The Rebel’s Cause: Getting Both Sides Onto His Side

So McCain would be caught between the battles he has fought with Democrats on issues such as Iraq, Iran, oil exploration and tax cuts, and the fights he has waged with his own party on immigration, campaign finance and climate change.

He would also have enemies in both parties if he follows through on his campaign promise to veto “every single bill with wasteful spending,” echoing the crusade against “pork” he has frequently used to embarrass his colleagues. And he would have outside interest groups, on both the left and the right, who would try to goad him into losing his temper — a subject of endless fascination throughout his career.

It could easily be enough baggage to load him down before his presidency ever gets started, unless he learns to pick his battles — and the “right sort of enemy” — almost perfectly.

“A lot of times, you’ve got to tell your party, ‘I’m sorry, I’ve got to move on.’ And that’s what McCain has done on many issues,” said Candida Wolff, President Bush’s chief congressional lobbyist for three years and now a partner at the international law firm of Hogan & Hartson. “The question is, on what issues does he do that? That’s where he’s going to have to look at the whole range of issues and make some strategic decisions.”

On the bright side, McCain’s years in the Senate have been full of the kinds of risky, bipartisan efforts that would satisfy most people’s definition of an “agent of change.” He and Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin hammered away at lawmakers’ resistance for almost eight years until their campaign finance overhaul became law in 2002. “Nothing is harder in Congress — I mean nothing — than passing legislation that affects members’ own re-election prospects,” said Mark Salter, McCain’s senior adviser and the co-author of the senator’s five books.

McCain teamed with Democratic Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts to try to solve the complicated and emotional problem of illegal immigration. And as the co-chairman of the “Gang of 14,” he and a bipartisan group of centrist senators struck a deal in 2005 that averted a showdown over judicial filibusters that could have paralyzed the Senate for months.

“Comfort, for most politicians, is being loved by your base,” said Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, one of McCain’s closest allies. “John pushes himself out of that comfort zone. You can make a career that way, but you can’t solve people’s problems.”

His Practical Side

That spirit has earned him respect from some of the former adversaries he would have to work with as president. “He’s a tough adversary, but also someone you can do business with,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell , R-Ky., who led the opposition to McCain’s campaign finance overhaul.

Even Feingold, who naturally is backing Obama, called McCain “an excellent legislator, a very determined guy.” And Republican Sen. Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, whose relationship with McCain appears to have recovered from a legendary dust-up in 1992 over prisoners of war in Vietnam, summed up McCain in two words: “conviction and tenacity.”

If McCain wins, Grassley said, “there’s not going to be anything silent about his tenacity. You’re going to feel the presidency. The people of the United States are going to feel the presidency.”

McCain’s role model may be a Mexican revolutionary, but it is his practical side that may have its roots in his upbringing in a Navy family, which would become crucial during his toughest times with a Democratic Congress. “McCain came from a problem-solving culture. That’s what the military is,” Salter said. “You solve problems by drawing as many people as possible into the problem-solving process.”

This is the side that appeals to Kirk Dillard, an Illinois state senator who was Obama’s most prominent Republican partner on legislation during his Springfield years. Even though Dillard speaks highly of Obama, he’s backing McCain, and not only because he feels an obligation as a Republican to do so. “Many of the things I like about Sen. Obama — his ability to work across the aisle — are the same reasons I was first captivated by Sen. McCain, except that McCain also has military and foreign policy experience, which I think is crucial,” Dillard said.

The Rebel’s Cause: Getting Both Sides Onto His Side

Those who have been on the opposite side of McCain say he would make the most of his pragmatic tendencies in the White House. “John knows how to make a deal, and that’s an important quality,” McConnell said. “He’s also demonstrated on a number of issues that he is able to work across the aisle. Since all of us believe, unfortunately, that we will probably still have a Democratic Congress, it’s going to be important to be able to work with the other side to get anything done.”

But there will always be issues where McCain could be expected to stand his ground, particularly on foreign policy and on issues he considers to have a moral dimension, such as the way suspected terrorists are interrogated. Having endured frequent torture during his five and a half years in the so-called Hanoi Hilton, McCain had the moral standing to force through measures banning torture in 2005 and requiring the Bush administration to comply with the Geneva Conventions in 2006, setting precedents he would be bound to uphold in a McCain presidency.

“John does the right thing. He has a moral compass that guides him,” said former Republican Sen. Connie Mack of Florida, who spent 18 years with McCain in the House and Senate. “There’s a seriousness about John that’s a reflection of his life experiences. He just doesn’t have time for the more trivial aspects of politics.”

An Early Rebel

When McCain was first elected to the House in 1982, he never intended to stay very long. He was, by his own admission, angling to run for Barry Goldwater’s Senate seat, since the conservative icon had already announced he would retire when his term expired in 1986.

But McCain arrived with the status of a war hero because of his captivity in Vietnam, chronicled in gruesome detail in his first book, “Faith of My Fathers.” And he was personally popular as well, a combination that led his colleagues, including Mack, to elect him president of the freshman class of 1982. When Ronald Reagan invited the freshmen to the White House, Mack recalled, “John went around and introduced each individual with a detailed biographical sketch of who each person was, with no notes. I’ve never forgotten that. This was obviously a fellow who had spent the time not only to meet us, but to read our biographical materials.”

Bio fo John Sidney McCain III: Click Here to View Chart

For the most part, McCain’s two House terms aren’t memorable. But in September 1983, he drew national attention when he spoke out against, and voted against, a measure authorizing Reagan to keep the Marines stationed in war-torn Lebanon on a peacekeeping mission. McCain’s speech provided an early look at how his Vietnam experiences would shape his views on military force throughout his congressional career. Nine months of study at the National War College had convinced him that civilian leaders had mismanaged the Vietnam War, with no real resistance from the military commanders, and he was determined not to let that mistake be repeated.

“The longer we stay in Lebanon, the harder it will be for us to leave,” McCain said in a speech on the House floor. “We will be trapped by the case we make for having our troops there in the first place.

“What can we expect if we withdraw from Lebanon? The same as will happen if we stay,” McCain said. “I acknowledge that the level of fighting will increase if we leave. I regretfully acknowledge that many innocent civilians will be hurt. But I firmly believe this will happen in any event.”

Today, McCain’s speech, at least on the surface, sounds much like the arguments for pulling troops from Iraq. Salter, however, said the closer parallel is actually McCain’s case for boosting troop levels in Iraq before the “surge” that helped reduce the number of insurgent attacks. With the deployment of so few Marines in Lebanon, McCain’s argument was that “this isn’t a mission. We’re risking lives to no end,” Salter said. “If you’re serious, you’re going to have to go to counterinsurgency and you’re going to need to send more troops.”

Just two years after his 1986 election to the Senate, McCain lost his one attempt to get into the leadership, as Don Nickles of Oklahoma edged him out for the chairmanship of the Senate GOP political organization for the 1990 campaign. The two became friendly even as the more conservative Nickles, who eventually moved up to party whip, opposed him on one issue after another. “ John McCain was the kind of guy you could wrestle with energetically on the Senate floor and then shake it off at the end of the day,” said Nickles, who’s now a lobbyist. “He’s the kind of guy you wanted as your friend in the foxhole.”

Without a leadership post, McCain focused on catering to issues of importance to the large population of senior citizens in his state. He was the Senate leader of the successful drive to repeal the 1988 law that added catastrophic health coverage to Medicare — financed with a surtax on the elderly. It was an early experience as a Senate rebel, though the chamber was in Democratic hands then. “This whole thing was not pleasant for me by any stretch of the imagination,” McCain said at the time. “I didn’t enjoy being accused of being insensitive and uncaring and arousing the ire and anger of some of the most powerful members of the Senate.”

The Rebel’s Cause: Getting Both Sides Onto His Side

Later, McCain began a lonely crusade against the Social Security “earnings limit,” which deferred benefits for seniors between ages 65 and 69 who kept working. By the time the repeal became law, in 2000, McCain was no longer one of the main players; he had just returned from his first run for the presidency.

The Road to McCain-Feingold

The main event of McCain’s first Senate term set the stage for his transformation into an agitator for campaign finance and ethics legislation, but he described the experience as more unpleasant than being a war prisoner.

In 1987, he and four other senators — Alan Cranston of California, Dennis DeConcini of Arizona, John Glenn of Ohio and Donald W. Riegle Jr. of Michigan, all Democrats — intervened with federal regulators on behalf of Charles H. Keating Jr., whose California-based Lincoln Savings and Loan Association was under investigation for unsafe and unsound practices and possible criminal behavior. When the savings and loan was seized by regulators two years later, the “Keating Five” became the target of a Senate Ethics Committee investigation that lasted more than a year.

BIG MOMENT: Probably McCain’s top legislative achievement (and the one disliked most by the GOP) is the campaign finance law. He and his Democratic partner, Feingold, prepared for a 2001 news conference. (CQ / SCOTT J. FERRELL)

McCain was a reluctant participant all along. He and Keating even got into a heated argument after the thrift operator, on hearing from DeConcini that McCain didn’t want to negotiate for Lincoln or intervene improperly, called him a “wimp.” But there was no doubt the two had close ties. They had vacationed together with their wives, and McCain had received about $112,000 in campaign contributions from Keating, his family and associates over the years.

The Ethics panel’s special counsel, Robert S. Bennett, reported in September 1990 that there seemed to be nothing improper about the behavior of McCain and Glenn and recommended the panel take no action against them. But the committee delayed its decision. A month later, a frustrated McCain saw the committee, and partisan politics, as the enemy. He lashed out on the Senate floor, saying his honor had been questioned and he was unable to clear his name.

“What would you tell your family when you go home to see them on weekends: that an investigation has been conducted in the most painful experience of your life, and yet with all the evidence in, with the investigation completed, that still the committee and the body fails to act?” McCain said. “I do not deserve — and I only speak for myself — to be strung out week after week, month after month.”

Then, in November, the committee began 26 days of televised hearings, which humiliated McCain even more. Finally, in February 1991, the panel let McCain off with a slap on the wrist, declaring only that he had “exercised poor judgment in intervening with regulators.”

The panel ignored McCain’s biggest potential problem in the affair: the vacations and flights Keating’s companies had paid for when McCain was a House member. McCain insisted he had intended to reimburse Keating’s American Continental Corp., which owned Lincoln Savings, and in fact thought he had. He reimbursed the company $13,433, and Senate Ethics declared it had no jurisdiction over that matter because McCain was in the House at the time.

McCain won a second term in 1992 despite the scandal, but the experience provided at least some of the motivation for his rebirth as a crusader for campaign finance and ethics overhauls. “I think the Keating Five was kind of a wake-up call, a time for self-evaluation,” Graham said. “That’s a good thing. Learn from your mistakes. To say that money hasn’t corrupted politics is just to deny the obvious. You’ve got people in jail.”

Salter said the Keating Five experience “did give him a greater appreciation for the appearances in politics. I think he did understand it.” But there were other experiences that also strengthened McCain’s determination to overhaul the campaign finance system, Salter said. One of the most significant was the heavy lobbying that surrounded the 1996 overhaul of telecommunications law, which McCain believed should go further in deregulating the industry.

In the view of McCain — a senior member of the Commerce Committee, which wrote the law — all the money being spent to protect various interests was holding up such a bold initiative. “Why is it that every time I talk to someone in this industry — and there are many — they say, ‘I am in favor of total deregulation, but. . . .’ There is always a ‘but,’ ” he said during the floor debate in June 1995. “And guess what? They have to have some kind of special dispensation for their industry to make sure that they have a level playing field.”

The Rebel’s Cause: Getting Both Sides Onto His Side

So McCain took on a new enemy: wealthy contributors and the favors they seemed to be able to buy. He and Feingold began pushing for a campaign finance measure that would ban “soft money” — large, unregulated contributions to political parties from corporations, labor unions and the wealthy. Their original bill also would have given candidates incentives to comply with voluntary spending limits, including free or discounted television airtime, and banned contributions from political action committees.

“It was such an intense experience working with him over eight years, hatching the plot and sitting there at press conferences, having the reporters laugh at us for thinking we could get this done,” Feingold recalled. “The idea that these kinds of games are being played with the public trust really bothered us.”

The two scaled their bill back to try to overcome repeated filibusters. They dropped the voluntary spending limits and ban on political action committee contributions, focusing instead on the soft-money ban and restrictions on ads that refer directly to federal candidates and spending that is coordinated with campaigns.

Their House counterparts, Republican Christopher Shays of Connecticut and Democrat Martin T. Meehan of Massachusetts, provided momentum by forcing votes in the House in 1998 and 1999, both of which succeeded. And McCain turned up the pressure by making the issue a centerpiece of his 2000 presidential campaign.

Finally, the collapse of Enron Corp., which had given $3.6 million in soft money to both parties over a dozen years, embarrassed lawmakers enough to break the logjam in 2002. Bush quietly signed the bill into law, despite his objections. McConnell and several groups sued, arguing the soft-money ban and advertising restrictions infringed on the freedom of political speech. But when the Supreme Court upheld most of the law in 2003, McConnell conceded to McCain: “I called him and said, ‘Congratulations, you won.’ ”

Bucking His Party

Campaign finance was just one of the reasons McCain has become perhaps the most famous maverick in American politics — a role he advertises in his presidential campaign one day and suppresses the next.

He always had an independent streak, his colleagues said, that surfaced from time to time in his political career. And there were times that it was arguably forced on him. A decade ago, when McCain proposed higher tobacco taxes to fund anti-smoking programs, it was because the majority leader at the time, Trent Lott of Mississippi, had asked him to take on the issue in his role as Commerce chairman.

But there is no question the maverick side became more prominent during his first presidential race, and even more so after he was beaten by Bush. That’s no accident, according to Salter. “After 2000, he was probably one of the most popular politicians in America” and had earned vast amounts of political capital that allowed him to take risks, Salter said. “He didn’t just sit on that. He started spending it. And he worked with Republicans and Democrats.”

But conservative activists said McCain seemed to go out of his way at times to flaunt his differences with the GOP mainstream. If the good man has to know how to be a little bad sometimes, McCain seemed determined to beat that lesson into the ground.

He voted against Bush’s two first-term tax cuts, saying in 2001 that “I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us at the expense of middle-class Americans who most need tax relief.” He joined forces with Kennedy and Democratic Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, the 2004 Democratic vice presidential nominee who also ran twice for his party’s presidential nomination, on a patients’ rights measure that never got to Bush’s desk.

Previously an opponent of background checks at gun shows, McCain teamed with Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut — a Democrat at the time, and now an independent and big-time McCain cheerleader— to cosponsor a milder version of the measure he had voted against in 1999. He labeled Bush’s Securities and Exchange Commission chairman, Harvey L. Pitt, “slow and tepid” in response to the corporate accounting scandals in 2002. He tangled with Bush’s first Defense secretary, Donald H. Rumsfeld, over the management of the Iraq War and the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison.

McCain voted to expand embryonic stem cell research and opposed a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, saying the issue should be left to the states. He opposed drilling for oil in ANWR. He worked on a proposal to require stricter fuel efficiency standards for vehicles with Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee and his partner on an investigation in the 1990s that concluded there were no more American prisoners of war alive in Vietnam.

The Rebel’s Cause: Getting Both Sides Onto His Side

He endorsed a “cap and trade” proposal — working with Lieberman once again — to address climate change by giving businesses permits for a limited amount of carbon emissions, forcing them to trade permits with other companies if they wanted to increase their emissions. (McCain still supports the idea but now wants to include more incentives to promote nuclear power.)

And he pushed a ban on torture of detainees through Congress in 2005, earning such strong support that Bush was forced to sign it despite his reservations. The next year, McCain, working with Graham and Republican Sen. John W. Warner of Virginia, forced the administration to accept language more in line with the Geneva Conventions as the price for congressional authorization of military commissions.

“Could we get to a place where we had a comfortable agreement? Yes. Was he a tough negotiator? Yes,” said Wolff, Bush’s congressional lobbyist in those days. “He wasn’t giving ground just because the administration was calling. He had his principles, and it was clear that he was going to stick to them.”

Keeping Score

Over the years, McCain’s voting record has reflected substantial shifts in his allegiance to his party — a trend his campaign has actually exploited, mainly to illustrate the contrast with Obama, who has bucked his own party far less often than his post-partisan rhetoric suggests.

In the first six years of the Bush administration, McCain joined his caucus — on votes pitting most Republicans against most Democrats — less often than the average such party unity score in the Senate GOP. His highest scores, 90 percent and above, were in the period when Republicans had President Bill Clinton as a nemesis. His lowest score, 67 percent, was in 1986 — his last year in the House — and again in 2001, the year after his defeat in the Republican presidential primaries. (He hit 90 percent again last year, but that figure may be misleading because he missed more than half the votes.)

Not a Typical GOP Senate Score Card: Click Here to View Chart

A rough guide to understanding McCain is his ratings over the years in conservative interest group score cards. They tend to hover in the 80 percent range, giving him just enough of a grounding in conservative values to reassure the Republican base. It’s the other 20 percent that McCain can exploit when he wants to appeal to independents.

McCain is certainly capable of changing his positions, and sometimes there is no clear motive other than his political needs at the time. He now wants to extend Bush’s tax cuts indefinitely, echoing mainstream Republican arguments that an economic slowdown is no time to let them expire, effectively raising taxes on Americans.

In the past, McCain has been a supporter of offsetting the cost of tax cuts by raising revenue elsewhere or cutting spending. But the way he has proposed paying for the tax cut package in this campaign — for example, by eliminating spending that started as earmarks — has been dismissed by many experts as implausible.

Other times, however, there is evidence McCain simply rethinks issues based on new information. After he returned from the campaign trail in 2000, for example, he held hearings on climate change in the Commerce Committee because, he said, he had gotten so many questions at town hall meetings about what his solution was. The hearings ultimately persuaded him to endorse the “cap and trade” proposals that many Republicans consider an expensive mandate on businesses.

“I am sorry to say that I do not have a plan because I do not have, nor do the American people have, sufficient information and knowledge,” McCain said at a May 2000 hearing. “But I do believe that Americans, and we who are policy makers in all branches of government, should be concerned about mounting evidence that indicates that something is happening.

“I do not pretend to have the expertise and knowledge on this very important and very controversial issue,” McCain said, “but I do intend, beginning with this hearing and follow-on hearings, to become informed, to reach some conclusions, and make some recommendations, or make some non-recommendations depending on the information that I receive.”

The Rebel’s Cause: Getting Both Sides Onto His Side

And although Democrats have accused McCain of an outright flip-flop for endorsing offshore oil exploration, which he opposed in the 2000 presidential race, McCain said the reality of $4-a-gallon gasoline makes it necessary to embrace steps the United States would not have used in the past.

“I don’t view that as a bad quality at all,” McConnell said. “What McCain has done on energy is to recognize changing conditions.”

Across the Aisle

Although McCain is capable of fierce partisanship, he also has a history of reaching out to Democrats on difficult issues that seem to require bipartisan coalitions.

Feingold recalled being surprised when McCain called him in late 1994, just after the Republicans had won control of the Senate. “I didn’t even know who he was,” Feingold said. “He said, ‘Hey, I’m looking for a Democrat to work with. I’ve seen your reform efforts and your attention to the deficit.’ I said, ‘Sure, what did you have in mind?’ He said, ‘Well, I’d like to do something about the revolving door problem’ ” — referring to the practice of former lawmakers and their aides going straight from Capitol Hill to lobbying jobs. “And I said, ‘John, I’d like your help imposing a gift ban, just like we had in mind in Wisconsin.’ ”

Mccain's Key Votes Click Here to View Chart

The two worked together on a 1995 measure that banned senators and staff members from accepting gifts of more than $50 in value, a forerunner of the stricter ban enacted last year. And that partnership eventually led to other McCain-Feingold ethics proposals, including the 2002 campaign finance law.

In 2006, McCain teamed with Kennedy, and recruited other Senate Republicans to work with them, to overhaul the immigration system at the worst possible time politically — when McCain was getting ready for his second run for the White House and needed to mend fences with the right.

“He persuaded me to get involved,” recalled Republican Mel Martinez of Florida, who worked with McCain and Kennedy. “I was new to the Senate. I was pretty reluctant to get involved with anything that had Ted Kennedy associated with it. He said, ‘No, you’ve got to do this. It’s the right bill.’ ”

Since the effort ran aground in both 2006 and last year, Democrats have accused McCain of backing away from his own bill by insisting he would focus on border security as president. But he has also suggested the other pieces — including a process for illegal immigrants already in the country to become citizens — could still follow, and Martinez doesn’t think McCain has given up on his goals.

“I think he was very strategic about it,” Martinez said. “People don’t have confidence that we can do this. That’s why we’ve got to do border security first.”

And in 2005, McCain outmaneuvered the Senate majority leader — Bill Frist of Tennessee, at the time a potential rival for the 2008 GOP nomination — by teaming with Democrat Ben Nelson of Nebraska to form the Gang of 14. The bipartisan group of senators agreed to head off a more serious showdown over judicial filibusters by preventing any deadlocks over Bush’s judicial nominees except under “extraordinary circumstances.” Conservatives, itching for an outright ban on judicial filibusters, were furious at McCain and the other Republicans who took part.

“He knew it was the right thing to do, even though his own leadership wasn’t with him,” said Democrat Mark Pryor of Arkansas, a member of the group. “So I’ll always respect him for that.” Nelson declined to be interviewed about the Gang of 14; an aide said he did not think it would be appropriate, given that he is supporting Obama.

The Rebel’s Cause: Getting Both Sides Onto His Side

Two Signature Causes

Some enemies are constants in McCain’s life. Civilian leaders who mismanage wars are in one category; wasteful spenders are in another. Both causes place McCain firmly within the conservative base of the GOP, sometimes even to the right of the mainstream.

In October 1993, for example, he tried to do what seemed unthinkable for a military veteran: He tried to force Clinton to withdraw U.S. forces from Somalia by introducing a measure that authorized no more funds except those needed for a pullout. Normally, McCain is a defender of the prerogatives of the president as commander in chief, and he has held to that standard for most of his political career. But in Somalia, as in Lebanon, he saw American lives at risk for no good purpose.

“I do not lightly impose on the foreign policy prerogatives of the president of the United States, but in this case I feel that Congress must,” McCain said in a floor speech. “The loss of American lives in combat is always a tragedy no matter how worthy or necessary the cause, but when those lives are lost to a mission which does not serve the national security interest of the United States, which has no firm or clearly defined purpose, which has not been well planned or well explained to the American public, then the loss of those American lives is not only tragic, it is needless.”

McCain’s contempt for Clinton, who never served in the military and had avoided service in Vietnam, was obvious. He once said Clinton’s lack of military experience “emphasizes his need to consult on matters he knows nothing about.” But Bob Dole of Kansas, a fellow disabled war hero and the Senate GOP leader at the time, argued that the United States would have to make sacrifices to continue its role in world leadership and that partisan politics shouldn’t be a factor.

The Senate rejected the amendment, and McCain got the message. “My doubts about the president’s leadership had affected my judgment as well, and Bob had called me to account,” he wrote in “Worth the Fighting For.” Two years later, when Republicans were criticizing Clinton for sending troops to Bosnia, McCain and Dole sponsored a resolution of support.

McCain is hardly an opponent of force when he thinks the cause is just. That’s the case with the Iraq War, which he endorsed wholeheartedly when the Senate authorized the use of force in 2002 and continues to support because he’s convinced it is central to the fight against Islamic extremism. “I think he really does understand this war,” Graham said. “If al Qaeda didn’t care about Iraq, why did they go into Iraq? The war is an idea, not a place.”

And when McCain became a vocal critic of Rumsfeld’s Pentagon it was not because the senator had turned against the war, but because he thought the commanders had not sent sufficient troops to secure the gains U.S. forces were making. His questioning of Army Gen. George Casey, then the commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, and other military officials at a September 2005 Senate Armed Services Committee hearing provides a glimpse of the kinds of questions he might ask his military advisers in future conflicts if he becomes president: tough, and full of confidence in his own judgment on military strategy.

“How many times, Gen. Casey, are we going to read about another offensive in Fallujah, Mosul, Ramadi . . . where we go in, we take control and we leave, and the bad guys come back again?” McCain asked. To Army Gen. John P. Abizaid, commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, McCain was blunt: “There’s no expert that I know that doesn’t attest that we needed more troops at the time a lot of us said we needed them.”

At times, McCain can be more confident in his assessments than he should be. When critics jumped on him in July for mistakenly suggesting that the surge led to the “Anbar awakening” — in which Sunni tribal leaders turned against al Qaeda in Iraq — McCain, rather than admitting an error, insisted a surge can be “a number of components” and suggested many people don’t understand that. If so, one of them was Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. military commander in Iraq, who testified in April that the awakening “started before the surge.”

And then there was the September 2002 news conference in which McCain rejected Saddam Hussein’s offer to allow U.N. weapons inspectors to return to Iraq. “They claim that they have no weapons of mass destruction. Everyone knows that’s a lie,” McCain said. “So when you tell a lie of that magnitude then, of course, their commitment to allowing the inspectors with free and unfettered access is also brought into significant question.”

Still, McCain’s military background is so well known that it gave his criticism of the Iraq troop levels instant credibility with many of his Senate GOP colleagues. “I heard him talk about how the generals were running the war and how they were wrong,” Grassley said. “I’m not a military man. I wouldn’t necessarily know. But I think history has proven him right.”

His other well-known crusade has been against “pork barrel” spending. Over the years, McCain has taken to the floor many times to read long lists of projects tucked away in appropriations bills that strike him as absurd — or, at a minimum, insufficiently scrutinized. He has voted against many spending bills on that basis, and some of those votes may come back to haunt him this fall.

The Rebel’s Cause: Getting Both Sides Onto His Side

Democrats have already criticized him, for example, for voting against the emergency appropriations bill to help survivors of Hurricane Katrina in 2005; he decided it included too much spending that had nothing to do with hurricane relief.

McCain also has given up bragging rights to one of the Republicans’ biggest domestic policy shifts of the Bush years, the creation in 2003 of the Medicare prescription drug benefit; he voted against it because he thought it was too expensive at a time when federal entitlement spending needed to be brought under control. But to Republicans who have joined forces with him to fight wasteful spending, his commitment to the battle is a hopeful sign.

“I’m just looking forward to working with a president who is anxious to say no,” said Republican Rep. Jeff Flake of Arizona. “On the big ones, he’s held firm.”

A Combative Streak

Another constant that could haunt McCain in the White House is his treatment of his enemies, whoever they are at the moment. He has a history of rolling right over them. Even those who say they’re at peace with him now will always remember the combative streak that, by McCain’s own admission, has ensured he will never win an award for Mr. Congeniality in Washington.

That’s more than just a subject of Capitol Hill gossip if McCain wins the White House, because one of the measures of a successful president, according to presidential historian Fred Greenstein, is “emotional intelligence” — a level of maturity and stability needed to keep a president’s actions from being questioned for the wrong reasons.

CONGRESSIONAL CRITIC: McCain has chided lawmakers in both parties for their use of earmarks to fund parochial projects in spending bills. He appeared at a 2006 news conference with two Senate GOP colleagues in that cause, South Carolina’s Jim DeMint , left, and Oklahoma’s Coburn. (CQ / SCOTT J. FERRELL)

McCain’s famous temper is only the most colorful aspect of the combative side of his personality. From calling criticism of his tobacco bill “chicken [excrement]” in a 1998 meeting with GOP senators to screaming obscenities at fellow Republican John Cornyn of Texas in a hallway argument during last year’s Senate immigration debate, McCain has earned a reputation for red-faced outbursts. His own books are full of stories of confrontations he says he later regretted. They usually blow over quickly, though, and his Republican colleagues say he has done better in recent years.

Less sensational — but potentially just as troublesome to the relationship he would have with Capitol Hill — is McCain’s history of lecturing his colleagues in public. When the tobacco bill was going down to defeat in 1998, McCain took to the floor and delivered a blistering scold: “Maybe we ought to remember the obligations that we incur when we govern America. Maybe we might remember the principles of the founder of our party when we are defining the Republican Party and how we vote on this legislation. We might understand that our obligation, first of all, is to those who cannot care for themselves in our society, and that includes our children.”

And during the Senate’s campaign finance debate the next year, McCain triggered outbursts from both McConnell and Republican Robert F. Bennett of Utah, who thought he had gone overboard and was accusing them of outright corruption. “I have been accused on a Web site, for the entire world to see, of caving into soft money,” Bennett said, referring to a McCain Web site that listed earmarks he considered questionable. “It is a question of my position, of personal integrity, that, in my view, has been impugned on a Web site available to the entire country.”

And when McCain accused a senator he did not name of telling other Republicans, in a closed meeting in 1998, that tobacco companies would pay for ads defending their vote against the tobacco bill, McConnell called that “a not-so-veiled reference to this senator” and declared himself “deeply offended. . . . I don’t need any contribution from anybody to myself, to the National Republican Senatorial Committee, any of our parties, or anybody, to stand up and defend the 45,000 tobacco growers from my state.”

McCain’s defenders, however, said they take his temper as a sign of his passion about the issues. “I like crusty, salt-of-the-earth types who tell it like it is,” said Republican Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma — who, like McCain, has angered plenty of Senate GOP colleagues with his uncompromising stands against spending proposals he considers wasteful.

“First off, he’s a Navy man, and his dad was in the Navy, and his granddad was in the Navy, etcetera. He’s allowed to cuss,” Coburn said. “And secondly, I’d much rather have someone who genuinely gets mad at the way things work around here than someone who will just give you the old, flaccid, ‘That’s the way it is’ type of response. Because that tells you they don’t really believe in anything.”