At first, though, the scandal did seem to make it the Democrats' race to lose. McCain had taken in $112,000 in political contributions from Lincoln S&L owner Charles Keating, his family and associates. McCain's wife, Cindy, and her late father, Jim Hensley, had invested $351,000 in a Keating strip mall a year before McCain met with regulators to urge them to back off of Lincoln. The McCains also took nine trips on Keating's tab, often on Lincoln's corporate jet, three to Keating's private Cat Cay resort in the Bahamas. On some trips, the kids and family babysitter went along.

McCain repaid Keating $13,433 for the travel, years later, and after it became evident that Keating and Lincoln were going to be problems. The mild admonishment by the Senate Ethics Committee obscured the fact that McCain had taken more money than any of the other senators involved in the Lincoln S&L collapse, which cost taxpayers $2 billion. He was also the only senator who was a close friend of Keating.

But McCain, who had spent the previous ten years as a lightweight politician who favored cameras over committee rooms, had almost a two-year lead time before his next election to recast himself as a "reformer" and a "maverick." The national press bought it and has been sold on McCain's makeover ever since. (You could say McCain was a maverick in the Keating Five scandal, being the only Republican among the five senators accused of leaning on S&L regulators in exchange for political contributions.)

THE P.O.W. CELEBRITY—Longtime McCain friend and consultant John Weaver has said that John McCain was a media celebrity when he first got off the transport from Vietnam in 1973. After a couple of years in physical rehab, McCain parlayed his celebrity status into a position as a Navy liaison officer to the U.S. Senate in Washington. There, the Navy and McCain cheerfully used each other to promote their agendas among the politically powerful. In 1980, McCain even arranged to marry his mistress, Cindy Hensley, in Washington rather than Arizona. The D.C. venue would serve to deepen McCain's political contacts in a way that Phoenix or Sedona could not. In addition to having Gary Hart as a groomsman, McCain asked then-Republican senator and future Clinton Defense Secretary Bill Cohen of Maine to be his best man.

Not long afterward, McCain moved to one of his bride's many Arizona homes, where, according to his official bio, he was mulling over what to do next when his father's untimely death inspired him to take up public service and run for Congress. However, both liberal and conservative cynics in the Arizona press were quick to point out that McCain's position in D.C. provided him with early access to information that the reporters and other insiders had: Republican Minority Leader John Rhodes was planning to retire in 1982. Critics suggest that McCain used the news of his father's death to paper over the fact of his only having lived in the district a few months before announcing his bid.

McCain's residency was a problem. Arizona Republicans didn't know much about him—aside from his status as the nation's celebrity Vietnam spokesman. Consequently, voters and the press paid more attention to McCain's rivals: a pro-business, conservative state senator and a woman in the state house who had earned a national reputation as a populist conservative crusader against the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion rights.

McCain decided to run to the right of his female opponent, including taking an even harder line on the Equal Rights Amendment, which he characterized as a radical liberal idea. Running on hard-line, extremist positions was a clever strategy for a candidate with no public record, who understood that the easiest way to earn support was to pose as a populist conservative.

Early in that first race for public office, McCain told the local press he didn't want to discuss his years as a P.O.W. (even though most of his first political ad was devoted to the story of his imprisonment). Then, during a critical moment in the primary, McCain was confronted on camera by a voter who argued that, unlike McCain, the retiring incumbent and McCain's two opponents were life-long residents of the 1st Congressional District. McCain responded with a fiery (and well-rehearsed) zinger to what he would later claim was the "thousandth time" the question had been asked:

"Listen, pal. I spent twenty-two years in the Navy. My grandfather was in the Navy. We in the military service tend to move a lot. We have to live in all parts of the country, all parts of the world. I wish I could have had the luxury, like you, of growing up and living and spending my entire life in a nice place like the First District of Arizona, but I was doing other things. As a matter of fact, when I think about it now, the place I lived longest in my life was Hanoi."

It was compelling television. Widely reported and repeated, it helped McCain cruise to a crushing win in the primary.

McCain's "P.O.W. response" became the perfect political cover and non-answer to tough questions, even as the press dutifully continued to report that McCain didn't like to discuss his years in captivity.

He has used his "reticence" to his advantage, while simultaneously using the "P.O.W. response" quite a bit. It provides the content for at least five current TV spots, in which he or an announcer delivers the voice-over for grainy iconic images of John McCain as P.O.W. The P.O.W. line was used by a McCain spokesperson in an angry response to reporters' questions about the possibility of McCain cheating in the August forum at Saddleback Church. It served to deflect questions about McCain telling his wife to enter a topless beauty contest. And it was used again when reporters challenged McCain staffers about McCain's inability to recall how many houses he owned.

NICE DEAL IF YOU CAN GET IT—Sometimes the POW response doesn't work and McCain has to react to circumstances by responding to, or even cozying up to, the press—as he did in 1994 when he helped his wife avoid prosecution for the theft of thousands of dollars' worth of prescription drugs from a non-profit foundation she directed.

In the late 1980s, Cindy McCain started a foundation called the American Voluntary Medical Team (AMVT), a non-profit organization with the laudable goal of sending recently expired prescription medications to Third World hospitals. (Pharmaceutical companies got generous tax write-offs by claiming the full price of donated drugs that otherwise would have been discarded.)

Soon after the foundation was up and running, Cindy McCain began consuming pills that the drug companies had donated to the cause. And not just any pills, but Percocet and Vicodin, classified under federal law under the same strict guidelines as opium. In fact, each pill Cindy McCain swallowed carried a maximum one-year sentence. When the theft was exposed, she could have been sentenced to more than 200 years in prison. (Cindy McCain initially said that back problems, exacerbated by stress from the Keating Five scandal, made her an addict, but court papers would show she was taking pills long before news of the scandal broke.) After an employee of AMVT noticed the loss on tax forms, and was fired for confronting Cindy McCain, the fired employee got a lawyer, contacted the press, and was ready to go public when she was pre-empted by the senator's team.

John McCain was able to cut a deal for his wife through the Bill Clinton-appointed U.S. Attorney for Phoenix, Janet Napolitano. Napolitano was a tough prosecutor, but she was also an embattled Clinton loyalist in a virulently anti-Clinton state (at one point, Senator McCain was among the Republicans demanding that she be removed from office). The Cindy McCain case provided Napolitano with a rare opportunity to cut a deal that would also quell her partisan critics. In the end, Cindy McCain never faced prosecution and was sent to a private rehab hospital for the wealthy. She and John appeared together on the Today show to discuss their "personal tragedy." And Napolitano used the respite from the attacks of powerful opponents to build the political base that helped make her governor.

Cindy's confession, redemption, and rehabilitation story provided great national headlines for the McCain family and made them seem more human. But it didn't play in Phoenix. The state's largest paper, the conservative Arizona Republic, published an editorial that accused McCain and the state's GOP of a deplorable double standard:

Conservative Republicans seemed to achieve some sort of drug-rehab epiphany when Ms. McCain made her announcement. Politicians who had never uttered a single positive sentence about drug-prevention—rehabilitation or diversion programs—suddenly thought they were just fine. Newspapers that often used words such as drug addict and thug as describing the same person suddenly had a new sensitivity to the problem. It seems that when Bill Clinton proposes significant drug rehabilitation and diversion, it is called a failed social program of the sixties. When Cindy McCain needs one of those programs, they suddenly became an essential ingredient in fighting drug use.

The incident might gradually have faded from view. But federal Judge John Kane turned class and racial bias in drug sentencing into a personal crusade, making speeches and writing articles about the egregious disparity in sentencing. From the federal bench in Denver, Kane criticized the deferential treatment provided a California Congressman's son who was sentenced to only two and a half years in prison after flying 400 pounds of marijuana into the country (and testing positive for cocaine three times while out on bail). Judge Kane also pointed to the example of Cindy McCain and her rehab treatment as a substitute for incarceration.

Kane was furious about the son's light sentence. "This is the kind or crap, the hypocrisy of the whole thing," he told the Denver alternative weekly Westword. "You expect common people to live in fear, but the children of politicians are the first one to get off." Bush campaign operatives eagerly (and discreetly) circulated the judge's comments during the 2000 campaign, but the press gave the story a pass.

Eight years later, it's doubtful that Cindy McCain's troubles will be an issue—and in that respect, she is like her husband, who has turned his heroic story and his personal tragedies into a free pass for avoiding reporters' questions.

McCAIN VS. FEINGOLD—McCain's record as a reformer has always been a bit dodgy. For example, people forget that original McCain-Feingold campaign-finance reform legislation would have banned PACs as well as soft-money advertising by political parties. Even though this provision didn't make it into the bill that was signed into law, Wisconsin Democrat Russ Feingold decided to comply with it—a decision that nearly cost him his seat in the Senate. In his 1998 re-election campaign, Feingold expanded his policy to refuse PAC donations and soft money ads by imposing a spending cap of "$1 per Wisconsin resident," or $3.8 million. Feingold even doubled down on his no-soft-money position, threatening to match every dollar party committees spent on his race with cuts in campaign spending. While Feingold was adhering to the letter and spirit of the campaign finance law that he and McCain had sponsored, Feingold's opponent, millionaire Congressman Mark Neumann, was greatly outspending Feingold with funds from his campaign committee—and millions in issue ads.

McCain refused to help Feingold. Instead, he endorsed Neumann and directed his own staff to help the Republican Party raise soft money for anti-Feingold ads. Feingold won by less than 2 percent. But McCain and Neumann remained friends—in fact, Neumann has served on both of McCain's Wisconsin state presidential steering committees.

Unlike Feingold, McCain said he had to "play by the existing rules" to win his 1998 race, which is why the man who wanted to ban PACs actually owned one (boldly dubbed the "Straight Talk Express"). In the end, McCain outdid his opponent in fund-raising by more than 65 to 1 (if you include McCain's PAC receipts) and won with a 42 percent margin of victory.

Few in the press reported on the contrast between McCain's and Feingold's 1998 races and even fewer reported in detail what McCain was doing in his race. The reformer was taking advantage of a "senators only" loophole, which the senators refused to close when their campaign-reform bill passed. While John Kerry and Hillary Clinton took advantage of the same loophole, McCain's decision is noteworthy because he holds himself out as a campaign-finance reformer. The loophole allows senators running for the presidency to engage in a shell game. Under FEC regulations, if your re-election to the Senate falls less than two years before a run for the White House, you can legally shift "excess unspent funds" from your re-election campaign to your presidential campaign, allowing you to double the contribution limits for donors and PACs.

Thus after spending next to nothing on his 1998 blowout, McCain was able to take as much as $40,000 from his PACs to finance his 2000 presidential bid. And McCain still takes PAC money, despite past efforts to ban what he once called its "corrupting influence."

This is just a glimpse of McCain's twenty-six-year political past. There is a long list of stories not reported by the members of the national media who have interviewed witnesses to determine the number of days Barack Obama was present at the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's sermons and who have pored over Michelle Obama's undergraduate thesis.

McCain's pick of Sarah Palin to be his running mate is another example of his instinct to react impulsively. In the first news cycle after McCain selected Palin, many in the media focused on the Alaska governor's right-wing views or her experience—or the lack thereof.

The real problem with the Palin pick is not what McCain or the media say about her, but what the choice says about McCain. The New York Times reported that up to the eleventh hour, John McCain wanted Joe Lieberman as a running mate. But McCain could not sell the independent senator from Connecticut to the G.O.P.'s conservative Christian base. To "shake things up," McCain selected a woman he had spoken with for less than two hours before choosing her.

Unless you believe McCain is silly enough to think there was logic behind his choice of Palin as an appeal to Hillary Clinton voters, the selection of Palin is proof that, if elected, McCain will be a reactive rather than a reflective leader.