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McCain's winning roadshow
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Jan. 31, 2000 | PETERBOROUGH, N.H. -- As the race tightens, McCain and Texas Gov. George W. Bush have been sniping at each other in print and on TV and the situation has grown -- as Bush himself assessed Sunday morning -- "tense." Bush has intimated that McCain is a liberal. McCain has hinted that Bush isn't up to the Herculean task of leading the world. And both candidacies -- especially McCain's -- have a lot riding on Tuesday's outcome. But you wouldn't know any of that by the look on the face of John McCain. He's having a ball. As he races from town meeting to town meeting on his "Straight Talk Express" RV -- a handpicked rotating pool of reporters drooling over his every word —- he's having the time of his life.
He traveled from Nashua to Raymond to Windham to Derry to Hudson -- and that's just on Saturday. At town after small New England town, McCain gives his same stump speech: a Catskills-worthy menu of yuks. An indignant monologue against the "12,000 enlisted men and women on food stamps" and the Clinton administration's "feckless photo-op foreign policy." A brief Bush-slap on taxes, a proposition on the budget surplus. A riff against Vice President Al Gore's 1996 campaign-finance shenanigans that manages to be both funny and angry. A tear against "the special interests that control Washington" followed by a call for campaign-finance reform. An expression of desire "to inspire a new generation of Americans to serve a cause greater than themselves." And then maybe an hour of feisty Q&A with the increasing number of people who have come to see what this guy is all about. It's quite a show. And who knows, it may all just pay off, propelling his fledgling, under-funded, underdog campaign into the world of contention. One year ago, former New Hampshire Sen. Warren Rudman took his buddy McCain to breakfast at the Senate dining room and told him he thought he could win this primary. "I laid out a strategy which essentially said that the people in New Hampshire are very strongly independent and a little bit on the feisty side, and very blunt," says the two-term senator, who retired in 1992. "I said, 'You know, John, that in combination with an amount of work that I'm not sure you're prepared to do' -- and he was prepared, I didn't realize it -- 'you could win that primary.'" It was only six months ago that McCain made his first of three trips to Peterborough, the small southwest New Hampshire town that was the inspiration for Thornton Wilder's play "Our Town." Back on July 11, a political eternity ago, McCain and his campaign offered free ice cream to anyone who came to the town meeting. Only 40 showed. But McCain skipped campaigning in the first-caucus state, Iowa, and devoted himself almost entirely to a win in New Hampshire. He spent more time here than any other candidate -- an overall total of more than two months. When he revisited Peterborough the first week in November he drew a crowd of 450. A week later, he pulled even with Bush for the first time in a statewide poll. "McCain, by dint of his own force of personality and energy, has done something that I've never seen done in this state," Rudman says. "I've never seen anyone go from 3 percent to a dead heat. I've never seen that happen." On Sunday, McCain held his last Peterborough town meeting. The building was bursting at the seams. As of Sunday night, second-by-second tracking polls of New Hampshire Republicans have McCain anywhere from 15 points ahead of Bush to five points behind.
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