When the rehearsals finally began, McCain worked hard, and he sought feedback on his answers, but the plethora of opinions was not always helpful. Pretty much anyone was allowed to sit in—all the top campaign aides, as well as, it seemed to one exasperated adviser, “random senators.” As he prepared for the second debate, there were “too many voices,” this adviser later lamented. “It was getting him tied up.” McCain would listen to different people telling him that he had to say something in a certain way, and then he would go onstage “thinking in his mind: OK, I have to get 15 things in. What are the 15 things?” recalled the adviser—”rather than just being himself. His personality never came through.” Accustomed to detailed debate in the Senate, he bridled at reducing his opinions to sound bites. The off-the-cuff charmer and disarmer from the old Straight Talk Express was missing from the second debate, a town-hall format that was supposed to be the most comfortable setting for McCain.
Various advisers cautioned McCain against being too aggressive. They recalled that he had been particularly caustic, almost brutal, toward Mitt Romney during the primary debates in January. McCain tried to joke that he was just getting it out of his system, but Mark Salter interjected, “C’mon, John, that was like shooting the wounded.”
McCain’s coaches worried about the candidate’s undisguised disdain for Obama. McCain dismissed his opponent as grandiose. He found Obama to be affected; he was irked by footage of Obama swaggering along, dangling his coat coolly over his shoulder. For the battered McCain, whose arms were so stiff that he could not raise them to comb his own hair, Obama’s smooth-operator style was pretentious.
Tension grew as McCain prepared for the second debate, the town-hall format in Nashville on Oct. 7. Pygmalion-like, Salter kept trying to craft the John McCain of their heroic books—plain-spoken yet eloquent, quietly noble in his humble greatness. Salter was “tightly wound,” observed an aide who was present at the debate preps. “He was really pressing John to say things exactly like he would say them.” On a Saturday session in a dingy conference room at the Radisson Hotel in Phoenix, McCain seemed distracted, off his game. He maintained his sense of humor. “Duprey!” he would periodically yell to friend Steve Duprey, who sat in the back reading a book or a newspaper. “Why haven’t you fallen asleep yet?” But at one point McCain flubbed an answer to the faux moderator (played by Charlie Black, who was so serious about his role that he wouldn’t let McCain or Portman go to the bathroom during precisely timed rehearsals). Everyone in the room, including McCain, knew that the answer had been off base. Salter stood up and said, “Every part of that answer was completely wrong.” McCain collapsed into his chair, deflated. “Well, let’s give up,” he said, exasperated. He wanted to go to his cabin in Sedona. The next day a smaller group held a more focused practice session there, under the Arizona sun. McCain’s sense of humor recovered, and he began teasing staffers. “Should I really feed you people after that?” he cracked as they broke for dinner.
To ease the mood before the first debate, McCain’s advisers had shown the candidate a YouTube video of Joe Biden awkwardly encouraging a supporter at a rally to stand up—not realizing the man was in a wheelchair. McCain was amused by Biden’s amiable talkiness. He was relieved to face him as the veep choice, and not Hillary Clinton, whom the McCain camp had truly feared. At the vice presidential debate on Oct. 2, McCain was delighted to see that Sarah Palin had irritated Biden. Watching the TV with some aides, McCain exclaimed, “He looks like an angry old senator!” The staffers were awkwardly silent, unsure if McCain appreciated the irony of his statement and hoping that he would experience a flash of self-recognition in time for his own performance in debate No. 2, just five days away.
He apparently did not. Haltingly pacing the stage, his limbs stiff from old wounds, McCain repeated the expression “my friends” until it was a meaningless punctuation mark. Obama stayed perched on his stool, watching, and not saying anything very memorable or that might in some way impede his steady march upward in the polls. McCain’s aides later grumbled to a NEWSWEEK reporter that the town-hall format was a joke, that moderator Tom Brokaw asked too many questions and that the candidates couldn’t really engage the voters with two-minute answers. But all of that may have been irrelevant. The same afternoon of the second debate, the Dow plunged 500 points. As the economy sank, the fortunes of Obama—as the Democratic candidate after eight years of Republican rule—inevitably rose. McCain could have performed flawlessly and still succumbed to economic reality.
After the town-hall debate, Salter and Schmidt reunited with a dozen or so members of the traveling press corps at a karaoke bar in Nashville. It had been months since the duo had had a night out with reporters. Salter, who had sung in a band in college, was cajoled into singing a few tunes. Before long, and after a drink or two, he was into it. Under pressure from the reporters, Schmidt joined him for a chorus of Johnny Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues.” Schmidt even sang “Rocky Mountain High,” to squeals from the increasingly inebriated reporters. But then he went off and sat quietly. Schmidt looked worn out, his burly body weighed by stress and the woes of the campaign, his relentless stare dimmed by exhaustion. He ignored political questions and talked quietly about his family. Salter, on the other hand, had found his groove. Standing in the middle of the bar, dressed in his ubiquitous corduroy jacket, he bellowed “More Dylan!” until he had belted out every Bob Dylan song the bar had. Reporters sang loud, drunken backup and tried to get Salter to join them in boy-band dance moves. It was the first time anyone had seen Salter look as if he was having fun in a long time.
Salter had long deferred to Schmidt. McCain’s speech and book-writing amanuensis was more than a decade and a half older than the campaign’s chief strategist, but Schmidt was a take-charge type, while Salter preferred to play the observer and consigliere. The two men kept each other laughing with deadpan, self-deprecating humor. Salter joked about Schmidt’s mathematical limitations, noting that his friend was so dyslexic he could barely read a poll. But as a storyteller, Salter admired Schmidt’s ability to lay out a narrative, the storyline that every campaign needs to make its candidate more appealing (or less unappealing) to voters. Schmidt had been instrumental in launching the “No Surrender Tour” after the campaign staggered through the summer of 2007, and in July he had revived the flagging campaign again with the “celebrity” ad. Salter had fully come around […continued on page 4]