The Rise and Fall and Rise of McCain, 'the Luckiest Man in the World'

WASHINGTON — The rise and fall and rise of John McCain's second bid for the GOP presidential nomination is a tale of perseverance, hard work, retail politics and proof that the guy's not kidding when he calls himself "the luckiest man in the world."

"Some of it was by design. A lot of it was luck and just drawing to one inside straight after another," Mark McKinnon, a top McCain adviser, said on the morning after he and his candidate went to the White House to accept President Bush's blessing as GOP nominee.

Luck, design, whatever, the McCain campaign is one for the books. It began as a front-running effort seemed destined for victory and then crashed for awhile amid promising new candidates, declining poll numbers and a fundraising meltdown.

And that was a problem for Tom Loeffler, a lobbyist and former Texas congressman, who heads the McCain fundraising operation and was getting used to potential donors saying they weren't much interested in investing in a loser.

"I may have gotten one or two calls like that," Loeffler said with a laugh. "It was a campaign that had in the eyes of many people collapsed," he said.

By mid-April, two weeks shy of the formal launch of the campaign, McCain shed staffers and cut consultant contracts. By July, mired in single-digit poll numbers and continued cash problems, McCain forced out five top advisers, including several who had been with him for years.

The campaign stripped down to a bare-bones effort that at times looked more like a gubernatorial race than a presidential campaign. Best thing that ever happened to McCain, some say.

"It fell apart and then he basically started from scratch again and did what he did in 1999" when his first presidential bid took off, said Dick Bennett, an independent New Hampshire pollster. "He basically rebuilt it one voter at a time."

Therein lies the non-lucky part, the part that made McCain ready when luck kicked in.

"Credit most of it to McCain for just doing a monster gut check and being a survivor," McKinnon said of his ex-POW candidate. "These primary contests are designed to humiliate, strip naked and just brutalize a candidate, and you have to be one tough SOB to get through it."

It's one thing to be a tough SOB. It's another thing to get people to give money to a tough SOB who looks like a loser.

"In July, there was nothing that the campaign people or volunteers such as myself as national finance chairman could really do but wait for him to regain some sort of momentum," Loeffler recalled.

So they waited as McCain – town hall meeting by town hall meeting – waded through tough times when he looked like

just another front-runner chewed up by a process that feasts on front-runners.

Meanwhile, Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson and Mitt Romney took turns as presumed front-runners. Giuliani traded on post-9/11 fame gathered as New York mayor. Thompson was a darling of conservatives. And Romney, he of the deep and open pockets, was spending his way to the top of the polls.

McCain was campaigning on the cheap. The contrast was obvious at South Carolina's Greenville-Spartanburg Airport in mid-October as he queued up, emptied his pockets and removed his shoes like everybody else heading for the US Airways flight back to DC.

"It was a matter of doing everything we could to stay in the game," McKinnon said. "That was really tough. McCain was flying coach and carrying his own bags. We were literally day to day in terms of finances."

Good Fortune, Simple Strategy

Luck kicked in when people started voting.

"A hundred things had to happen, most of them improbable," McKinnon said. "We were a lucky campaign. A lot of lucky things happened."

Loeffler agreed, putting it in the more lawyerly "certain things did happen that in hindsight were advantageous to the nomination."

The strategy was simple. McCain had to win in New Hampshire, South Carolina and Florida. But the first stroke of luck was embedded in his fourth-place finish in Iowa.

On Jan. 3, caucus day in Iowa, Romney was riding high and counting on a victory to cement the front-runner status that could benefit him in states to come.

Inside the McCain campaign, the Iowa strategy relied on getting help from others: A win by anybody other than Romney would be a win for McCain.

"Somebody had to beat Romney in Iowa," McKinnon said.

Somebody turned out to be Mike Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor and former Baptist preacher fueled by support from Iowa evangelicals.

Huckabee won Iowa by nine points over Romney. Evangelicals, including many who don't like McCain, did him a big favor.

On to New Hampshire, a state McCain won in his unsuccessful 2000 race against Bush. As in Iowa, the McCain strategy counted heavily on somebody beating, or helping to beat, Romney.

This time, somebody turned out to be Giuliani, who – in an epic strategy miscalculation – ignored the early contests in order to concentrate on Florida, which eventually killed his campaign.

McCain took a narrow five-point New Hampshire win over Romney, and the comeback was on. Never would have happened, McKinnon said, if Giuliani had competed in New Hampshire.

"If he had stayed in New Hampshire we would have split votes with him and Romney probably would have won New Hampshire," McKinnon said.

The next major contest was Jan. 15 in Michigan, where Romney's dad, George, once had been a senator, a governor and an auto executive – a home state advantage that made Romney a heavy favorite.

In Michigan, McCain's luck showed up again in the person of Huckabee, who, in a move that later proved crucial, saw a chance of beating Romney and lingered in the state for three days instead of heading on to South Carolina for its primary four days later.

As expected, Romney took Michigan, beating McCain by nine points and Huckabee by 23. And, McCain aides believe, Huckabee's Michigan effort proved crucial to McCain's South Carolina win.

McCain won South Carolina by a mere three points over Huckabee – a margin of less than 15,000 votes among 443,000 cast – and was on a roll. Probably would not have happened, McKinnon said, if the Huckabee time and money spent in Michigan had been spent courting South Carolina's evangelical vote.

More McCain luck in South Carolina: Former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson, by then a candidate with no hope of winning, stayed in the race and finished third with 16 percent of the votes, many of them right out of the Huckabee column.

Clinching with a Town-Hall Campaign

Luck having done its thing, the toughest SOB in the race had a big Super Tuesday that knocked Romney from the race and made McCain the presumptive nominee.

Last Tuesday, McCain clinched the nomination with four wins (including Texas) that put him over the number of delegates needed for victory.

Luck, perseverance and conservative candidates splitting up the conservative votes paid off.

"The failure of conservatives to congregate around a single candidate early in the process certainly helped McCain quite a lot," said Dante Scala, a University of New Hampshire political scientist.

And while conservatives weren't congregating, McCain did what he does best, hosting freewheeling town hall meetings that couldn't be more different from the scripted and choreographed events that were George Bush's forte in 2000.

The questions sometimes were not friendly. Sometimes they were hostile. McCain, generally, was genial in response, though he was not shy about voicing his differences, often with a polite, if curt, "thank you for your question" to punctuate his response.

"He is at his very best functioning under the auspices of retail politics," Loeffler said. "That means going out and meeting people, town hall meetings, the give and take at these meetings. He really connects."

Next question: Can McCain run a town-hall campaign nationwide in a general election? Doubtful.

"A general election is much more by media," said Loeffler. "But he will still be following the style he believes in, the more retail approach of reaching out to America."

There's no reason to believe the perseverance that brought him the nomination won't be there in the general election.

But what kind of luck would it take for the luckiest man in the world to win the presidency while supporting an unpopular war and endorsed by an unpopular president during a time of national economic woes?

Perhaps something unfathomable like a Democratic party divided on racial, gender and ethnic lines between two candidates involved in a prolonged, increasingly nasty battle and spending their money to smack each other around while the luckiest man in the world sits back and enjoys the show.