Beyond the Dome

Heading into tonight’s presidential debate in Nashville, it’s clearly John McCain who has the tougher job. Not just because Barack Obama has opened up a significant lead in most recent polls, but also because McCain now has to decide whether he can fight back without losing sight of the political ground rules he set for himself before he was a candidate.

The election is four weeks from today, and it’s not exactly a secret that McCain’s team is trying to pull out every bit of ammunition it can use to turn things around. That’s why they just remembered this weekend that Obama had some dealings with Bill Ayers, the former member of a militant Vietnam War protest group that was blamed for several bombings. In bringing up the episode on McCain’s behalf, Sarah Palin has even been citing a weekend story in The New York Times, McCain’s least-favorite paper.

Of course, the same story concluded that while Obama has “played down his contacts” with Ayers, “the two men do not appear to have been close.” Although Obama exaggerated McCain’s role in the “Keating Five” scandal — in his campaign’s instant response to the Ayers charges — it was nowhere near the level of exaggeration of suggesting that Obama was “palling around” with terrorists.

And then, when McCain turned back to the economy yesterday at a speech in Albuquerque, it was one of his angriest broadsides yet against Obama. “I guess he believes if a lie is big enough and repeated often enough it will be believed,” he said of Obama’s claims that he has opposed regulation that could have prevented the financial crisis. It’s undeniable that McCain has supported deregulation on most issues, but he argues that he had tried to regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac while Obama did nothing. Fair enough, though the record suggests that McCain did a lot less than he says he did.

Right now, McCain is undoubtedly under a lot of pressure from his campaign team and all of his supporters to pound Obama as hard as it takes to win the election. So it’s worth pondering how McCain, with the benefit of a bit more distance, described his own political fortunes before he began his current race for the presidency.

In 2006, I interviewed McCain shortly after he made amends with the Rev. Jerry Falwell, whom he had described in his 2000 campaign as an “agent of intolerance.” At the time, McCain looked back on that speech with regret, because he felt he had let his anger over hardball tactics in the South Carolina primary get the better of him. When he wasn’t under the pressure of a campaign, McCain knew that anger was not an attractive quality.

“I was angry. I mean, there’s no doubt about that,” McCain said. “It was a failing of mine to get angry, because an angry candidate isn’t a very good candidate.”

And McCain had learned a clear rule of thumb that seemed to leave him at peace with whatever political decisions he had to make: “When I do what’s right because I know that it’s right — and I’m not always sure on a number of issues — but when I know what the right thing to do is, and I do it, it always turns out fine. It always turns out fine. If I do something for political reasons, it always turns out badly.”

Over the next four weeks, McCain’s biggest challenge will be to listen to his own advice.