The audience is just the kind that makes John McCain feel most alive: a couple of thousand fresh-faced, corn-fed college kids still idealistic enough to believe an Honest-to-God American Hero who tells them that they can, and should, strive to serve a cause greater than their own self-interest. The setting is the Stephens Auditorium at Iowa State University, in Ames, and the questioner is Chris Matthews of MSNBC's Hardball, who is pitching an hour's worth of interrogatories to the American media's favorite politician.
It is three weeks before midterm elections that will prove to be a decidedly mixed bag for McCain. His party will experience the electorate's repudiation of the war in Iraq, which McCain has always supported, and at the same time the voters will repudiate the cozy and corrupt Washington culture as a whole, which McCain has always loathed. Matthews wants to know McCain's views on the prevalence of gay people in all walks of life, a subject whose predicate is the scandal involving Representative Mark Foley and his come-hither instant-messaging with congressional pages. "Should gay marriage be allowed?," Matthews asks.
"I think that gay marriage should be allowed, if there's a ceremony kind of thing, if you want to call it that," McCain answers, searching in vain for the less loaded phrases he knows are out there somewhere, such as "commitment ceremony" or "civil union." "I don't have any problem with that, but I do believe in preserving the sanctity of the union between man and woman." It may not be clear just what McCain is trying to say, but it's easy to see how his words could be skewed in a direction that the Republican right might not like at all.
Fast-forward to the next commercial break, during which McCain and Matthews reposition themselves from the stage to the auditorium floor to take questions from the students. McCain's longtime political strategist, John Weaver, a lanky, laconic Texan, moves in to whisper some advice. The next question is about the pending federal farm bill, and McCain repeats his long-standing opposition to certain agricultural subsidies.
But then, out of nowhere, he adds, "Could I just mention one other thing? On the issue of the gay marriage, I believe if people want to have private ceremonies, that's fine. I do not believe that gay marriages should be legal." There: he said it, the right words for his right flank. It might seem that this audience, the sons and daughters of a socially conservative and culturally traditional bellwether state, would accept, if not approve of, what McCain has just declared. But they are the Wi-Fi wave of the future, and they can smell a pander bear as surely as they can a hog lot. They erupt in a chorus of deafening boos. "Obviously some disagreement with that last comment," McCain says tightly. "Thank you. It's nice to see you."
Moments later, McCain remounts the stage for the program's final segment, and he bores into Weaver, standing quietly in the wings, with a cold look that seems to mingle irritation at Weaver's whispered advice with regret that he took it, and demands, almost hisses, "Did I fix it? Did I fix it?"
John McCain has spent this whole day, this whole year, these whole last six years, trying to "fix it," trying to square the circle: that is, trying to make the maverick, freethinking impulses that first made him into a political star somehow compatible with the suck-it-up adherence to the orthodoxies required of a Republican presidential front-runner. McCain opposes a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, but supports a ballot measure that would do just that in his home state of Arizona. (It would fail in the midterm elections.) His short-term reward for the Hardball bunt on gay marriage? Boos from the audience and a headline on the Drudge Report, the right wing's favorite screechy early-warning system, reading, mccain: gay marriage should be allowed? McCain needs to square that circle, and the hell of it is, he just can't.
Back in the Straddle
But God knows McCain is trying. He began this mid-October day in Sioux City, appearing at a fund-raising Siouxland Breakfast for Representative Steve King, an immigration hard-liner. Recently he had called McCain an "amnesty mercenary" for daring to work with Senator Ted Kennedy on a compromise bill that would provide an eventual path to citizenship for the millions of immigrant workers already in the United States illegally. A day earlier, in Milwaukee, in front of an audience of more sympathetic businessmen, McCain had been asked how debate over the immigration bill was playing politically. "In the short term, it probably galvanizes our base," he said. "In the long term, if you alienate the Hispanics, you'll pay a heavy price." Then he added, unable to help himself, "By the way, I think the fence is least effective. But I'll build the goddamned fence if they want it."
"I'm willing to negotiate anything," McCain tells the breakfast crowd in Sioux City, explaining that there is no way the millions of illegal aliens now here can be sent back to their countries of origin. But he acknowledges that anything seen as amnesty for illegals is "totally unacceptable, particularly to our Republican base." Later, McCain tells me that Congressman King "really knows this issue," but he sounds as if he is trying to persuade himself as much as me.
A couple of hours later, McCain is in an S.U.V., bound for a tour of an ethanol plant in Nevada, Iowa, just north of Des Moines. He knows the visit will be a stretch: he opposes ethanol subsidies. Six years ago, he all but skipped the Iowa caucuses, in large part because his scornful opposition to ethanol was a nonstarter in a state where making corn into fuel is a big and lucrative business. He turns sardonic, asking the members of his small traveling party if they have had their morning glass of ethanol.
