John McCain: The Lost Art of Decency

-The Atlantic- He loomed as one of the last remaining larger than life figures in American politics but its the small human moments with John McCain that linger indelibly in memory now. In his prime before the compromises of his last presidential campaign shrunk him into a defensive crouch his preferred method of controlling his image was to abandon all the modern methods of self-presentation whether conducting a rollicking running seminar aboard his Straight Talk Express" bus or ruminating with a solitary journalist on a long flight in a small chartered plane. Most current fiction bores the shit out of me" he once told me somewhere over New England as I followed him around for weeks of stumping in the 2006 midterm elections that amounted to the beginning of his own 2008 campaign. As I wrote in a 2007 profile of McCain for Vanity Fair he once allowed to a gathering of midwestern businessmen I want to keep health-care costs down until I get sick and then I dont give a goddamn." To a group of Wisconsin college kids waiting to have their pictures taken with him he mock-grumbled All right you little jerks!" And on an executive jet high above Iowa he read aloud a USA Today headline: Actor Wesley Snipes Faces Indictment on Tax Fraud Charges" and muttered: All our childhood heroesshattered!" The Tao of John McCain was unlike that of any other politician Ive ever covered. Ed Koch was as colorful Mario Cuomo as smart George W. Bush as human. But no one combined McCains unflinching mix of bracing candor impossibly high standards and rueful self-recrimination when he (inevitably) failed to live up to the ideals he outlined for himself. Count me as a card-carrying member of the perennially fascinated constituency that McCain used to refer to as his base: the working press.