Can He Recover?

Deep in debt and running third in the Republican stakes, John McCain is putting a brave face on his campaign meltdown. "We've fixed the mistakes and we're moving on," he told a group of business people in Santa Clara in the Bay Area on Monday.

Fixed the mistakes? As far as Mr. McCain is concerned, his "mistakes" are all organizational. His campaign staff was too big, too cumbersome, too expensive. In the last quarter he raised $11 million but spent 13. Now he has learnt the lesson of Wilkins Micawber — "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness" — Mr. McCain will trim his sails and concentrate his efforts on the first three primary states.

If only Mr. McCain's troubles were simply about organization. The failure of the McCain campaign, and the reason a McCain presidency is now the remotest of possibilities, is less to do with his profligate staff than with his ambiguous attitude toward conservative values. How did the bemedalled war hero, the successor to Barry Goldwater's seat in Arizona, and longtime "conservative" frontrunner fall from grace in the eyes of so many conservatives? Let me count the ways. He has shown a persistent disdain for the constitution. In his legislation attempting to limit political campaign spending, the McCain-Feingold laws, he offended conservatives who believe in the First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of speech. Opponents of his campaign spending reforms will enjoy the irony that it is the failure of Mr. McCain to raise enough funds that has brought him low.

Mr. McCain's attempt to restrict gun ownership by law, and thereby trammel the Second Amendment guaranteeing Americans the right to bear arms, has also offended the conservative base. Mr. McCain is against allowing the sale of cheap "Saturday Night Specials," the weapons favored by trigger-happy teenagers. He believes there should be restrictions on the sale of assault rifles. He thinks people who want to buy a firearm at a gun show should be subject to background checks.

Then there is the McCain approach to immigration. The senator from Arizona, whose long borders favor widespread illegal immigration, followed the president's lead in trying to find a compromise that would allow illegal immigrants to work toward American citizenship, an approach conservatives generally believe to be an "amnesty" rewarding criminals with a priceless gift. The fact that Mr. McCain embraced the liberal paragon Senator Kennedy over the immigration deal only confirmed what conservatives were already thinking: McCain is not one of us.

Nor is Mr. McCain very good with evangelicals. A religious man, an Episcopalian who attends his local Baptist church, he believes his faith to be a personal matter. In 2000, during the primary campaign, he discovered that evangelical leaders were doubting his commitment to anti-abortion issues, which roused his famously short temper. He blasted evangelical leaders Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson as "agents of intolerance" and "evil."

"They distort my pro-life positions and smear the reputations of my supporters," he declared. "Why? Because I don't pander to them." Yet just six years later he was pandering away, wooing Mr. Falwell in his suite of rooms in the Senate and accepting an invitation to speak at Mr. Falwell's Liberty University, where the words "agents of intolerance" and "evil" were conspicuously absent. The evangelical conservatives proved too powerful as enemies and, offered a way out, he happily flip-flopped.

Mr. McCain's consistent position on the Iraq War has also done him little good with conservatives. When Donald Rumsfeld was in charge at Defense, Mr. McCain criticized the paucity of troops and the failure to plan for the occupation. Such candor was unwelcome to those loyal backers of the president's war, and this week Mr. McCain continued to describe the early years of the Iraq War as "a disgrace in the history of this nation." He demanded more troops for Iraq long before the president announced the "surge," but his prescience has won him few friends. The president is unpopular because the war is unpopular, and for Mr. McCain to strap himself to the president's mast attracts similar loathing.

Perhaps the most telling aspect of Mr. McCain's relationship with the president is one that has been long forgotten. In 2000, Mr. McCain was "swiftboated" by the supporters of George W. Bush, whose henchmen denigrated Mr. McCain among Southern conservatives by hinting at the mental instability that may have been provoked by his nearly six years as a prisoner of the North Vietnamese and that he may have fathered a black child out of wedlock. (He has an adopted Bangladeshi daughter.)

Mr. McCain was angry and sick at what happened to him, with justification. He had every reason to despise Mr. Bush. In Vietnam, Mr. McCain was awarded a Silver Star, a Bronze Star, the Legion of Merit, the Purple Heart, and a Distinguished Flying Cross. Having been shot down, he was routinely tortured for failing to provide military secrets, as a result of which he cannot raise his arms above his shoulders. He is a true war hero. Mr. Bush's military record is somewhat less heroic.

The lesson of John Kerry and the Swiftboaters is that you must quickly strike back, lest your opponents' smears take hold. Mr. McCain said of the attack upon his friend Mr. Kerry, "It was the same kind of deal that was pulled on me," and called the attempt at character assassination "dishonest and dishonorable."

However, rather than take on those who slandered him, and his wife, and his child, Mr. McCain rolled over. As with Messrs. Falwell and Robertson, Mr. McCain readily forgave the president, campaigning vigorously for his reelection in 2004, introducing him and hugging him at every opportunity. For many, such political expediency at the cost to his personal dignity uncovered an ignominious side to Mr. McCain from which he will never recover.