The McCain Makeover

Such is the case when McCain pays a visit to "The Daily Show With Jon Stewart" a few weeks later. McCain's almost a regular here, and Stewart usually treats him like he's Abraham Lincoln without the whiskers and the stovepipe hat. But tonight Stewart badgers McCain about Bush's claim that he has made the world a safer place. "My question to you is simply this: How much safer can the world afford to have him make us?"

McCain rolls his eyes. He makes a joke about calling in his lawyers. He hems and haws to the point where Stewart pleads, "Don't dodge the question!" But McCain continues to do exactly that. Finally, Stewart relents. "We're gonna come back and talk about other things," he says at the break.

"Thank God," says McCain.

DON'T LOOK NOW, but 26 months before November 2008 the race for president has already started. McCain and his potential rivals are out on the campaign trail virtually every week. They are raising money and support for federal and state candidates in the 2006 election. But they are also collecting chits, building name recognition and garnering backers for the presidential campaign to come.

"Teddy White must be turning over in his grave," says John Weaver, McCain's chief campaign strategist, referring to the late author of The Making of the President books. "I can't believe we're doing this so early."

But doing it they are. And no one more assiduously, nor with more apparent success, than McCain, who has vaulted to the front of the GOP field. Early polls indicate he gets twice as much support as any other likely Republican candidate except Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City, who runs close behind. Even in liberal, blue-state strongholds such as Massachusetts, McCain runs even with or better than the two most recognizable Democratic names, Hillary Clinton and Al Gore. As a former Navy pilot who was shot down over Hanoi and spent more than five years as a prisoner of war, he's got impeccable military credentials and stature, and a reputation for bipartisanship and fierce independence that appeals to a broad spectrum of voters. He's also got star power: Turn on your television most days, and you'll find McCain on one of the morning talkfests or on "Larry King Live," "Imus" or "Hannity and Colmes."

Many of the Republican professionals who once wrote off McCain as the loosest of political cannons say they are surprised and impressed at the careful, disciplined way he and his staff have gone about establishing his as yet undeclared candidacy. He is laboring hard to become the presumptive candidate for a party that almost always nominates the presumptive candidate.

"He's very much where George W. Bush was in 1998 and '99 -- getting his team established, trying to create that same air of inevitability that Karl Rove tried to create around Bush," says Saul Anuzis, chairman of Michigan's Republican Party, referring to Bush's political Rasputin.

Still, there are many rivers to cross before November 2008. McCain has to vanquish a formidable cast of possible Republican opponents, which could include Sens. George Allen (Va.), Sam Brownback (Kan.), Bill Frist (Tenn.) and Chuck Hagel (Neb.), along with Newt Gingrich, Giuliani and Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. He also faces a host of enemies among Republican interest groups and social conservatives who have not forgiven or forgotten his run as an iconoclastic insurgent in 2000 and who dislike some of the positions he currently holds on litmus-test issues such as the gay marriage amendment (he's against it) and stem cell research (he's for it).

To succeed, McCain must perform the old political two-step: Capture conservative Republican loyalists who dominate the party's nominating process; then, once nominated, swing back to the center to attract independents and moderate Democrats. It's an especially tricky task for a politician who has always cast himself as a man of unvarnished principles and straight talk.

McCain concedes he's being more careful with his rhetoric and off-the-cuff comments. Which is why he looked so uncomfortable with Jon Stewart: "I don't want to say anything that I'm going to be hearing about for the next couple of years."

Otherwise, he insists, nothing's changed -- except perhaps the perceptions of some analysts. "Some on the liberal side say, 'Ah, McCain's not the maverick that we thought he was. Oh my God, he supports the war in Iraq! How could he!' And some of my friends on the right say, 'Well, he voted against the marriage amendment,'" which would ban gay marriage.