McCain thanks Senate ally with affectionate jabs
AIKEN, S.C. - When John McCain wants to flatter the officials who campaign with him, he is not conservative with praise. At a morning rally in Aiken on Thursday, McCain described state Attorney General Henry McMaster as "a dear friend and a great law enforcement man," called former vice presidential candidate Jack Kemp a "role model," and said Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma "stands for everything I would like to be."
Then McCain's attention turned to Senator Lindsey O. Graham, one of the few prominent South Carolina politicians who backed him eight years ago and today among his most tireless boosters anywhere in the country.
"As you know, the reason we lost the primary in 2000 is because of Lindsey Graham," McCain said. "He's been a millstone around my neck for many years."
McCain tends to show affection through ironic derision: He refers to his press corps as "little jerks" and "Trotskyites," his aides as either drunks or refugees from a "work-release program," and is happy to privately deliver cutting impressions of his Senate colleagues for their stentorian tics or insecure ways.
But no one in McCain's orbit seems to receive as much unsenatorial disrespect as Graham, who has been at McCain side as an object of perpetual ridicule for years. Today's primary will put his South Carolina hype man to a test - although Graham is certain to receive all of McCain's blame for a loss here and none of the credit for a win.
"He's good friends with a lot of them, but it's special with Lindsey," said Cindy McCain, the candidate's wife. "He enjoys his company, his sense of humor, his brilliance. It's almost brotherly."
In Aiken, when McCain, 71, turned to sincere praise for the 52-year-old Graham - lauding the high profile his colleague has in the national media for a freshman senator - he slipped with a Freudian ease hinting at an affection even more tender.
"It's not an accident when you pick up newspapers and magazines you see Cindy - I mean Lindsey," McCain said.
"Being a political wife you get used to all kinds of stuff," Cindy McCain said about the unusual attention her husband lavishes on Graham, who seems to be continually calling the candidate's gold RAZR cellphone - calls McCain acknowledges with either "Lindsey boy!" or "Hello, Lindsey, my boy!" or "Oh, it's just Lindsey."
The two met working together on campaign finance legislation shortly after Graham came to Congress in the 1990s. When McCain made the rounds lining up support for a presidential campaign in 2000, Graham - along with his colleague Mark Sanford, now governor - was one of the few elected officials in the state to sign on.
In 2002, Graham, a lawyer serving in the Air Force Reserves, was elected to the Senate and has been a close ally of McCain's on military issues, especially involving the handling of detainees.
"They've gotten closer in the Senate, they've fought the same battles, and they travel a lot together," said adviser Mark Salter.
"Every hot spot and war zone," Graham said, "and I'm dumb enough to go with him."
Their adventures have spawned a whole subgenre of McCain anecdote, in which Graham the rube - whose favorite Italian restaurant, McCain never fails to note, is the Olive Garden - finds himself in a distant land and embarrasses his patient mentor with his clumsiness.
There was the time Graham took the sleeping pill Ambien with just a few hours left on a trans-Atlantic flight only to jar himself awake before the unfriendly despot of "some foreign place" - as he groups all their destinations - and the occasion he broke the reflective silence on a visit to Senator John Sununu's family grave in Beirut by describing the simple tombstone as "frugal."
"If there's an article in the paper about some meltdown or massacre, we're there next week," Graham said on a recent bus ride through South Carolina. "We went to YOU-bek-istan."
"UZ-bek-istan," McCain corrected disapprovingly.
"Whatever," Graham said. "It's just another dictator he beats the hell out of."
It was on a trip the two took to Iraq on July 4, when McCain's candidacy appeared hopeless in part because of his support for the war, that meetings with troops inspired McCain to go on.
"We can't give up on that," McCain told Graham on their return flight. "Too much at stake."
Graham is now South Carolina's senior senator and chairman of McCain's campaign in the state - where McCain is supported by much of the Republican establishment that opposed him last time.
Graham fits the profile of a potential McCain running mate, but these days McCain seems less interested in what his friend would bring to a ticket than what he is already taking away from it. McCain blames Graham for just about everything that has gone wrong for him, from his fourth-place finish in the Iowa caucuses - the result of a Graham comment to Iowa voters on a campaign trip - to a mild illness picked up in Michigan.
"I think it's the second cold I've gotten in the last two months, but we all know why we get them," McCain said the other day. "Being around Lindsey, who has several communicable diseases, some of which bear no known cure." 