Word: mccain
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...John McCain was not quite 2 years old when his parents despaired of managing his tantrums; he would go into a "mad frenzy," he says, holding his breath until he passed out and fell to the floor. A Navy doctor offered a prescription: whenever McCain erupted, his mother would shout to his father, "Get the water!" Then his parents would fill a bathtub with cold water and drop their fully clothed son in. "Eventually," McCain recalls in his memoirs, "I achieved a satisfactory (if only temporary) control over my emotions...
Those watery tales have now grown into full-blown clichés. Obama is aloof, self-possessed, cool under fire; McCain is passionate, impetuous, hot under the collar. Each one makes a virtue of his temperament as the right setting for the current climate. Americans, McCain says, "expect me to get angry, and I will get angry, because I won't stand for corruption." His impulsive intervention in the bailout negotiations suited his narrative as an action hero: Suspend the campaign! Postpone the debates! His message is practical, real world, get it done; someone around here has to know when...
...some veterans of Arizona politics paint a more complicated picture of McCain than as just a crusader against corruption. They talk of bullying and intimidation, of meetings when he banged the table so hard they feared it would split. In one case, recalls former Arizona Senator Dennis DeConcini, when he refused to fire an aide who had annoyed McCain, "to put it politely, he told me that I could go do something with myself." DeConcini, a Democrat, says that "in my eight years with him, I learned that John just hates it when you disagree with him. If you press...
Warner first encountered McCain in 1973 when he was serving as Secretary of the Navy and read the intelligence reports on the young POW. They soon became friends and eventually Senate colleagues on the Armed Services Committee, often working in closed-door sessions where members would not need to moderate their passions for public consumption. "I have not, in all those years, ever witnessed any moment when he wasn't in complete control over what he was saying and doing," says Warner. Several other politicians even suggest that McCain's outbursts are not irrational but calculated for effect, to help...
...McCain used the market meltdown to advertise boldness, Obama used it to show steadiness. "Presidents are going to have to deal with more than one thing at a time," he said, dismissing McCain's back-to-Washington gambit as an inability to multitask. Since he hasn't nearly as much experience handling a crisis as McCain does, he's used his campaign itself as a stand-in, one long test of nerves. He resisted calls to take a hatchet to Hillary Clinton a year ago; as McCain gained ground in September, Democrats demanded that Obama get hotter and meaner...