McCain battles on others' terms

John McCain held a town hall meeting in Peterborough, N.H., yesterday. He gave an impassioned speech and took questions. (Robyn Beck/ AFP/ Getty Images)

PETERBOROUGH, N.H. - In the closing days of the presidential race, Republican John McCain storms through the coda of his stump speech with passionate conviction: "Stand up, stand up, stand up and fight," McCain thunders, jutting his index fingers downward as his words drown under waves of applause. "America is worth fighting for."

McCain's search for meaning in combat inspired the title of his second memoir, "Worth the Fighting For," a term borrowed from Hemingway. In that 2002 book, McCain wrote that he sought out political missions that provoked "the right sort of enemy."

But McCain is fighting through his last days as a presidential contender on others' terms. Once the protagonist of his own heroic narrative, he now appears in the role of a supporting actor, at times seeming overwhelmed by historical forces and bigger characters - a scorned President Bush, the sudden financial crisis, the nation's first black presidential nominee, and McCain's own vice presidential choice.

Over the weekend, McCain trudged through hockey rinks, airport hangars, and a moving-truck loading dock, offering himself up as the safer choice for voters uneasy about Democratic nominee Barack Obama.

When McCain appears alongside his running mate, Sarah Palin, the unprovoked chants of "Sarah!" begin long before she takes the podium, and a small exodus of attendees usually starts before McCain gets there. And it often seems that the enthusiasm at his rallies comes from sentiments provoked by his rival. In Virginia on Saturday, a handmade sign just over McCain's shoulder declared "The Obamanation Stops Here."

Mark Salter, McCain's longtime aide who co-wrote his memoirs, acknowledges that the candidate has had to adjust to a race in which his own virtues - embodied in his life story - are no longer the core of his message.

"He has a sense of being a man in the story," said Salter. But "this is the environment in which he runs, because of things that are outside his control. The only thing to do is seize on something like 'Joe the Plumber' . . . to remind people that this is the most liberal person to be a party nominee."

Late in the race, McCain recast his campaign around the issue of taxes, and he made Joe Wurzelbacher a fiscal-policy oracle when the plumber and Obama disagreed at a rally about Obama's plan to "spread the wealth." After standing up McCain at a morning rally in Ohio on Thursday, Wurzelbacher made it to McCain's side later in the day, and the candidate praised him as "an American hero . . . and my role model."

At the end of his losing 2000 primary campaign, McCain said the experience had established a "McCain Majority," rich in support from Democrats and independents and ready to transcend the partisan divide he said had crippled American politics. But now, McCain is casting himself in more partisan terms, warning of one-party rule and stressing that he alone could serve as a counterbalance to a Democratic-led Congress.

"There's kind of a structure to American politics," Bill McInturff, McCain's pollster, said in a call with reporters on Friday. "As you look at polls, the most important thing to look at is party."

For the first time in his career, McCain's rallies thrum with ideological fervor from within his party's conservative base, but he seems to engender little curiosity outside it. Meanwhile, a number of prominent Republican moderates who were once among McCain's biggest boosters - led by Colin Powell - have endorsed Obama.

"Eight years ago, he had to work to get the Republicans on board because they were not so fond of John McCain," said Steve Duprey, a McCain friend who served as chairman of the New Hampshire Republican party in 2000. Now they're all here and he's reaching out to independents."

As a senator, McCain has always plucked issues from the margins - campaign finance, tobacco regulation, earmarks, immigration reform - trusting his charisma to assemble national constituencies and legislative coalitions around each.

Yet as his party's nominee, McCain has offered himself up not as a builder of new alliances but a one-man Republican roadblock against the excesses of "the old liberal left tax-and-spend" Democrats, as he put it on Saturday at a campaign stop. "We're running as a check-and-balance guy," said his key adviser, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.

McCain has to rely on such pragmatic arguments - and in the process reinforce partisanship - because he is hampered by the historical moment rather than empowered by it, aides acknowledge.

Graham, who joined McCain in defying many conservatives by supporting the immigration bill, recently indicated that McCain's inability to convince Hispanics of his independence from the party could cost him crucial western states he needs to win the election. "Wouldn't that be sad?" Graham asked.

After his pick of Palin, aides say McCain had begun to unmoor himself from Bush-era Republicanism, but that the financial troubles experienced in September jerked him back in place.

"If Lehman [Brothers] and the economy hadn't happened, we'd still be up seven [percentage points] and you wouldn't be asking these questions," Republican Senator Mel Martinez of Florida told reporters, wondering why McCain was struggling in traditionally Republican states.

His aides still believe they are making a coherent bid for the Republican base, and that their tax-and-spend depiction of Obama will pull aboard enough independent and centrist support to tip the election to McCain.

"Obama has more routes to 270 [electoral votes] than we have, and we're cognizant of it, but we have a route," said Salter. "There's no sense of: 'I'm going to wage a futile struggle.' That's a lot different than the end of the 2000 campaign."

That year, an outspent and outmatched McCain responded to the South Carolina primary loss that ultimately doomed his campaign by relying on his impulse for improvisation. Now he girds himself with ever more personal discipline and focus, repeating an almost identical stump speech daily. When given a script, McCain rarely diverts from it.

After a town hall meeting three weeks ago in Lakeville, Minn., when McCain was booed by supporters for telling them they should not be "scared" of Obama, his campaign stopped scheduling events at which McCain would take questions from the crowd. They made an exception last night in Peterborough, where he held a town hall forum and took questions on topics such as the financial crisis and immigration.

Months earlier, McCain's lead strategist, Steve Schmidt, had similarly prevailed upon McCain to jettison his "Straight Talk Express" bus sessions with the media he once celebrated as his "base."

"The lesson we've all learned is that a free-flowing exchange of ideas can also take us off-message," said Duprey. "He's probably on the phone with more different people over the course of a day than any candidate I've ever seen. That's what he does in lieu of hanging out with his former 'base.' "

Indeed, much of McCain's campaign - heavy on derision of Obama's star-powered idealism - explicitly repudiates the political style that made him such a distinctive national figure.

Before McCain appeared on stage at a Minnesota airport hangar in September, US Representative Michelle Bachmann mocked Obama for the self-awareness that led him to write two autobiographies, the same number that McCain has authored. "Because one wasn't enough?" she sneered.

When McCain's top political aides conferred by phone on Friday, they boasted that their candidate continued to maintain his advantage in polling over the unpopular "generic Republican." Yet they suggested that he had little choice but to close out his campaign by acting like one.

"Taxes and spending," campaign manager Rick Davis said. "There's nothing better to end a race on in New Hampshire."

Sasha Issenberg can be reached at sissenberg@globe.com.