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And then he showed me that he was a mere mortal.

In Tuesday, in response to a question about what he would do if he were president in the aftermath of the Columbine High School shootings, McCain told me, "It's obvious that at a gun show people should be subject to background checks. I don't get it why in stores you get a background check, but you go three blocks down, there's no background checks."

There's a loophole in the existing gun control laws, I noted, because the gun lobby argued successfully to exempt gun shows.

"Well, it should be closed," McCain responded.

But a day later, on Wednesday, McCain voted to kill an amendment from Sen. Frank Lautenberg that would have closed that very loophole. The largely party-line vote was 51-47. Six Republicans voted for the measure. McCain was not among them. This after reports that the four guns used in the Columbine killings had been purchased at gun shows. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., complained, "It's like the NRA lives in here."

And then, a day after that, McCain changed his mind again, and signaled he'd support legislation to close the loophole; in fact, he might even draft it. Stay tuned, because the battle won't be over until the last vote is counted.

McCain's 48-hour flip-flop ain't no big thing for most politicians. But it must be said that McCain is supposed to be more than just a politician. John Sidney McCain III has been wooing congregants into the church of his courage and charisma from the moment he burst onto the American landscape as an unfathomably brave returning POW in 1973.

He first ran for Congress in 1982, and won a Senate seat just four years later, all the while garnering supporters and detractors with outspoken, often counterintuitive views on high-profile subjects. He's gone after government waste, fought to reform campaign finance laws, pursued big tobacco and lately, as his friend, Sen. Gordon Smith, R-Ore., says, he's been "the only one who was acting presidential in the middle of Kosovo."

Add it all up, throw in a presidential candidacy and you have grown men falling at his feet as if he were Gwyneth Paltrow in a sundress.

"He wants to clean up campaign financing, and restore honor to the heart of politics," the normally acerbic Michael Lewis gushed for the New York Times Magazine. "A Maverick Takes on the Senate and Looks to 2000," headlined the regularly just-the-facts-ma'am National Journal. "John McCain Walks on Water," intoned Esquire. (Really.) This from the so-called liberal media, despite the fact that, on all but a handful of issues, McCain is politically about as conservative as they come -- pro-life, pro-impeachment, pro-gun, pro-GOP.

It's difficult to write about McCain without dealing with the gushing from the fourth estate. Media is as important to John McCain as is he to us. He loves the limelight, for one, but more importantly, it's an important element of his battle plan as he tries to emerge as a serious contender for the GOP nomination. As he explains it to me, his easy access to media will help him make up for the bigger bankroll of the front-runner, Texas Gov. George W. Bush. And then, once it becomes a two-man race, his credibility, experience and straight talk will do the rest. Especially if Bush stumbles, as many Republicans think he can't help but do.

But beyond his need for media, or journalists' need to see him as a hero -- or, conversely, a sham to demythologize -- McCain is a compelling figure. In the end, he's a flawed, complex man -- as he'll be the first one to tell you -- and that makes him almost irresistible, at least to reporters.

"I'm a very imperfect person," McCain says in an interview with Salon News. "I don't live up to my own expectations in my life in many ways," he adds. "There's an impatience that sometimes is harmful to me in my relationships. Sometimes I move from one issue to another too quickly. Sometimes I'm not as considerate of my staff and my family as I should be. I could catalog many failings that I have as a human being. But I do try to recognize them and I try to improve. But I will not always be as good a person as some of the people I've had the opportunity to have met."

This combination of humility and candor has served him well with a press corps fed on a steady diet of braggadocio and evasion. "There's something about John McCain that comes through that's hard to measure," says one of his campaign co-chairmen, former New Hampshire Sen. Warren Rudman. "There's a quality to him that's interesting. It's an earnestness. A directness. An intensity. I can't really explain what it is, but people like him. And I think that will carry him to victory if nothing else."

But McCain's a Rorshach test; you see in him what you want to see. To his Republican opponents in the House and Senate, he's a hot-headed, grandstanding opportunist, while his Democratic foes see him as an ultra right-wing wolf hiding beneath the pelt of a charismatic sheep. To his first wife, he was a philanderer; to veterans he is the exemplar of the American fighting man.

"The media has had a difficult time conveying the essence of the whole man," says Jeff Barker, Washington correspondent for the Arizona Republic. "The Arizona media focuses on how scrappy he is, and the national media focuses on how he seems to be above the fray. But I think it's a combination of genuine courage and good political instincts -- and it's hard to tell where one ends and the other begins."

But it's the members of his staff -- some of whom have worked for him for almost a generation -- who have it about right. They roll their eyes at his quirks, nudging each other knowingly, complaining about him like you might do about a parent. All the while they put in 14-hour days because at the bottom of it all they love not issues or a cause or an image, not any false concept of St. John McCain the Divine, but the man, just the man.

"I don't think he thinks of himself as a saint," says Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wisc., his partner on campaign finance reform. "I don't think he likes that kind of label. He's just out there trying to do the right thing."

Next page | Saint with a nasty temper