McCain gets by with a little help from his Senate friends

The night before Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) won the New Hampshire primary, Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-Maine) was on hand in Portsmouth, urging voters to support her Senate colleague.

After the rally, an independent voter approached Snowe and told her that “to hear you say that he could unite the country” had swayed her toward McCain, whose New Hampshire victory resurrected his presidential hopes.

{mosads}More than any other candidate, McCain has relied on a nucleus of Senate supporters to propel his White House run.

Spanning the ideological spectrum, they have aided his back-from-the-dead resurgence, bestowing legitimacy onto a campaign that was in tatters only six months ago.

A long career in the Senate rarely pays political dividends. A trail of votes leaves senators who pursue their presidential ambitions open to charges that they are part of the problem in Washington, not the solution. Only two men — Warren Harding and John Kennedy — have ever vaulted straight from the Senate to the White House.

But McCain has turned a liability into an asset, enlisting his Senate friends to smooth the rough edges of his candidacy and sell him to voters. These colleagues buoyed him when he was languishing. On the campaign trail, they offer personal testimony, with an air of Senate gravitas, to bolster McCain’s argument that he can both work with Washington and change it.

In the case of Sen. Joe Lieberman (Conn.), the Democrat-turned-Independent, the campaign rolled out his endorsement just weeks ahead of the primary in New Hampshire, where it probably helped win over the state’s many independents.

McCain’s Senate champions have also vouched for a man whose conservative credentials are questioned by many Republicans. Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), who endorsed McCain after dropping his own presidential bid, called McCain a “solid pro-life guy” in Iowa.

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), another prominent abortion foe and a tough critic of pork-barrel spending, announced his support for McCain days before the South Carolina primary.

McCain’s Senate colleagues may have pushed McCain over the top in that contest, which he won narrowly on Saturday.

Many have seen the Palmetto State as the proving ground for the eventual GOP nominee.

Along with Coburn and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), former Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Texas) — an icon of supply-side economics — and former Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.) attested to McCain’s conservative bona fides in the state.

Having such “dyed-in-the-wool conservatives” stump for McCain probably was decisive in the margin of victory in South Carolina, concluded Sam Geduldig, a lobbyist for Clark, Lytle & Geduldig and a former House political aide who is supporting the campaign.

“The fact that they represent those issues so clearly gives conservatives comfort that Sen. McCain is going to pursue conservative policies,” agreed Frank Donatelli, an adviser to the McCain campaign who worked in the Reagan White House.

Most recently, McCain has been courting the endorsement of Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.), who says he may back a candidate ahead of Florida’s Jan. 29 primary. Unlike his rivals, McCain boasts a close working relationship with the former Republican National Committee chairman after the two helped to craft a controversial bipartisan deal on immigration reform last summer.

For most of his 12 Senate backers, endorsing McCain has been no casual commitment.

Lacking money and staff, the Arizona Republican has leaned heavily on his Senate friends to stand in for him at far-flung events, to offer their Rolodexes to his fundraising effort, and even to assist in the hard slog of the overstretched campaign.

McCain is well aware of the curveballs that campaigns can throw their Senate surrogates, having performed the role for former Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.) when he ran for president in 1996.

On the day of the Iowa caucuses, Kyl and Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) found themselves phone-banking voters from the campaign’s Des Moines office.

Graham spent long hours aboard the Straight Talk Express, helping McCain banter with reporte­rs as they crisscrossed New Hampshire.

Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) was caught in a blinding snowstorm on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula en route to an event he was headlining for McCain last week.

According to Burr, McCain’s Senate supporters get their marching orders “just like any other volunteer that might hit the ground,” except that the senators “are a little more flexible” in the type of help they can provide the campaign.

The senators do not always relish being at the mercy of the campaign. Burr admitted relief after he escaped assignment for duty aboard the Straight Talk Express when he showed up to help in New Hampshire. “To be really honest with you, I didn’t oppose that,” he said.

In a phone interview as the Michigan blizzard whirled around him, Thune acknowledged — when prompted — that he did not quite know what he was getting into when he endorsed McCain early last year. “No, not exactly. I didn’t know what that would all entail at the time,” he said.

Despite the hardship of the campaign trail, the senators have been eager volunteers, according to John Green, a lobbyist for Ogilvy Public Relations who has overseen McCain’s congressional outreach. When the campaign sank into the doldrums this summer, he said, “A lot of them asked, ‘Can I do more?’ ” 

Dole’s 1996 campaign manager, Scott W. Reed, described McCain’s colleagues as the “backbone of his campaign” during that dark period.

However, he added that the senators are not driven only by friendship and altruism. “If every member of the U.S. Senate dreams of being president, this is a good opportunity for these folks to learn what it’s all about,” Reed said.