The McCain World Rift
February 22, 2008
David Brooks
Op-Ed Columnist NYT
If it turns out that there is evidence of an affair and a
meeting, then his presidential hopes will be over.
The staff of the McCain
campaign had a rude awakening last Jan. 25th. They opened The
Washington Post and found a front-page story linking McCain’s campaign
manager, Rick Davis, to the Russian aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska.
Who, some wondered, was feeding damaging information about Davis to the
press?
Speculation inevitably settled, as it must in McCain World, upon
John Weaver. For nearly a decade, stories about the inner workings of
the McCain apparatus inevitably involved the Weaver-Davis rivalry.
These two McCain advisers share a mutual hatred, one McCainiac told me
Thursday, that is total, absolute and blinding.
The tensions, which divided the McCain presidential campaign until
Weaver was forced out last summer, exist on many levels. First of all,
there is a personal contest for the attention and love of John McCain.
But there are broader issues as well.
Davis is a creature of the political mainstream. He is
even-tempered and charming. He is a lobbyist and a friend of lobbyists.
He is a good manager. In policy terms, his tastes tend toward the
Republican center.
Weaver is a renegade. He has a darker personality. He’s not a
member of elite Washington circles and resented the way McCain would
occasionally get pulled into them. Weaver is a less effective
bureaucrat, but his policy instincts are more daring and independent.
The Davis-Weaver rivalry has lasted for so long because John McCain
has a foot in each camp. McCain is, on one level, a figure of the
Washington mainstream. He admires Alan Greenspan and Henry Kissinger.
He appreciates a steady manager like Davis.
But McCain is also a renegade and a romantic. He loves tilting at
the establishment and shaking things up. He loves books and movies in
which the hero dies at the end while serving a noble, if lost, cause.
He loves the insurgent/band-of-brothers ethos that Weaver exudes.
McCain was loyal to each camp in a house divided. But the poisons
emanating from the rift have spread outward. They are the background
for the article my colleagues at The New York Times published Thursday.
At the core of that article that began on the front page are two
anonymous sources. These sources, according to the article, say they
confronted McCain in 1999 with their concerns that he was risking his
career by interacting with Vicki Iseman. As a columnist, I’m an
independent operator, speaking for myself alone. I have no idea who
those sources are. But they are bound to come from the inner circle of
the McCain universe. The number of people who could credibly claim to
have had a meeting like that with McCain in early 1999 is vanishingly
small. I count a small handful of associates with that stature,
including Davis and Weaver. There is nobody in that tight circle
unaffected by the hostilities that emanate from the rift.
Thursday, as McCain was fervently and completely denying the
allegations of an affair with Iseman, people in all quarters of the
McCain universe were vehemently denying it, too. But even on this
embattled day, they broke down into rival camps over the identity of
the sources.
Many in the Davis camp argued Thursday that Weaver must be the
chief anonymous source, and that he had roped in one other confederate.
He’s had a hard life, they said, and is driven by demons.
Weaver countered by telling reporters that he retains enormous
affection for McCain and desperately wants him to become president.
Moreover, Weaver had been trying to get back into the fold. There is no
way he would be an anonymous source against McCain. Some closer to
Weaver theorized that the sources must be former McCain campaign elders
from 2000 who worked for rival campaigns in 2008.
I checked that possibility out, and it doesn’t hold water. But
while calling around to a dozen senior McCain friends and advisers
Thursday, what struck me was the enormous tragedy of the rift. They all
love McCain. They all say it is absurd to think he abused his power in
the way that is alleged. But the rift is like some primal sore. It
affected every conversation I had Thursday, as it has infected McCain
efforts again and again over the past many years.
At his press conference Thursday, McCain went all-in. He didn’t
just say he didn’t remember a meeting about Iseman. He said there was
no meeting. If it turns out that there is evidence of an affair and a
meeting, then his presidential hopes will be over. If no evidence
surfaces, his campaign will go on and it will be clear that there were
members of his old inner circle consumed by viciousness and
mendaciousness.
But lingering over everything is the bitterness of the rift, which
has caused duplicity and anger to seep into the campaign of this fine
man. The poisons have yet to be drained.