Ex-president McCain: from maverick to heir apparent to aging senator--and it only cost $28 million.

JOHN MCCAIN is getting his first lucky break in weeks: I can't get into his conference call. It's only been days since his campaign manager Terry Nelson admitted that only $2 million was left in the coffers after almost $30 million had been raised. It's been hours since Nelson, joined by half a dozen high-level officials and 50 low-level McCainiacs, jumped ship. This conference call will be stuffed with smart-aleck journalists who want to nag about those problems. That's certainly what I want to know about when I, along with my fellow hacks, am put on hold.

Lucky for us, the music is "The Flame," that lone #1 hit by Cheap Trick. Listen closely and it sounds like Robin Zander is singing McCain's obituary. "Watching shadows move across the wall, and I feel so frightened ..." Verse after verse of power-pop gloom pulses through the receiver. But there is a light at the end of the tunnel: "Remember: after the fire, after all the rain, I will be the flame."

Once the call connects, McCain doesn't say much that hasn't already been serenaded. "We've had financial problems," he admits. "I am responsible for those problems." The Weekly Standard's Michael Goldfarb asks how McCain is doing, and the candidate makes light of the sincere question: "In the words of Chairman Mao, it's always darkest before it's totally black." This is not the first time he's told that joke this week.

The tone of the call changes, softens. Maybe it's because the bloggers are sympathetic to McCain, maybe it's because the journalists have already picked out his headstone. McCain spends most of his time answering questions about the Iraq War, the progress report that will come in September, and the Democrat-led charge for benchmarks.

"I spent this past week on the floor of the Senate managing the defense bill," he says. "I'll be there all next week. I will do whatever is necessary to pass that bill. If I have to take September off, I'll do that."

Presidential candidates don't take September off. Staying in Washington that month might mean forfeiting the race. But McCain didn't want to run another insurgent campaign for president. He wanted to convince the Republican base that he was Bush's natural successor. There's a sense among people who have followed McCain that the strategy worked too well--that as the Bush era sputters to a halt, the McCain era is ending with it.

McCain's campaign team scoffs at that theory. "I just don't buy that," says Patrick Hynes, the web guru who set up the conference call. "It's very clear that guy who ran against Bush in 2000 isn't the successor to George W. Bush."

McCain had his scraps with Bush in 2000 and well into his presidency. He opposed the first round of tax cuts and the White House's relaxed rules on torture. But McCain also spent years improving his relationship with the president and the Republican establishment. He campaigned for Bush in 2004. He barnstormed for even the most hopeless GOP candidates in 2006. As the president's fortunes darkened, McCain defended his character and his resolve. "The relationship has grown warmer over time," McCain told the Washington Post in an August 2006 piece. "We get along very well."

This was always a double-edged strategy. McCain came out of the 2000 campaign with an enviable reputation among political reporters, one that bordered on hero worship. They liked him personally and they loved to watch him turn his guns on fellow Republicans. A 2004 snapshot of

McCain bear-hugging Bush with all the joy of a construction grunt hauling a bag of cement became famous. Supportive political pundits pored over it like the Zapruder film, looking for evidence that McCain was uncomfortable, that he was playing along for a couple of years to get the nomination.

Not until the dog days of 2006 did reporters start turning on McCain. He was building a political machine to correct all of the 2000 blunders, and doing that meant allying with the Republican establishment. In March, he hired Nelson, the national political director of the 2004 Bush race. Within a month, he had glad-handed Rev. Jerry Falwell and signed up to give the commencement address at his Liberty University. Pro-McCain journalists were shocked: they'd never had higher esteem for the man than when he compared Falwell and Pat Robertson to Louis Farrakhan and Al Sharpton on the 2000 campaign trail. "Reverend Falwell came to my office and said that he wanted to put our differences behind us," McCain explained. "I was glad to do that."

McCain's cheering section in the press was gobsmacked. The Daily Show's Jon Stewart, who'd frequently invited McCain on to dish politics, sounded like a hopeful young baseball fan who just found out that Shoeless Joe Jackson took bribes: Say it ain't so, John. "Are you freaking out on us?" he asked. "Because if you're freaking out and you're going into the crazy base world--are you going into crazy base world?"

McCain's answer was a joke, but it was telling. "I'm afraid so," he told Stewart. In other words, everything he was doing to mollify the base he was doing with a sly Santa Claus wink. That was how he spent most of 2006, stumping for Republican candidates across the country while broadcasting his superiority to them. In June, as the immigration bill McCain had co-sponsored worked its way through the Senate, California congressional candidate Brian Bilbray slammed it as too weak. McCain cancelled a Bilbray fundraiser. In September, when conservative Rhode Island Senate candidate Steve Laffey was in striking distance of winning the Republican primary, McCain stumped for liberal incumbent Lincoln Chafee. Laffey was shoulder to shoulder with McCain on the Iraq War; Chafee opposed it and infuriated the Republican base. McCain didn't worry about that.

"The line they ran on was 'he's the natural frontrunner,'" says a political consultant who worked for the campaign but turned down a full-time position. "They were telling the base the same thing they were telling senators when they were asking around for endorsements: he'll be the nominee, and you've got to support him. Otherwise, you'll get screwed."

McCain's camp reasoned that they could walk the tightrope between the media and the agitated base because the base wouldn't have a better choice. Mitt Romney was hiring all the talent that wasn't going with McCain and placating conservative voters just as intensely as McCain was tweaking them. McCain's camp identified him as the biggest threat to the nomination and started pounding away in the primary states. Both candidates lagged Rudy Giuliani in the polls. When he entered the race in January and his lead didn't fade, McCain's team had difficulty adjusting.

"Rudy was always ahead of McCain, but nobody thought it would hold up," says one McCain staffer. "Some of us didn't even think he was going to run. We only realized how serious Rudy was when he entered the race and shot up to 40, 45 percent in the polls."

Still, McCain's organization dwarfed Giuliani's. He was running a national campaign, strong in the first primary states, leading in some of them. The size of the field and number of candidates gave way to a theory that McCain could be the consensus candidate of just enough Republicans to win the early contests, then win it all. His operation in South Carolina, the strongest in the race, was the product of a seven-year obsession by McCain and his longtime operative John Weaver that they would never again lose the state the way they lost it to George W. Bush. McCain officially launched his campaign in April with tours of Iowa and New Hampshire that went rather well.

"When he tried the initial town halls," says a consultant familiar with the campaign, "when he was slamming pork barrel spending and talking global warming, that was a two-week stretch where the campaign established a brand. And then it was extinguished by the immigration stuff."

There's no disagreement about that. The June return of the immigration bill knocked the campaign's legs out. Originally co-sponsored by McCain and Sen. Ted Kennedy, it enraged the Republican base. Fundraising slowed and poll standings crumbled--especially after pollsters included Fred Thompson. Online activists circulated video of South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham--McCain's most loyal backer in the state--calling some bill opponents "bigots." Eleven months after McCain manager Rick Davis told the New York Times that the GOP would anoint McCain because it was "a party that gravitates toward front-runners," the campaign released a face-saving memo: "Wide Open Race & No Clear Front Runner."

McCain learned most of the lessons of the 2000 campaign. He worked, however wincingly, to patch up relations with the base. Though he won't win the White House, he hasn't failed entirely. The last seven years have been more like a McCain presidency than the candidate could have imagined when he finally released his delegates at the Philadelphia convention.

Candidate Bush clearly articulated his stance against McCain's campaign finance reform plan: he favored comprehensive transparency of donations, not red tape. But President Bush signed McCain-Feingold. Candidate Bush rejected McCain's muscular foreign policy of "rogue state rollback" and said he'd only use the military "when it's in our national strategic interests." But President Bush launched two wars and two long occupations. The candidate of the "humble foreign policy" became a president whose moral and historical mission was "ending tyranny in our world."

If it was the immigration bill that finally knocked McCain's campaign off course, it's fitting. That was the one issue where McCain and Bush always saw eye to eye, where they saw themselves as evangelists who could save their party and their country from "nativism" and demographic ruin. For all their disagreements, McCain and Bush had the same vision of what kind of country America could be: a military and cultural colossus with a citizenry aware of its own greatness and a world transformed by it. But that's not the country the Republican base wants to live in.

David Weigel is an associate editor of Reason.