On the Bus.(John McCain's Straight Talk Express)

John McCain's campaign bus, the Straight Talk Express, has had many incarnations. In 2000, when McCain competed against George W. Bush for the Republican Presidential nomination, the bus was a stage for his around-the-clock monologues with the press corps. For the 2008 campaign, the Straight Talk (as the McCain staff calls it) began as a state-of-the-art behemoth, as big as a tractor-trailer. Then, as McCain's fortunes fell--the campaign essentially went bankrupt over the summer--the sleek Straight Talk, which reportedly cost nine thousand dollars a day, was replaced by something that looked more like an actual bus. It is sixteen years old, not exactly shabby but definitely worn. It is usually trailed by a coach carrying McCain's travelling press, and, during most legs of the campaign trips, individual reporters are summoned to join the candidate on the Straight Talk. On a recent Sunday morning, two days before the January 29th Florida primary, the bus started up outside a television studio in Tampa, where McCain had just recorded his fifty-second appearance on "Meet the Press."

In the front of the bus are eight captain's chairs, where McCain's senior advisers and an assortment of family members sit. These include McCain's wife, Cindy; one of his senior strategists, Charlie Black, a quiet North Carolinian who heads one of Washington's biggest lobbying firms; Mark Salter, McCain's writing collaborator and longtime Senate chief of staff. Absent that Sunday morning were the Blogettes--McCain's daughter Meghan and two of her friends, who together write a lively online chronicle of their adventures on the campaign trail.

Past the captain's chairs, the center passageway narrows. On one side is a bathroom and on the other a galley stocked with Dunkin' Donuts and Coke, the staples of the McCain diet. McCain sits in the rear of the bus, at the center of a horseshoe-shaped gray leather couch--what is called the "circle lounge." In one corner, a television is tuned to MSNBC--never Fox News. As many as ten reporters squeeze around the horseshoe, until they are wedged thigh to thigh on either side of the Senator.

McCain, who is seventy-one, looks both older and more vigorous than he does on television, which tends to conceal the scars from a skin cancer. In person, he is all energy and motion. At one moment, bursting into laughter, he exuberantly explains why, after "a short period of waterboarding to find out what they did in their absence," he would take back some of the staffers who fled his campaign at its low point. At another, he cracks up over one of his own familiar jokes. That morning, he was talking on his cell phone to Governor Jon Huntsman, Jr., of Utah, who made a surprise endorsement of McCain back in 2006, passing over former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, a fellow-Mormon. Huntsman has a warm relationship with McCain and has been mentioned as a possible running mate. Somewhat improbably, he was stumping for the Senator in Miami. "Thank you, my friend," McCain bellowed. "I just had my interrogation on Russert"--Tim Russert, the moderator of "Meet the Press." "It's a good thing I had all that preparation in North Vietnam!"

In fact, the candidate was eager to talk about his television interview. He reached into a breast pocket, pulled out an index card, and, referring to Russert, said, "You know how he always gives quotes? I had to give the Romney quote to him." He held the card tightly with two hands and read, " 'No question we'll have to have a series of timetables and milestones. But those shouldn't be for public pronouncement. You don't want the enemy to understand how long they have to wait in the weeds till you're going to be gone.' " The quotation, referring to a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, is from an interview that Romney gave last April to ABC's "Good Morning America," and, in the days leading up to the Florida vote, McCain read it to anyone who would listen. He treated it as the Aha! moment of the campaign. As Democrats were calling for what McCain referred to as "surrender," Mitt Romney legitimatized their argument by uttering the word "timetables." McCain said, "There's no other way you can interpret that, except that he was saying 'timetables.' That's all there is to it."

There was more to it. Romney was not proposing a specific date for withdrawal. He was suggesting that President Bush privately discuss timetables of some sort with the Iraqi government, though it was unclear exactly what he meant. McCain thought that he was on the verge of winning the Republican nomination because, while his Republican opponents hedged their bets, he had risked everything to support increasing the number of troops in Iraq--the "surge"--when the idea was at its most unpopular. The attack on Romney was unfair, even false, in its particulars, but McCain believed that Romney had shown the least backbone of all the candidates.

Somebody said to McCain that Romney had said he should apologize for twisting the intent of the words, and McCain became indignant: "He ought to apologize to the men and women who are serving, because they deserve steady and steadfast leadership, particularly when times are tough. And his statement obviously was looking for the blinking exit sign." He continued, "I remind you again, it's just a fact, that at that point, in April, 2007, it was at the worst point. Harry Reid"--the Senate Majority Leader--"is giving speeches on the floor of the Senate saying the war is lost. He didn't say, 'The surge isn't going to work,' he didn't say, 'We are going to fail.' He said it was lost. All the Democrats were outdoing each other: 'I'll get them out in six months,' 'No, I'll get them out in three months,' 'No, I'll get them out tomorrow,' 'I'll get 'em out. We're losing.' "