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"  One of Us, Part 3 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 the infighting in January 2008&amp;#039;s Part 2, the campaign&amp;#039;s comeback examined in this story from April 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. *** They all gathered at the front of the big new plane, John McCain and his ever-expanding circle of friends and advisors, Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut and Governor Charlie Crist of Florida now among them, and they leaned in and listened to strategist Steve Schmidt, who was receiving the first waves of exit-poll results through his BlackBerry. It was only just past two o&amp;#039;clock in the afternoon on the tarmac in San Diego, but on this far-reaching day, February 5 -- Super Tuesday -- states in the East and the Southeast were closer to calling it a night. And night was what everyone wanted to see, this night especially, maybe the night -- don&amp;#039;t even say it -- that would witness the final transfiguration of McCain from perpetual outlier to the face of his party, the chosen one. The mood among McCain&amp;#039;s entourage had been upbeat during a predawn rally in New York City and on the long cross-country flight, but now faces fell a little, and the conversation seemed intense, even anxious. A few photographers were snapping pictures of the huddle from their seats in the back. They were asked to stop. On such an open and accessible campaign, the sudden blackout raised goosebumps.  Whispers began running down the plane&amp;#039;s aisle, growing less hushed the farther back they got. It wasn&amp;#039;t that Mitt Romney had mounted a last-ditch recovery, which was everyone&amp;#039;s first guess. (Although the early numbers showed McCain holding only a slim lead over Romney in his home state of Arizona, which was unthinkable.) It was that Mike Huckabee, the guy everyone had taken their eyes off of, now looked like he was making a break up the middle.  There had been an early sign that Huckabee would do better than expected, and there had been an early sign that McCain and his people were just fine about that. The plane had been chartered from JetBlue to accommodate the nearly one hundred passengers -- when only months before, McCain&amp;#039;s manifests had been reduced to four names, including his -- and the TVs in the backs of the seats flashed with the news that Huckabee had surprised Romney with a win in West Virginia. There were cheers. &amp;quot;We heart Huck on this plane,&amp;quot; said Mark Salter, McCain&amp;#039;s senior advisor and speechwriter. They heart Huck, because they hate Romney. It had taken time for McCain&amp;#039;s simmering dislike of the man, stemming from an eight-year-old dispute over federal funding for the Salt Lake City Olympics, to boil over into debate spats and, finally, pitched public battles. McCain had pledged in the beginning to run a positive campaign, and, mindful of his reputation for temper, he had done his best to keep quiet, demonstrating a sometimes impressive discipline. Way back in summer-warm Iowa, he had been asked whether he wanted to comment on Romney&amp;#039;s misfire about his five sons serving the country by helping him run for president -- McCain&amp;#039;s youngest son, Jimmy, is a marine serving in Iraq -- and McCain answered only by shaking his head. Now, though, there was plenty to be said.  McCain had started the flight from New York to San Diego by asking, through the gathered press, for Romney to apologize for slighting Bob Dole, a man for whom McCain feels something like love. Dole had written a letter to Rush Limbaugh praising McCain; Romney had said that Dole was the last person he&amp;#039;d want writing a letter on his behalf. &amp;quot;It was totally inappropriate to make the comments that he did about one of the great war heroes in America,&amp;quot; McCain said. Salter was more pointed: &amp;quot;Let me tell you exactly where it&amp;#039;s coming from. Mitt Romney is all about Mitt Romney, and nobody else. Maybe the five little Mitts. But nobody else. And so I think McCain sees something like that -- who is that guy to take a shot at this guy?&amp;quot; And as the day progressed, and the nerves grew taut, and the hours wore on, McCain steamed and stewed and finally said to himself, Fuck it -- or fuck that guy, at least -- and let the waves crash over the wall. &amp;quot;He&amp;#039;s taken at least two positions on every issue,&amp;quot; he said.  A little later: &amp;quot;I just happened to see polling, I defeat both Senator Clinton and Senator Obama in a general-election matchup. Governor Romney&amp;#039;s way down.&amp;quot; And after word came through that Romney accused McCain of backroom shenanigans in West Virginia, vaulting Huckabee to his surprise triumph: &amp;quot;Rather than blaming it on someone else, I&amp;#039;d suggest that he move on.&amp;quot; But now the plane lifted off from balmy San Diego for the short hop to Phoenix, celebrations planned, the ballroom at the Biltmore and the band booked and waiting, and here these nervous men huddled, fearing that as much as Romney had been damaged by McCain&amp;#039;s stepped-up attacks over the previous days and weeks, perhaps it had been Huckabee, not McCain, who had benefited. To a point, that was okay -- it was okay for Huckabee to win West Virginia. And he&amp;#039;s a nice guy; let him have Arkansas. He was always going to win Arkansas. Then came the first whoopsie reports out of Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee -- all Huck, Huck, Huck, the guy McCain liked, the guy who didn&amp;#039;t fuel his angry engine -- followed by the specter of Arizona falling, and suddenly it felt as though the plane would never touch down and the sun would never set.  It had felt just like that twenty-eight days ago, January 8, on that last afternoon in New Hampshire. McCain was leading in more polls than not that day, but everybody was saying it was too close to call. He&amp;#039;d bet his whole candidacy on the results of the night ahead; the afternoon was the part that everyone wanted to make disappear with a snap of their fingers. Instead, it could only be blurred with drinks and cigarettes and restless sleep on lobby couches, phone calls and hasty e-mails, lunches in the hotel bar that everybody ordered but nobody ate. On a day that represented the beginning and the end of all things, they were trapped in this awful, never-ending middle. Eight years ago, the New Hampshire primary had marked the start of John McCain&amp;#039;s rise, when he made up for his lack of money and lack of audience versus George W. Bush by campaigning for president door-to-door, eventually winning by 19 points. Then, he sometimes held five town-hall meetings in a day, trying to bribe folks to come inside with offers of free ice cream and still talking to empty rooms. This time around, when he saw lame-duck candidate Duncan Hunter, a congressman from California, shivering on a street corner in Manchester, reduced to waving at passing cars, McCain didn&amp;#039;t point and laugh through the tinted windows of the Straight Talk Express. McCain knows too well how it feels to be the guy everybody else makes fun of. He didn&amp;#039;t even have to cast back eight years to remember. RELATED STORIES:  PART 1: One of Us PART 2: John McCain&amp;#039;s Last War PART 4: The Pearl COMPLETE COVERAGE: Everything You Need to Know About the Election  Only last July, when his once-unstoppable-seeming campaign machinery broke down and then finally collapsed, McCain had been that man on the street corner. He&amp;#039;d been ready to give up the ghost, because while McCain is proud, his pride is more weapon than armor. For a man who has been in uniform since he was eighteen and in politics since 1982, he can show a surprising capacity for being wounded. One of the people who did leave the campaign then was John Weaver, McCain&amp;#039;s longtime strategist and friend. Weaver combed McCain&amp;#039;s hair and brushed off his jacket, because the man with the broken shoulders could not do those things for himself, and it was his defection that hurt McCain the most. &amp;quot;I have not talked to John in some time,&amp;quot; McCain said in January, and he wouldn&amp;#039;t say much more than that. The truth is, Weaver has tried to reconcile, but McCain has not answered or returned his calls. For a lot of people still out on the trail, that bitterness has cast a kind of shadow over everything. For McCain, that bitterness is gas in the tanks. He says that he was spurred to continue his dying campaign by a reenlistment ceremony for almost six hundred soldiers in Baghdad on the Fourth of July, which he attended with one of his staunchest political allies, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina. Another 161 green-card soldiers were set to receive their citizenship that day; only 159 did, because two were killed in action the previous month, dying for a country that hadn&amp;#039;t yet awarded them a passport. Aside from coloring McCain&amp;#039;s take on the illegal-immigration debate, the ceremony also gave him a kick in the ass. &amp;quot;Lindsey and I were talking,&amp;quot; McCain said, remembering their long flight home, &amp;quot;and I said, We&amp;#039;ve gotta stick with this. It was very moving to see those young people willing to fight like that.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;It was one of the most moving experiences of my life,&amp;quot; Graham said. &amp;quot;I know that really invigorated him.&amp;quot; But so, too, did the feeling that most of his own troops had abandoned him, this general without an army. McCain was ruthless in stripping what remained of his campaign staff to the core -- &amp;quot;We knew who our friends were,&amp;quot; Graham said -- and he went on the attack, pinning what remained of his hopes on this wedge of a place, New Hampshire, which had proved so receptive to him and his ground game before. It was a good strategy, and with McCain&amp;#039;s limited resources, it was probably his only strategy. But it was also risky: Lose New Hampshire, lose the war. So on the day before the primary, the tension in the back of the bus weighed heavy. This was it, and everybody knew it, and McCain was feeling nostalgic as well as nervous. He talked about the past, and he asked his staff to mirror, as closely as possible, the final day of his campaign eight years earlier. He held his one-hundredth town hall in Peterborough, where he had first dished out ice cream. He made stops in the same cities -- Keene, Hanover, Concord -- he had stopped in last time around, ending each of his speeches by saying, &amp;quot;I will never let you down,&amp;quot; perhaps one last jab at the people who had left him for dead months earlier. Now he listened to the crowds cheering, and he remembered. He wanted so badly to remember that he made the bus stop in Portsmouth in the dark -- Portsmouth, where he had held his final event in 2000 and now did again. He slept in the same hotel room, the Presidential Suite on the eighth floor of the Crowne Plaza in Nashua. The next day, he pulled on the same green sweater he had worn back then; he jingled the pennies in his pocket that he had picked up over the course of the previous week, but only if he spied them heads up; he checked the weather and was heartened that there would be drizzle in the northern part of the state, because rain had been good luck for him on Election Day.  So was watching a movie, and Cindy McCain was busy downloading a couple of his favorites for him, Viva Zapata! and A Fish Called Wanda, and he was happy about that. He was also buoyed by the midnight reports out of Dixville Notch, the remote village in the northeast corner of the state, whose seventeen voters were the first to report their primary results. He had lost there in 2000; this time, he beat Romney four to two. &amp;quot;A landslide,&amp;quot; he called it, but when someone joked that it was a harbinger, he shushed them. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m superstitious about that, too,&amp;quot; he told them. Later that morning, McCain asked to go to Broad Street Elementary School, the same polling station he had visited on primary day in 2000. There, in that parking lot bordered by snowbanks, was everything that this day meant at once.  He was encouraged by the size of the crowd that engulfed him as soon as he stepped off the bus, the reporters and the voters, and their reaction to him, men reaching out their hands and women in tears. Romney had stopped by the school only minutes before, and you could have heard the snowflakes falling. He might pull this off yet. Either way, there was the sense that what this journey had been -- this rollicking, old-style campaign with beat-up buses and boxes of doughnuts and 101 town halls -- was finished. Even success would mean the death of something. Back on the bus one last time, back to the Crowne Plaza, this is how the ride ended: Someone asked what question might make McCain cry, a reference to Hillary Clinton&amp;#039;s quasi-breakdown in a diner the previous day. &amp;quot;How about,&amp;quot; McCain started, &amp;quot;the kind of staffing that&amp;#039;s the greatest albatross around my neck -- &amp;quot; And here, McCain stopped and looked up at Brooke Buchanan, his long-suffering press secretary, whose jeans were falling off her, she had worked herself so thin, and then, good-naturedly but perhaps not generously to Hillary or Brooke, he put his face in his hands and feigned a good weep. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t know how I&amp;#039;ve been able to carry this campaign on my shoulders,&amp;quot; he said. That was the end of New Hampshire by bus, and the start of that long afternoon. McCain went upstairs and watched a movie and took a nap. Mark Salter pulled a table and a chair outside and sat in the sun, smoking cigarettes and writing the speech (victorious version only) that McCain would give in just a few hours. The first exit-poll results started coming in around five o&amp;#039;clock, and they showed him with a 5-point lead, maybe 6. The hotel lobby began to hum. In the adjacent ballroom, a man filled plastic bags with confetti. Up in McCain&amp;#039;s hotel suite, Cindy and their daughters Meghan and Bridget got dressed for the big night. Plates of ribs and vegetable platters were spread out on the coffee table, but McCain didn&amp;#039;t eat much. Instead, he practiced his speech for Salter. That was the first time McCain allowed himself to claim out loud the victory he so desperately needed.  He remained nervous, though, even then. There was so much at stake, and there were so many people in New Hampshire who were undecided on his fate -- McCain hated that word, undecided -- that he still feared a jinx. And how many of his beloved independents would be lured away by Obama and into the Democratic primary instead? Until the hard numbers come in, there&amp;#039;s really only hope and these weird, electric crackles in the air. McCain watched the news reports and tugged on a lucky rubber band that he kept around his left wrist. Salter went downstairs for another smoke. Then, at 8:21 p.m., minutes after the polls closed, the Associated Press called it: New Hampshire for McCain. Salter butted out his cigarette and bucked it for the elevators. In the time it took to make that short dash through the hotel, Fox News called it, too, and the TVs in the lobby were obscured by raised hands and cheering. &amp;quot;Unbelievable, dude,&amp;quot; Salter shouted over the noise. &amp;quot;The greatest political comeback in my lifetime.&amp;quot; Upstairs there was celebration, too, but it wasn&amp;#039;t as raucous as downstairs. It was prideful. Now McCain was in a dark suit instead of his lucky green sweater, and he had Salter&amp;#039;s speech rolled up in his hands, and between glances at it, he watched the TV and allowed himself his version of beaming. Lindsey Graham was there -- &amp;quot;2008 fits John and what he has to offer like 1980 fit Reagan, that&amp;#039;s what it comes down to,&amp;quot; he said -- and former senator Phil Gramm was there, and Cindy and the kids, and Salter and Mike Dennehy and Rick Davis and Brooke Buchanan, what was left of his once hundred-strong staff. There were whoops and hugs and handshakes, but they also spent a lot of time just looking at one another and shaking their heads: How did we get here from there? Huckabee called, and McCain retreated into the bathroom to accept his congratulations. Romney called, too, and McCain took that call in the bedroom. &amp;quot;Romney&amp;#039;s conceded,&amp;quot; Davis said, emerging. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s not the concession we want,&amp;quot; Gramm said. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s good enough for tonight.&amp;quot; Now McCain had only to wait until the other candidates spoke to rooms cast in defeat before he could join the party downstairs. &amp;quot;These people have been so good to us,&amp;quot; he said, almost marveling. &amp;quot;Twice.&amp;quot; At last, Romney came on the TV. &amp;quot;Romney&amp;#039;s going to speak here, so we better turn that down, Cindy,&amp;quot; McCain said, pointing at the TV, but she didn&amp;#039;t hear him, and no one else did, either. &amp;quot;It will be interesting, Ron Paul bringing in third here -- I would just turn that down,&amp;quot; McCain said again, and again no one heard him. &amp;quot;Another silver,&amp;quot; Romney said. McCain looked like he was going to throw up into the plant beside him. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s why I wanted to turn it down,&amp;quot; he said. And that was the moment. That was when it happened, this great turning of prospects and moods and tactics. McCain gritted his teeth and forgot about New Hampshire, forgot about Huckabee, forgot about the beginning and the middle and saw only the end, and he found suddenly that he had all the more gas in the tanks. McCain needed it, too, every last drop, to carry him through a disappointing loss to Romney in Michigan -- &amp;quot;We didn&amp;#039;t mind a fight,&amp;quot; he said after -- to a narrow win in South Carolina and to a wider win in Florida, which knocked Rudy Giuliani out of the race and into McCain&amp;#039;s increasingly crowded corner, and then through a ridiculously punishing schedule (a single day saw stops in Chicago, Nashville, Birmingham, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C.) on the rush toward Super Tuesday, including today&amp;#039;s last marathon leg, New York to San Diego to Phoenix, seventeen hours from rise and shine to sitting in another hotel room, jingling the pennies in his pocket, watching another TV, waiting for another twenty-one verdicts. The exit polls were partly right: Huckabee claimed great chunks of the Southeast -- better him than Romney, but still, Jesus. And then McCain began picking up states, big states, New York and New Jersey, and small states, Delaware and Connecticut, and making it a race in Massachusetts -- wouldn&amp;#039;t that have been a sweet, sharp knife to clang off Romney&amp;#039;s ribs? -- and onward west into Missouri, Oklahoma, Illinois, and running away with Arizona after all -- what the hell was that about? -- and then waiting, deep into the night, for the biggest and final prize, California. He spoke before he knew he had won it. He came down to the ballroom, and he was cheered by one of the biggest crowds he had seen, and something changed once again, just as it had that night in New Hampshire. This was the beginning and the end of something, too. Except on this night, night two, it wasn&amp;#039;t about how the rest of the country perceived John McCain; it was about how John McCain perceived himself. He&amp;#039;s superstitious, and he&amp;#039;s tenacious, and he&amp;#039;s stubborn, and he&amp;#039;s loyal, and he&amp;#039;s vindictive, and he&amp;#039;s combative, and he&amp;#039;s disciplined, except when he isn&amp;#039;t, and he&amp;#039;s right, except when he&amp;#039;s not, and now he would claim to have become one thing above all others, ignoring what he has been for so long in favor of what he will be. &amp;quot;Although I&amp;#039;ve never minded the role of the underdog,&amp;quot; he said, &amp;quot;tonight I think we must get used to the idea that we are the Republican party&amp;#039;s front-runner.... And I don&amp;#039;t really mind it one bit.&amp;quot; He said it quietly -- even his voice was different than it had been earlier in the day, changing along with him, calmer, between breaths, sounding how he imagined he would sound as president of the United States -- and the quiet became him. And then he turned his attention to his rivals, not just that guy, him, but now the other one as well.  &amp;quot;I salute Governor Huckabee,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;And I want to congratulate Governor Romney.&amp;quot; The difference in wording was subtle, maybe even subconscious, but it was not unimportant. It was as though even in the afterglow of victory, McCain couldn&amp;#039;t resist moving a few more plastic tanks on the big map of the world: salute versus congratulate, respect versus hip-hip-hooray, and most important, Mike Huckabee versus Mitt Romney. Just like that, John McCain had set up a new battle in order to remove himself from an old one. Two days later, Romney would end his campaign, but McCain already seemed to have left the others behind. From now on, he was above it, he said without saying -- he was ready to become that someone or something else he thinks we need him to become. With that, he went outside, and he took a car to his condo, just down the street. He was alone with his family, no reporters, none of his new friends. It was late, and it had been a long, long day.  Now it was over. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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