How John McCain Turned His Clichés Into Meaning

Benjamin Lowy/Reportage, for The New York Times

A backstage crew watches McCain being interviewed at the Washington Ideas Forum in November.

When I walk into John McCain's office a week before Thanksgiving, he is not at all happy — and seems to be enjoying it quite a bit.

He is sampling none of the usual flavors of upset we tend to associate with the Arizona senator: not the "McCain is bitter" or "get off my yard" varieties, not even the "deeply troubled" umbrage that politicians of all stripes love to assume. Here is a man, instead, who is gleefully seizing an opportunity for outrage.

"I am very angry," McCain says through a smiling grimace. He hands me a photocopied compilation of old quotes from the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, from back when Democrats were in the minority and Republicans were threatening to enact a rule — the so-called nuclear option — that would require only a 51-vote majority to confirm most presidential and judicial nominations. Turns out Reid believed this was a bad idea when the Republicans were in charge but was a good one now, and McCain is packing bullet points.

"I'm going to go kick the crap out of Harry Reid," he keeps announcing as we walk from his office to the Capitol. Once on the Senate floor, McCain approaches Reid, puts his hands on the majority leader's shoulders, smiles and says something I can't make out from the visitors' gallery above. Reid smiles back, says a few words in reply and places his hands on McCain's sides. It looks as if they are dancing.

Minutes later, McCain stands to address the chamber. He is, as advertised, very, very unhappy. Today is a "black chapter in the history of the Senate," he says, referencing something Reid said back in 2008, as a way of pointing out his hypocrisy. He then goes on to explain that this is as "historic" a vote as he can remember casting and that he feels great "sorrow" for the harm done to the institution on this "sad day."

After McCain leaves the floor, I ask him what he said to Reid before his speech. "I said, 'Harry, I'm going to go kick the crap out of you.' Then he said, 'John, I would expect nothing less.' " McCain grins big to conclude this dark chapter in the history of the United States Senate.

John McCain is a cliché.

It is not his fault, or not entirely. Many of us become walking self-caricatures at a certain point, and politicians can be particularly vulnerable, especially those who have maneuvered their very public lives as conspicuously as McCain. They tell and retell the same stories; things get musty. They engage in a lot of self-mythologizing, and no one in Washington has been the subject and the perpetrator of more mythmaking than McCain: the maverick, the former maverick, the curmudgeon, the bridge builder, the war hero bent on transcending the call of self-interest to serve a cause greater than himself, the sore loser, old bull, last lion, loose cannon, happy warrior, elder statesman, lion in winter . . . you lose track of which McCain cliché is operational at a given moment. He does, too. "I think I was the brave maverick when I was taking on Bush," McCain told me, "and then I was the bitter old man when I was criticizing Obamacare."

Critics will take their shots, he says, it comes with being "in the arena." That cliché isn't McCain's exclusively — it's the self-consoling Teddy Roosevelt line that politicians are always trotting out. "It's not the critic who counts" but "the man who really was in the arena."

McCain has another favorite Teddy Roosevelt phrase, "the crowded hour," which I have heard him invoke several times over the years. It comes from a poem by the English writer Thomas Mordaunt, and T. R. used it to famously describe his charge on San Juan Hill. In McCain's philosophy, "the crowded hour" refers to a moment of character testing. "The 'crowded hour' is as appropriate for me right now as any in a long time," McCain told me as we walked through the Capitol. In some respects, this is just a function of public figures' tendency to overdramatize the current moment and their role in it. But five years after losing to Barack Obama, after enduring the recriminations between his splintered campaign staff and rogue running mate, Sarah Palin, and after returning to the Senate and falling into a prolonged funk, McCain finds himself in the midst of another crowded hour, maybe his last as an elected leader.

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