — Senator John McCain’s campaign events were once free-wheeling journeys marked by flashes of humor, candor and arch observations from the candidate about presidential politics — and John McCain. Oh, and moments that left no doubt that Mr. McCain was not working from any script.

“Thanks for the question, you little jerk,” Mr. McCain said to a New Hampshire high school student who inquired about his age last year, raising his eyebrows as he chortled at his own joke. “You’re drafted.”

Not these days. As Mr. McCain worked his way through Florida and Ohio as the Republican Party’s nominee for president this week, he was a candidate transformed. The Arizona Republican unsmilingly raced through a series of relatively brief speeches, reading often from a Teleprompter, and served up a diet of the kind of sound-bite attacks that he used to dismiss with an eye-roll.

“Just a little while ago, he flew off to Hollywood with a fundraiser for Barbra Streisand and his celebrity friends,” Mr. McCain said of his opponent, Senator Barack Obama, his voice sounding strained at the end of the day but still dripping with scorn. “Let me tell you, my friends: There’s no place I would rather be than here with the working men and women of Ohio.”

Mr. McCain’s once easy-going if irreverent campaign presence — endearing to crowds, though often the kind of undisciplined excursions that landed him in the gaffe doghouse — has been put out to pasture. He takes far fewer chances, meaning there are fewer risqué jokes, zingers at a familiar face in the crowd, provocative observations on policy or politics, or exercises in self-derogatory humor. By every appearance, this Mr. McCain is, or at least is struggling to be, disciplined and on message in a way befitting of American politics today, if not quite befitting of the McCain of yesterday.

There may be a price for all this. After Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, his running-mate, riveted the overflow crowd at an airplane hangar here for 16 minutes, it was Mr. McCain’s turn, and people in his audience began murmuring and drifting away midway through a 14-minute speech that was flat and cheerless. When Mr. McCain made his first appearance without Ms. Palin, on Monday morning in Jacksonville, Fla., he faced an arena that was one-quarter full.

Still, it is the course Mr. McCain has chosen and one his aides say he will stay on.

To a certain extent, Mr. McCain is trying to struggle with the fact that he is now a general election candidate in an environment where — more than ever — the other side (or reporters or following him) are ready to seize on any slip-up, real or imagined. This is no a time for the idle remark, bout of frankness, or edgy humor that once stood Mr. McCain apart on the candidate field.

And what voters are seeing in these final weeks of the campaign is a very deliberately retooled version of Mr. McCain — what he says, how he says it and how he goes about the day-to-day steps of campaigning. It came about as part of a fundamental reordering of his campaign that resulted from the ascension of the hard-driving, disciplined Steve Schmidt, a senior campaign adviser and veteran of President Bush’s 2004 campaign, who popped up on Mr. McCain’s plane one day this week.

Mr. McCain is by all appearances struggling to stick to his script and avoiding, whenever possible, events that his campaign cannot control. There are now not one but two firmly drawn curtains separating Mr. McCain’s spacious quarters on his plane from the press corps. Left idle is the couch that was built in the front of his plane — called “Straight Talk Air” — to reproduce at 30,000 feet the free-wheeling chats with reporters that were the stock-in-trade on his bus; the other morning it was covered with newspapers. Mr. McCain, who promised to hold weekly press conferences if elected president, has not held one in more than a month.

He recently began doing Town Hall meetings with voters, including one Wednesday night in Grand Rapids, Mich., with Ms. Palin, but these are mostly by invitation-only — reminiscent of President Bush’s town hall meetings of 2004 — as was obvious by the succession of softballs and adulatory questions floated across his plate.

For anyone who has covered Mr. McCain over the past decade, this new version of the candidate can be a striking sight. There he was the other day leading a crowd in a chant of “Drill, Baby, Drill,” the words that now invariably arise from his crowds when Mr. McCain talks about his support for offshore drilling, a position he once rejected.

There are the attacks against Wall Street — the denunciation of cheats and greed and self-dealing — which recall the decidedly populist cant of Al Gore, the Democrat, when he was running for president in 2000. He attacked Mr. Obama for holding a celebrity-strewn big-dollar fundraiser in Hollywood despite the fact that he had just held his own big-dollar celebrity-strewn fundraiser in Hollywood.

There are the indignant attacks on corruption and self-dealing in Congress, the institution where he has served for 25 years. “The word is going out my friends — to the old-boy network, the pork-barrelers, the earmarkers — that change is coming,” Mr. McCain said at stop after stop. “Change is coming! Two mavericks are coming to Washington and we’re going to shake things up!”

And most notable are the dizzying cascade of attacks on Mr. Obama, who seems to have come to consume Mr. McCain as the weather turns cool, a reminder that this long election cycle is approaching its end. “Let’s have some straight talk,” he said. “Senator Obama is not interested in the politics of hope. He’s interested in his political future. That’s why he is hurtling insults and making up facts.”

For years, Mr. McCain has struck a different kind of cloth as a presidential candidate: as a politician capable of defying his party or embracing it; holding a world view that defied any easy ideological setting; having an ironic detachment as he observed himself on the campaign trail, combined with a sly sense of humor that leavened his occasional bursts of temper. These days, he sounds less like his old self than Bob Dole, another senator who ran for president in 1996, sounded in the closing days of his campaign — speaking louder or repeating statements that he thinks might be overlooked.

“The American economy is in a crisis! It’s in a crisis!”

Mr. McCain’s aides suggested that their candidate will spend as much time possible with Ms. Palin campaigning in the final weeks of the race, pointing to her proven ability not only to draw a crowd but to animate the ticket in a way that Mr. McCain cannot. And Ms. Palin has shown no hesitancy about carrying a traditional burden of vice presidential candidates by attacking Mr. Obama.

But these days, this Mr. McCain seems content carrying that burden himself.