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"  One of Us, Part 2 With intimate access to the candidate, Chris Jones has tracked John McCain&amp;#039;s fight for the White House in four installments. From uncertain beginnings in August 2006&amp;#039;s Part 1, to this infighting in Part 2, the campaign&amp;#039;s comeback in April&amp;#039;s Part 3 and finally the real war in this summer&amp;#039;s Part 4, the profiles offer the ultimate McCain primer -- and postscript -- for Election Day. Click here for updates from Jones and all of Esquire&amp;#039;s election coverage in one place. The bus is new, and so is the driver, and the driver is lost for the second time today; back in Des Moines, Amvets Post 2 had proved elusive as well. Now it&amp;#039;s the tiny airport in Waterloo that&amp;#039;s hiding somewhere in the corn and the failing light, twice unlucky for the man hollering in the back.  &amp;quot;Come on, let&amp;#039;s go,&amp;quot; John McCain says after the bus -- with NO SURRENDER written across the side of it -- gets hung up in the parking lot outside the local American Legion, the day&amp;#039;s last stop, at least in Iowa. He has crossed most of the state with a crusader&amp;#039;s zeal, beginning at the crack of crow&amp;#039;s piss in the basement VFW in Council Bluffs. That was thirteen hours ago. His bed is still eleven hundred miles away. &amp;quot;Let&amp;#039;s go,&amp;quot; he says again. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;ve got a long ride ahead of us.&amp;quot; At last, a wind sock hangs limp in the distance. The small plane is waiting nearby. It has ten seats, six of which will be empty. That&amp;#039;s how light McCain&amp;#039;s packing these days. He takes his usual place, front right, one of the few remaining comforts of routine, with a newspaper and a magazine folded open to an article titled &amp;quot;The Sunni Side of the Street.&amp;quot; He turns on the reading lamp over his head, the light reflecting off his thin white hair.  Across the aisle from McCain, where political strategist John Weaver or campaign manager Terry Nelson might have been expected to recline, sits long-retired Marine Lieutenant Colonel Orson Swindle, strapping himself in. Forty years ago, McCain stood on Swindle&amp;#039;s shoulders to reach one of the Hanoi Hilton&amp;#039;s high windows, through which they communicated with other prisoners by way of a flagless semaphore. Now that the campaign has been husked to the core, Swindle has been cast again in his former role of prop. He was introduced as ugly at every stop today -- &amp;quot;Marines by nature are pretty ugly, but this is really the ugliest marine I know,&amp;quot; McCain said. Each time out, Swindle laughed as though he hadn&amp;#039;t heard the line before, and along with the other veterans gathered onstage, the sorts of men and women we once named airports and schools after, he said that John McCain is the man to win us the war in Iraq, and that it&amp;#039;s a war we need to win.  For months, mindful of poll results and his staff&amp;#039;s urgent pleas, McCain had tried to separate himself and his candidacy from Iraq. He had to get past it, he was told often enough to make his ears bleed. While he would necessarily confess to the failures there, and he would repeat his belief that the consequences of a grander failure would be devastating, McCain dutifully tried to turn the conversation to issues of broader electoral appeal: Social Security and Medicare reform, balanced budgets, overhauling the tax system, reducing our dependence on oil. Only at sunset last night, in an airport hangar in Sioux City, backdropped by flags and bowlegged heroes, was that vain effort decisively abandoned. McCain has decided to ignore the numbers and the whispers -- easier now that he has surrounded himself with apparitions -- and tie his waning presidential hopes inextricably to America&amp;#039;s fate in the Middle East. &amp;quot;I would rather lose a campaign than lose a war,&amp;quot; he said today, marshaling what is left of his energy and his resources to rescue twin victories from battles begun so badly. The plane powers up toward the runway, the generous basket of junk food sitting on the floor dancing a little on the carpet. Which reminds McCain --  &amp;quot;Brookey, you can tell them that they don&amp;#039;t need to order eight hundred doughnuts every time we&amp;#039;re on the bus,&amp;quot; he says, turning to look at press secretary Brooke Buchanan, one of five survivors from an office that had been occupied by twenty-five. This morning, a box of doughnuts the size of a crib mattress had shown up on the bus. McCain had lifted his breakfast from it, an apple fritter accompanied by a Styrofoam cup of coffee, but most of the rest of them had gone to waste, and this isn&amp;#039;t the kind of campaign that can afford to throw out doughnuts anymore. &amp;quot;Oh, they came from the event,&amp;quot; Buchanan says. &amp;quot;We took those from the event.&amp;quot; But McCain&amp;#039;s on a roll, suddenly seeing bridges to nowhere everywhere he looks. &amp;quot;Here&amp;#039;s the twenty-seventh version of the schedule,&amp;quot; he says, picking up tomorrow&amp;#039;s thick manifest. &amp;quot;They must chop down a whole fucking forest every time they make a change. I don&amp;#039;t know why they can&amp;#039;t just print out one page.&amp;quot;  It isn&amp;#039;t long before Buchanan plugs in her iPod, dialing up some old-school rap. Apart from Too Short&amp;#039;s faint beat and the engines, the plane goes quiet, flying east into an advancing night and Portsmouth, New Hampshire. McCain drifts off. They&amp;#039;re restorative, these flights, like the water tables in a marathon. They are also expensive, which means McCain, his money long disappeared into the maw of his dismantled machine, has been forced to fly commercial some of the time. That&amp;#039;s resulted in campaign events taking place via speakerphone, when US Airways decides it&amp;#039;s not flying from D.C. to Pittsburgh after all, and it&amp;#039;s risked McCain running as empty as his bank accounts, without time built in to catch his breath. He&amp;#039;s catching it now. Swindle reads. Buchanan scans tomorrow&amp;#039;s schedule, shaking her head. The other advantage of small planes is that they fly higher than the big ones. At forty-one thousand feet, the horizon just starts to curve, or maybe it only looks as though it does, but on this clear September evening it&amp;#039;s beautiful either way, lit ahead by orange cities and behind by the setting sun. Inside small planes, the violet sky seems even more enormous. McCain stirs. Buchanan worries aloud that he hasn&amp;#039;t been eating enough. Apart from this morning&amp;#039;s fritter and coffee, he&amp;#039;s had a handful of potato chips and a can of Red Bull. (The barbecued chicken that came on board the bus in Des Moines was a shade of salmonella pink that could have derailed the candidate for days.) There are trays of chilled Chinese food stashed up front, fallout-shelter eats that are now dug out and served in plastic boxes on plastic trays. McCain picks at a bit of fruit, chokes back a cold egg roll. &amp;quot;I really don&amp;#039;t eat well,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;I eat junk. I kinda get pumped up at these things and don&amp;#039;t have much of an appetite.&amp;quot; He consents to filling the last corner of his stomach with a fortune cookie.  He pulls the slip of paper from the cookie, reads it, and wordlessly passes it back. The game isn&amp;#039;t over until it&amp;#039;s over, it reads. McCain retrieves it and tucks it away. A short time later, the plane touches down in Portsmouth. He thanks the pilots as he ducks out the door. A van waits in the dark to take him to the night&amp;#039;s hotel, the Sheraton down by the harbor. No one else is here to greet him. Eight Months Ago McCain had tried to sleep, largely unsuccessfully, in the same hotel in the same town last April. It was the night before his campaign officially began. Announcement Day was a formality, but for most candidates it was a happy formality. For McCain, it was more a measure of how low he had been laid. His run had been under way for more than a year, predating the midterm elections of 2006, when McCain was one of the few life rings left for floundering Republicans. Then, the man exuded uptick. While he told reporters that he hadn&amp;#039;t made up his mind about what to do with his surging popularity, he was holding fundraisers and building an elaborate organization -- even an unstoppable one, he might have hoped. But on this gray morning in Portsmouth, that all felt like such a long time ago. A lot of things, mostly bad, had happened between then and now. He woke up early, looked at the day&amp;#039;s manifest, and pulled on a blue sweater, because a consultant had decided that sweaters made him look younger -- which is important when you&amp;#039;re seventy-one -- and because his suit was too wrinkled to wear. The buds were just breaking on the trees in nearby Prescott Park. The clouds continued rolling in over the harbor, over the Navy shipyard that provided the backdrop for a temporary stage. A band of old men wore Uncle Sam hats and played their banjos and brass; they grew red-cheeked trying to play loud enough to be heard over the rumble of idling TV trucks. A few people were holding homemade signs -- VETERANS FOR MCCAIN, YOUTH FOR MCCAIN, AMERICA NEEDS MCCAIN -- all of which seemed to have been painted with the same hand. Giant spotlights were being plugged in, a thousand-watt effort to make it look like the sun was finally shining on John McCain.  Back at the hotel, however, he was just finishing up an emergency closed-door meeting of his finance committee. He was always a lousy fundraiser, and the just-announced first-quarter returns had been disappointing, placing him a distant third behind Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney. Worse, the $12.5 million he had collected was already spent and then some -- the hundred-strong team of consultants and strategists that had been assembled, most of them veterans of the George W. Bush campaigns, was now running on McCain-style financial fumes. Team was a word used only loosely by then. From the beginning of this, his second stab at the presidency, McCain had deemed it wise to divide the money from the politics, church and state. On one side sat Rick Davis, the campaign&amp;#039;s chief executive officer; on the other sat Terry Nelson, the former Bush operative, and John Weaver, the lanky, laconic Texan who years earlier had first convinced McCain that he should run for president, scrawling a platform on the back of a napkin. For a long time the two sides had seemed to act in opposition to each other as often as they acted in concert. Now they weren&amp;#039;t talking to each other at all. Early on, Davis had projected the campaign would take in more than $100 million over the year, which was proving a wildly optimistic forecast. Some national polls placed McCain as far back as third, behind actor and then-undeclared candidate Fred Thompson and Giuliani. He was also tracking poorly with independents, the powerful swing voters who had staked him to a nineteen-point win over Bush in the New Hampshire primary in 2000. Somewhere along the way, McCain had lost his grip on underdog hearts. Week by painful week, he looked less like a straight-shooting maverick and more like the old company man, the bank robber suddenly become the bank. Except now the bank was empty. Nelson and Weaver felt that Davis had made their job impossible: How do you map out a campaign strategy when you don&amp;#039;t know how much money you have to spend? Davis blamed Nelson and Weaver, arguing that their mismanagement of McCain&amp;#039;s political image had made it hard to raise enough money, and privately he told McCain as much. In 2000, the senator had been sunk in the end by the perception, especially among religious conservatives, that he was a Republican of convenience. The bipartisanship that McCain had trumpeted as the only way to get things done in Washington had made him look too willing to compromise, casting him in a traitor&amp;#039;s light. Later, to restore his reputation as a good soldier, McCain decided to swallow his pride and align himself strongly with the new president, including cosponsoring a Senate bill authorizing the war in Iraq. Although McCain couldn&amp;#039;t help criticizing Bush&amp;#039;s strategy as being short on troops and foresight -- a recipe for a new Vietnam -- he was careful to pin most of the blame on Donald Rumsfeld, a man even Republicans found easy to loathe. Through every botch and casualty, he remained steadfast in his public support of the president. McCain soon found himself the last man standing.  That would cost him, and he knew it. &amp;quot;But I don&amp;#039;t worry about it,&amp;quot; he said time and again. &amp;quot;There are far too many brave young Americans who have sacrificed too much for my political ambitions to be impacted by the popularity or the unpopularity of the war.&amp;quot; RELATED STORIES:  PART 1: One of Us PART 3: Two Nights... PART 4: The Pearl COMPLETE COVERAGE: Everything You Need to Know About the Election  McCain might have survived that unpopularity -- trading independents for base Republicans -- except that next he called up rival and friend Ted Kennedy to talk about the snag of twelve million illegal immigrants in this country, and together they created a path for what they called earned citizenship and what some others called amnesty, and together they posed for pictures after the first successful cloture vote in the Senate, and together they climbed into an elevator and exhaled, weary with adrenaline, and alone McCain stepped out of that elevator and into an almighty, wind-driven shitstorm. &amp;quot;We knew it would be a minefield, but boy howdy,&amp;quot; Weaver says today. &amp;quot;We might have been overly optimistic that we could have tiptoed our way through it.&amp;quot; Just like that, the man whose greatest political gift was his ability to be all things to all people had pulled a nearly impossible trick: He had given everybody a reason to hate him. To the Left and Center, he was a Bush flunky and a war pig. To the Right, he was a lover of Mexicans and Kennedys. Very few politicians can make a run based on today. They&amp;#039;re running either on their histories or on our futures. But when his Straight Talk Express finally eased up a narrow lane into Prescott Park and the bus doors opened, John McCain found himself confronted with banjo-and-brass music and an unflattering present. Wearing his blue sweater, he walked to the stage with his wife, Cindy, who was dressed in pink, and stumbled into his announcement speech. It had been written days earlier by Mark Salter, his Senate chief of staff and the man most responsible for McCain&amp;#039;s public voice: a Lincoln-esque brand of rhetoric packed with adverbs and echoes. This time, McCain tripped over the refrain -- &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s not good enough for America, and when I&amp;#039;m president, it won&amp;#039;t be good enough for me&amp;quot; -- because the teleprompter that loomed behind the crowd was nearly impossible to read from the stage. It was washed out by the spotlights. That, plus the acrimonious finance-committee meeting (it was decided that the money would eventually come in, so the money would keep going out), plus a nagging cold, plus the darkening skies, as well as McCain&amp;#039;s growing feeling that he couldn&amp;#039;t get a straight answer about anything from anybody -- all of it left him in one of those sour moods that had saddled him with a reputation for temper. So many goddamn people around him, and no one thought to keep his jacket pressed.  When he surrendered to a media scrum beside the bus, the last of his optimism looked squeezed out by the crush. The opening questions were about Iraq and immigration, the issues that closed in on him like the halves of a vise. He answered them as he had been prepared to answer them, interrupted twice by the ringing of a cell phone on the belt of a cameraman kneeling beside him. Then someone shouted out the start of another line of questioning: &amp;quot;How do you get connected -- &amp;quot; &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m already connected,&amp;quot; McCain cut him off. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m already connected.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;But there seems to be a lack of enthusiasm for your candidacy. . . .&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I haven&amp;#039;t detected that myself. Congratulations.&amp;quot; And then the cameraman&amp;#039;s phone rang for a third time -- &amp;quot;Shall we sing along?&amp;quot; said McCain, looking down at him -- and then the phone rang again. McCain measured his words. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s your last chance,&amp;quot; he said, and though he managed to follow the threat with a smile, it was the sort of smile that stops watches. Following a short, tense drive to Concord, he headed into the Courtyard Marriott. There, McCain went upstairs alone for a phone interview with Sean Hannity, wondering aloud why he was reduced to radio instead of TV. Salter filled the wait with a cigarette in the parking lot. Weaver was on his phone, across the lobby from Cindy McCain, who stood despite a number of empty chairs, as though if she sat down, she wasn&amp;#039;t getting up again. She&amp;#039;s never been much for joining her husband on the road, and she looked like a woman who was at the start of a long trip that she hadn&amp;#039;t looked forward to taking. There had been rumors in the capital, in fact, that she might even deliver one of those cinematic it&amp;#039;s-me-or-the-presidency ultimatums, but here she was, the beer heiress in pearls, standing in a Courtyard Marriott in Concord, New Hampshire, watching the rain start to fall. McCain came back downstairs and everyone returned to the bus, a splashy set of wheels with flat-screen TVs, blue leather captain&amp;#039;s chairs, and a stainless-steel fridge and microwave in the kitchen. McCain took his customary seat, in the middle of the horseshoe in back, surrounded by reporters. &amp;quot;Are we doing an out-of-doors event?&amp;quot; he shouted at the front of the bus, and he made a face when the wrong answer came back. &amp;quot;Yeah, we&amp;#039;ll have to fire the entire incompetent campaign staff,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m sure I&amp;#039;ll find many people to blame for this besides me.&amp;quot; Seven Months Ago He was in Las Vegas in early May. McCain had been looking forward to this trip for a long time. He was holding ringside tickets for the fight between Oscar De La Hoya and Floyd Mayweather at the MGM Grand on Cinco de Mayo. Cindy McCain and their youngest son, nineteen-year-old Jimmy, were flying up from Phoenix to meet him. Jimmy, a newly minted marine, was about to become the fourth generation of McCains delivered unto war. Las Vegas was part of John McCain&amp;#039;s extended goodbye to his son. Originally, the evening&amp;#039;s schedule was going to be clear -- for one night, McCain wasn&amp;#039;t going to be a presidential candidate or a senator; he was just going to be a husband and a father and a fight fan. But the continuing campaign budget crisis forced him to squeeze in a fundraiser beforehand at a casino nightclub called Tab\u00FA. A reporter for the Los Angeles Times waited among the slot machines, hoping to ask McCain something about tribal land rights, but the senator wasn&amp;#039;t in the mood for heaviness and was slipped through Tab\u00FA&amp;#039;s back entrance. The nightclub was fashionably dark, with low concrete tables and big-titted waitresses dressed in black, serving lobster canap\u00E9s to the guests, most of whom were comparing how good their four-figure seats were for the fight. McCain was in such a good, backslapping humor that he didn&amp;#039;t seem to mind having to go to work. He was buoyed by a well-reviewed performance in the first Republican debate two nights before. Improving poll numbers gave him further bounce, showing slim-to-substantial leads in all four of the early-voting states: New Hampshire, Iowa, South Carolina, and Nevada. But he was especially excited about the fight (&amp;quot;My heart is with De La Hoya, my head is with Mayweather&amp;quot;) and getting the chance to spend some time with Jimmy, a light of a kid. It&amp;#039;s chilling how much he looks like his old man, or at least how his old man used to look. White teeth, short back and sides, his slight frame wrapped in a well-cut suit, he worked the crowd like a professional. He has told friends, however, that he has no desire for a future in politics. What does it say when a son wants to follow his father into the first of his arenas but not into the second? It was hard enough to imagine that a senator&amp;#039;s son had chosen such a dangerous path through life, kicking up the same awful fears of folded flags that every deployed soldier leaves in his wake. Jimmy&amp;#039;s service is the lone subject about which McCain will not answer questions -- &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re proud of all our kids, is what we say.&amp;quot; He has another son, Jack, who is a midshipman at the Naval Academy, like his father and grandfather and great-grandfather before him. McCain will talk about Jack, because Jack is safe in Annapolis. But McCain will not talk about Jimmy, whose imminent departure represented one of those rare instances when a family&amp;#039;s and a nation&amp;#039;s dramas unfolded on the same front line. Not since Adlai Stevenson had a presidential candidate seen his son off to war. For the McCains, though, there had been a quiet feeling that a night such as this was inevitable, and that feeling seemed to have taken some of the nerves out of it, as though together they have been pulled toward this destiny the way the tides follow the moon. Cindy McCain has said that she would have liked for Jimmy to go to college before enlisting, but Jimmy was determined to follow his older brother into the military. Once he became Private First Class McCain -- graduating in San Diego, watched by his father with pride -- he reportedly signed up for infantry duty, which increased his chances of seeing combat. Those chances became a virtual lock when John McCain succeeded in his efforts to have more troops sent to Iraq, the burden of war now shared, as it had been twice before, between a McCain father and a McCain son. Admiral John McCain Jr., who commanded Pacific forces during Vietnam, had ordered massive air strikes on Hanoi when McCain was imprisoned there. And now, with Jimmy standing in the crowd and only weeks away from deployment, John McCain kept secret whatever he had said to him in their suite on the twenty-first floor, and instead he climbed onto one of Tab\u00FA&amp;#039;s concrete tables and said, &amp;quot;We can win this fight,&amp;quot; never mentioning that it would soon include his son. He shook some hands and posed for some pictures and was finally bundled with his family into the back of one of the MGM Grand&amp;#039;s house limousines. The chauffeur pulled into the heavy fight traffic headed for the arena, and in the back of that car, in his own way, McCain prepared himself and his son for what awaited them. Suddenly, in the midst of so much bustle, they were alone. &amp;quot;This is something you&amp;#039;ll never forget,&amp;quot; McCain said to Jimmy, his hand on his knee. &amp;quot;This will be the most exciting thing you&amp;#039;ve ever seen.&amp;quot; The limo pulled up to a service entrance. Accompanied by a couple of heavyweight-sized cops, McCain and company walked through the endless underground tunnels toward ringside. On the way, they ran into boxers Shane Mosley and Bernard Hopkins, business partners of De La Hoya&amp;#039;s. McCain, his face lit up in a way it rarely is anymore by celebrity, introduced them to Jimmy like school friends. &amp;quot;When you&amp;#039;re mediocre at something, you really admire the people who can do it well,&amp;quot; he said later, referring to his own inglorious military boxing career. Now, nearing the light and sound of the arena bowl at the end of one last length of tunnel, he looked suddenly boyish. John McCain always walks fast, and Jimmy does, too, in the same perpetual hurry. That night, there really was no holding them back. McCain emerged at the foot of the crowd, between the floor seats and the bleachers, and the cops hustled to get between him and the other fans. &amp;quot;No, no, that&amp;#039;s all right,&amp;quot; he said, stepping out from behind his protectors. &amp;quot;These are nice people.&amp;quot; He shook hands on the way to his row of seats. Ron Howard and Brian Grazer sat nearby; they waved, and McCain waved back. Over there sat Will Ferrell, and Jim Carrey, and Jack Nicholson. Like every fight, the circus was as big a part of it as the blood. Cindy was planning to take Jimmy to Caesars Palace for a nightcap afterward, but this part of the evening was between the boys. Along with the rest of the crowd, they stood and cheered when the boxers climbed up through the ropes and rolled their shoulders, and they stayed standing for the anthem and through the introductions, the electricity building, the pressure mounting, John McCain smiling at Jimmy -- &amp;quot;Didn&amp;#039;t I tell you?&amp;quot; -- and Jimmy smiling back, both of them clapping and cheering, lost in the moment, anxious for the sound of the bell and the start of the fight. Five Months Ago McCain had just returned from a trip to Iraq when, on the morning of Monday, July 9, he asked to meet with Terry Nelson and John Weaver. Both men thought it was going to be a strategy session, &amp;quot;how we could move forward.&amp;quot; Instead, McCain erupted -- &amp;quot;ranting, ranting, ranting,&amp;quot; according to one aide. May&amp;#039;s recovery had proved short-lived. The second-quarter fundraising returns were worse than the first. The immigration bill had been voted down several days before, yet the backlash was continuing unabated. (&amp;quot;We had told him, Just because there&amp;#039;s a saloon fight going on doesn&amp;#039;t mean you have to pick up a chair,&amp;quot; Weaver says. &amp;quot;But that&amp;#039;s not his nature.&amp;quot;) He was tired of hearing about poll results and being told how he needed to distance himself from the war. And the campaign apparatus had seized to a virtual halt. It was so ugly, Rick Davis wouldn&amp;#039;t come into the office anymore. There was even heated talk of calling it quits. Weaver and Nelson fought back, arguing that the twin-towered campaign structure was too cumbersome for them to succeed. &amp;quot;The process was completely flawed,&amp;quot; Weaver says. &amp;quot;Terry had done a great job for John. Unfortunately, he wasn&amp;#039;t actually given the tools to be the campaign manager.&amp;quot; Although all three men were close friends as well as political allies -- years earlier, when Weaver was battling an apparently incurable cancer, McCain flew him and his daughter out to Arizona for a moving farewell supper -- they shouted at one another until they were hoarse. &amp;quot;With that, I have work to do,&amp;quot; Weaver said and slammed the door behind him. That evening, McCain and Weaver spoke on the phone. &amp;quot;I thought it was a good conversation,&amp;quot; Weaver says. &amp;quot;I told him I didn&amp;#039;t want to have any more arguments.&amp;quot; It was the last time they would speak. The following morning, Tuesday, Weaver had fallen sick with the flu and was flat on his back in bed. His cell phone, which hadn&amp;#039;t stopped ringing since shortly after dawn, finally coaxed him up. It was Mark Salter. McCain had come into the office at seven o&amp;#039;clock that morning and announced that he was replacing Terry Nelson with Rick Davis. Around the same time, Nelson, after a night of reflection, had submitted his letter of resignation. Whether he had quit or was fired was a question of minutes. &amp;quot;What are you going to do?&amp;quot; Salter asked. Only the week before, Weaver had moved from New York to D.C., gearing up for the meat of the campaign; &amp;quot;So much for being a visionary,&amp;quot; he says. By a little after eleven o&amp;#039;clock that morning, Weaver had cleared out his office and said his goodbyes. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a sad story, there&amp;#039;s no other way around it,&amp;quot; Weaver says. &amp;quot;It wasn&amp;#039;t an easy decision. I had a twelve-year relationship with John. I love the man, and he really does put his country first. But at the end of the day, you have to do what you think is right.&amp;quot; Weaver wasn&amp;#039;t the only one who decided it was time to go. Reed Galen, McCain&amp;#039;s deputy campaign manager, and Rob Jesmer, the campaign&amp;#039;s political director, left later that same day. Mark Salter -- who had cowritten each of McCain&amp;#039;s best-selling books as well as his speeches and was one of the principal architects of his political career -- thought about leaving; instead, he remained in the Senate office and resigned his paid position with the campaign. Most of the crack press office -- Brian Jones, Matt David, Danny Diaz -- and dozens of other staff members followed. McCain was taken aback by the scope of defection. The collapse became the talk of Washington, bringing to mind Edmund Muskie or Gary Hart. Even Bill Clinton was awed enough to weigh in: &amp;quot;John McCain was not well served by the people working for him,&amp;quot; the former president said. In response, McCain obeyed his nature and picked up a chair. &amp;quot;My first answer is, I did not know that President Clinton was well connected with my campaign. I had no idea that he was so intimately familiar with my campaign. My second answer is, It&amp;#039;s my responsibility and nobody else&amp;#039;s.&amp;quot; On the Senate floor that same afternoon, McCain kept railing, chiding his fellow senators about Iraq. &amp;quot;A lot of us are not driven by polls,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;A lot of us are driven by principle. And a lot of us do what is right, no matter what the polls say!&amp;quot; As his voice continued to rise, he sounded more and more like a man who had grown tired of speaking to deaf ears. Now John McCain greets this autumn morning from his bed at the Sheraton in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the same hotel in the same town he has gone to sleep in and woken up in so many times before, but today there&amp;#039;s no call for spotlights. It really is sunny outside. He climbs on board the bus -- no longer the luxurious, expensive Straight Talk Express, a shabbier ride, beat-up and worn, adorned only with a McCain banner strung up in the rear window. &amp;quot;Frankly, I don&amp;#039;t relish it,&amp;quot; he says of the loss of his front-runner status. But despite his protestations, this seems to be how he likes it best of all, John McCain and a couple of old buddies -- &amp;quot;Morning, Orson!&amp;quot; -- and a seat in the back, shrugged free of the demands of the machine, carried on down the road instead by pink chicken and fortunes in cookies: The game isn&amp;#039;t over until it&amp;#039;s over. &amp;quot;I still believe I can out-campaign anybody,&amp;quot; he says, sounding more motivated than he has sounded in months, motivated by anger, motivated by war. Portsmouth to Rochester, Rochester to Franklin, Franklin to Concord, Concord to Hudson, Hudson to Nashua, and at every stop, before big crowds and small, McCain grips the microphone and makes a few jokes -- &amp;quot;I tried to enlist in the marines, but my parents were married&amp;quot; -- before he lifts himself out of this small VFW or that smoky Legion Hall and launches into his practiced, impassioned plea. &amp;quot;I think it&amp;#039;s pretty obvious the American people ran out of patience,&amp;quot; he says, referring to the first of his wars. &amp;quot;And we did pay a price for our failure. We&amp;#039;re friends with the Vietnamese now, but we shouldn&amp;#039;t forget that thousands were executed, hundreds of thousands were put in reeducation camps, I don&amp;#039;t know how many fled on boats, died at sea. And in Cambodia, there was a genocide of incredible consequences. We have a tendency to forget that. But the Vietnamese never said we&amp;#039;re going to follow them home. They had no radical extremist cause that they thought was part of the struggle between them and us. That&amp;#039;s the difference.... I want us out, too, but I want us out with honor. And as terrible as the consequences of failure in Vietnam were, I don&amp;#039;t think they are as consequential as failure in Iraq.&amp;quot; Whenever he talks like this, McCain almost always looks down at his right wrist, not because it&amp;#039;s partially frozen by the wounds that war inflicted on him but because around it is a bracelet, about as thick as a ruler, with a photograph of a young soldier on it. Next to it is written: SPC Matthew J. Stanley. Army 12/16/06 Wolfeboro Falls, NH. The date is the day Stanley, twenty-two and newly married, was killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq. McCain was given the bracelet by Stanley&amp;#039;s shaken mother, Lynn Savage, who took it off her wrist at a New Hampshire campaign stop a few months ago and put it on his. Today, she has joined him on the bus, and it&amp;#039;s her turn to tell a war story, her voice trembling only a little. &amp;quot;I thought maybe, if I just offered the bracelet, he might take it and remember the reason why we need to finish what we&amp;#039;re doing and not let my son die in vain and not let thousands of others die in vain.... I just wanted it to be a gesture, to connect with him, so that he would understand. I&amp;#039;m sure he had friends who were killed during the war and he might know what their parents went through. And I thought maybe it would just be a connection, and it really was -- he was very emotional when I gave it to him. That wasn&amp;#039;t my intention. But as long as it remains a reminder for him to honor my son and all the other soldiers who have fallen, it&amp;#039;s a wonderful thing. Never let the memories die, that&amp;#039;s so important.&amp;quot; And then she will stop and smile a thin, sad smile.  This is what&amp;#039;s left for John McCain, the man and the message stripped down to the base coat. Instead of trying to be all things to all people, he&amp;#039;s trying to be one or two things for just a few, and maybe enough of them will hear him and think well of him for it. He&amp;#039;s run out of the time and the money and the love that allows a man to speak of beginnings. He&amp;#039;s finally realized that beginnings are a young man&amp;#039;s game. Now, like most old men, he&amp;#039;s become obsessed with how the story will end.  After another fifty miles, after another meandering, mirthful conversation in the back of the bus, he shouts up front how long we have until the next stop. &amp;quot;Twenty minutes? Oh, my God.&amp;quot;  But the truth is, he would like to stay on this beat-up bus forever. He knows too well what will happen when it stops. &amp;quot;I talk to Bob Dole,&amp;quot; he says, his voice quiet as a lake. &amp;quot;I was with him the last two weeks of his campaign, constantly. One of the things that was very moving -- and admittedly, he didn&amp;#039;t give great speeches and I understand that -- but you&amp;#039;d see in the crowd these older men with the crossed skis, the 10th Mountain Division hats on. And after the speech you&amp;#039;d kind of see Bob go over and they&amp;#039;d come over, and it was fascinating to see that. It was very touching to see that. It makes me emotional even now when I think about it.&amp;quot; Suddenly, McCain smiles his own thin, sad smile, and his eyes brim with tears. He has rarely attended his own military reunions; when he has, he says, he could pick out the guys who had retired by how much closer they seemed to death. Maybe that&amp;#039;s why he&amp;#039;s always looked ahead, always pushed forward, always tried to sell us on our futures and never on his past. Until now -- until now, he never dwelled much on history, partly because he has so much of it to get lost in, mostly because he wanted to seem strong and vigorous. But now he wants to remember, and he would like for you to remember, too.  Forty years ago, John McCain was filmed in black and white, wrapped in a body cast and smoking what might have been his last cigarette. This footage was little seen until what&amp;#039;s left of his staff -- Rick Davis, Brooke Buchanan, everything cut back to the bone -- convinced him it was finally time to play that card in an ad called Courageous Service. (&amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m slightly embarrassed by it,&amp;quot; McCain says.) There he lies, all of thirty-one, interrogated by an invisible man with an Indo-French accent -- What is your name, what is your rank, where were you educated, what is your official number? ... &amp;quot;Six-two-four,&amp;quot; McCain says, his smoke burning down, &amp;quot;seven-eight-seven.&amp;quot; And then the screen fades to black. The clip is powerful, because the John McCain we know today seems so far removed from that John McCain. It speaks of such long journeys. There&amp;#039;s a subtler message hidden behind it as well: It serves to remind us, gently, that after he refused early release, he spent more time in a Vietnamese prison camp than America has spent in Iraq -- that old men, and old soldiers especially, use a different abacus when making sums out of sacrifice. Portsmouth to Rochester, Rochester to Franklin, Franklin to Concord, Concord to Hudson, Hudson to Nashua, again and again, as though on a loop, until the roads are so familiar, the memories are all you have left: John McCain would like to remind you that he nearly gave his life in service of this country; that his father and grandfather served it yesterday and that his sons are serving it today; that only seven years ago he was maverick John McCain, straight-talking John McCain, underdog John McCain; that in time measured by months rather than years, he was exactly the sort of man that many of you wished to see become the president of the United States; and that he&amp;#039;s still out here, fighting the last big fight of his life. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a4031/mccain0108/>