On a Friday morning last July, Senator John McCain packed a carry-on bag, boarded a cheap flight out of Baltimore and traveled alone to New Hampshire.His campaign had just burned through $24 million and had nearly gone broke. His sunny comments about progress in Iraq had made him a target of derision. His calls for loosening immigration rules had outraged grass-roots conservatives. So when McCain spoke at a campaign event in Concord that afternoon he might have been the only one in the room who thought he could salvage his candidacy. “Everybody came that day to see the dead man walk,” recalled Fergus Cullen, the chairman of the New Hampshire Republican Party.McCain’s big victories on Tuesday night, which gave him a commanding lead in the race for his party’s nomination, represented one of the most remarkable resurrection stories in recent American politics. How it happened has as much to do with events beyond McCain’s control.But McCain was also helped by factors that defied conventional wisdom. His support for an overhaul of immigration law rallied Hispanic Republicans pivotal to his success in Florida. A critical factor in his comeback was his campaign’s decision to pour almost all of its scarce resources into trying to make an early splash in New Hampshire.Finally, McCain’s campaign could not have recovered without a last-ditch $3 million loan last fall, when the candidate, who is 71, put up as collateral his campaign mailing list, the principal asset of his political future, and took out a life insurance policy to assure the bankers that they would be paid, even if he died.McCain officially kicked off his campaign on April 25 last year. Although he had expected to raise $100 million by the end of 2007, McCain’s positions on the war and immigration turned off the small donors who had been his mainstay in his 2000 presidential race. The troubles exploded on July 10, when the campaign announced, at the very moment that McCain stood on the Senate floor opposing a withdrawal from Iraq, that his top two political aides, John Weaver and Nelson, were departing. Speculation raced through both parties that McCain would soon withdraw from the race.But three days later, McCain got off a Southwest Airlines flight in Manchester and began the long climb back up. By November, polls showed that the public had begun to feel less negative about Iraq, where violence had declined. At the same time, his closest rival for the nomination, Giuliani, began to fade after critical news reports about his years as mayor of New York City, and soon decided to pull out of New Hampshire entirely.“The rise of McCain is tied to the decline of Giuliani,” said Andrew Kohut, a pollster and the president of the Pew Research Center. Last week, propelled once again by momentum and money that was at last rolling in, McCain won Florida with big support from Cuban-Americans. This week, as he grew more confident of winning, the maverick who had long defied and exasperated his party began promoting himself as a true conservative who could unify Republicans for the fight in November.
