Quotes of the Day

In early 2007, John McCain sat down to breakfast at a back table in the Senate Dining Room with Ken Duberstein, Ronald Reagan's last White House chief of staff and one of the few big-name Republicans to have supported McCain rather than George W. Bush in 2000. It stood to reason that the fabled Washington wise man would back McCain again. Instead, Duberstein said he was troubled by McCain's efforts to ingratiate himself with the conservative wing of their party. He cited a fence-mending commencement address McCain had given at the Rev. Jerry Falwell's Liberty University and his hawkish stand on the war in Iraq. "I told John the right wing never wants to be satisfied; they're professional whiners," Duberstein remembers now. "They are never happy. So don't kill yourself trying. They will never trust you, no matter what you do for them. John looked at me like I didn't understand. He said, 'Don't worry. People know who I am.' " (See pictures of John McCain's campaign farewell.)

McCain can no longer make that claim. A politician who enjoyed a shiny reputation as a maverick with broad appeal has squandered it in the course of winning the nomination and then trying to hold together a Republican coalition that has been on life support for years. Because of the brutish tone of his campaign and the generally spiteful mood inside the Republican Party, McCain faces a period of uncertain length in the wilderness, abandoned by former admirers on the right and the left. And so his latest test of character awaits: How does he overcome this defeat and retake his place as one of his party's best legislators? (See pictures of John McCain's final push on the campaign trail.)

He'd do well to consider how he got here. When he set out to run for President a second time, McCain and his top advisers decided they had to gamble with his most precious political asset: his brand. Team McCain was convinced that to capture the GOP nomination, its man had to prove himself a real Republican in every way. And so it made a bet: the McCain brand was so well established in the public's mind that he had plenty of latitude to woo suspicious conservatives without damaging his reputation as a straight-talking, independent maverick. Or so Team McCain believed. "Americans know John McCain," Mark Salter, the Senator's closest adviser, assured me back in the spring of 2007. "They know his record. They know he's not George Bush. That [charge] is just not gonna stick."

But stick it did, in part because McCain worked so hard initially to align himself with the White House. In order to win the GOP nomination, McCain embraced tax cuts he had once opposed, promised to appoint activist conservative jurists to the Supreme Court to advance social causes he had never cared much about and boasted of his support for the agenda of a President he had once famously loathed. McCain played down the risk he was running. "I've already been accused of changing," McCain told me at the start of his campaign. "I haven't. I'm the same. Everything will be the same."

And yet McCain's swing to the right during the primaries still wasn't enough to win over many conservatives. That forced him to pursue a strategy during the general election that put galvanizing the Republican base ahead of inspiring centrist swing voters. By selecting as his running mate Sarah Palin, an inexperienced favorite of conservatives, over alternatives who would have appealed to independents, McCain not only missed a chance to win over those voters but also undermined his greatest advantage over Barack Obama — his deep record on national security. At a critical moment, McCain simply gave the experience card away. (See pictures of Barack Obama's campaign behind the scenes.)

Finally, the candidate who had promised a civil and elevated debate wound up waging a reckless, spaghetti-on-the-wall character assault — Obama's a vacuous celebrity! A dangerous naif! A friend to terrorists! A closet socialist! — against an opponent whose preternatural poise made McCain's every charge seem desperate. He convinced himself that Obama was dishonorable and unqualified and was persuaded by his aides to believe that the only way to win was to make the Democrat seem unacceptable to voters. As a result, McCain reaped the worst of all worlds: voters saw McCain as both a Bush clone and a Karl Rove disciple, a purveyor of failed policies and a practitioner of stale politics. And a little frantic to boot.

Given the twin burdens he bore of a dismally unpopular incumbent Republican President and an already staggering economy that fell off a cliff in October, it is possible that McCain never had a chance. For all his cred as a maverick, McCain built that reputation on issues like tobacco, campaign finance, pork-barrel spending, immigration and torture, all of which were peripheral to the general-election debate. Meanwhile, on problems that worried voters most — the economy, health care, jobs — neither McCain's record in the past nor his proposals for the future were distinguishable from the standard Republican fare promoted by President Bush for the previous eight years. That McCain may have lost an unwinnable race won't stop Republicans or reporters from blaming him anyway. Much as Duberstein warned, some conservatives will try to toss McCain over the side, reminding us that he was never their choice, despite all he did to win their support. They will argue that McCain's problem was not that he veered too far to the right but that he started off too close to the center. (Duberstein endorsed Obama four days before the election.)

As the campaign closed, a common fantasy among some of McCain's old associates went like this: the old bomber pilot would pull back on the stick before Election Day, right his wobbly plane and mount a clean push for victory. Instead, McCain just corkscrewed into the ground. And so it will be important to see what lessons McCain learns from his campaign and what role he plays as a member of a shrunken minority in Congress. Will he harbor bitter memories of his defeat and the poor treatment he feels he received from his old friends in the national media? Or will he revert to past form and become an accessible gadfly and bipartisan dealmaker?

After his loss to Bush in 2000, McCain became the go-to Republican for Democrats looking for a partner on a big piece of legislation. He joked about sleeping like a baby after losing (i.e., waking up and crying in the middle of the night), but he dealt with defeat and his new prominence by pouring his energy into his work on Capitol Hill. "I think you'll see a lot of straight talk from him right away," says veteran GOP consultant Scott Reed. "He'll be the first to criticize what he really didn't like about the campaign and its tactics." Besides, at 72 and free from the yoke of a campaign, McCain doesn't have to worry about making anyone happy. He is not temperamentally suited to stasis; he would probably not find fulfillment in constantly blocking Democratic legislation as a member of the implacable opposition. He could, instead, follow his instinct for action and compromise by forging deals across the aisle — on energy, the environment, even health care and regulation of the financial markets. And he could prove a valuable source of insight on national-security matters for the new young Democrat in the White House, provided Obama is willing to listen.

"I think McCain's best years are ahead of him," says Mark McKinnon, who was McCain's chief admaker and a top adviser until June, when he dropped out of the campaign because he didn't want to participate in attacking Obama. "He'll put it all behind him quickly. He'll say the challenges the country faces are greater than any burden he carries from the campaign. And then he can help President Obama get important things done."

"If he does that," McKinnon says of McCain, "he'll put new meaning in the words 'country first.' "

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• James Carney