PRESCOTT, Ariz. — The striking thing about Sen. John McCain’s series of speeches this week was how often he apologized for or explained youthful indiscretions, his temper or his bad congressional votes.
On his “Service to America” tour, Mr. McCain repeatedly touted his military service and bipartisan credentials and talked about the heroes who shaped his personal life and politics.
But it could just as easily have been called the “imperfect public servant” tour — words he used to describe himself to students at his former high school on day two of the tour — as he found himself apologizing for not always living up to what those heroes expected:
• At Episcopal High School in Alexandria and again at the U.S. Naval Academy, Mr. McCain acknowledged “all-too-evident flaws,” including a surfeit of pride that caused him to rebel against both schools’ discipline systems, leaving him with more demerits than academic accomplishments.
• In Pensacola, Fla., where he was stationed after graduating from the academy, he said he was a “rather callow, conceited and [an] often stupid” fellow, with a self-centered idea about his military duty, in his early Navy days.
• On Friday, he acknowledged a bigger public failing, saying he was wrong to have voted in the 1980s against establishing a federal holiday for Martin Luther King: “We can all be a little late sometimes in doing the right thing,” Mr. McCain said, drawing some boos from his audience, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
• On Saturday, he told his home-state supporters he was too green when he first ran for Congress, and in his two terms in the House, he developed “the reputation of an often confrontational partisan.”
Coming at the end of two terms from President Bush, who almost never admits to an error in judgment or action, Mr. McCain’s public introspection was startlingly frank.
“All lives are a struggle against selfishness. All my life I’ve stood a little apart from institutions that I had willingly joined,” Mr. McCain said, explaining his back-and-forth relationships with authority.
In his times of failure, Mr. McCain almost always also found redemption — usually with the help of one of his heroes. In the case of his high school antics, he met a teacher who, he said, changed him; in Congress, it was Rep. Morris Udall, Arizona Democrat, who he said took him under his wing and showed him how bipartisanship worked.
As if to prove his education hadn’t been a total loss, Mr. McCain trotted out G.K. Chesterton and Frederick Jackson Turner to examine the country’s soul, and W.B. Yeats to explain his own.
In some ways, the series of speeches was as much about inoculation — tackling tough issues early before Democrats had a chance to shape what he says were youthful character flaws into a narrative about his presidential campaign.
If that was the goal, it’s already paid off. On Friday, one of Democratic Sen. Barack Obama’s supporters, liberal radio talk-show host Ed Schultz, who was warming up a North Dakota Democratic Party crowd, called Mr. McCain a “warmonger.” The presumed Republican nominee called for Mr. Obama to distance himself, and the Illinois senator promptly did so.
Democrats said the speeches were defined more by what they lacked — any deep discussion of his time as senator — than what they covered.
“It’s easy to see why John McCain would want to reinvent himself for the general election by glossing over his quarter-century in Congress,” said Democratic National Committee spokesman Damien LaVera.
“But focusing on his days as a schoolboy can’t change the fact that the future he promises for America is four more years of President Bush’s failed economy and a willingness to keep our troops in Iraq for 100 years,” he said.
In the seven speeches, Mr. McCain talked about his congressional voting record only once, during his apology for the King holiday vote. He mentioned his service in Vietnam on three occasions, talked twice about his views on tax policy, and twice called for victory in the battle with Islamic radicalism.
Left out of Mr. McCain’s remarks was any reference to one of his greatest public blunders, his association with disgraced financier Charles Keating, which earned him a reprimand from the Senate and put him on track for possibly his best-known accomplishment, overhauling campaign-finance laws.
The speeches took Mr. McCain from Arizona to Florida with stops in Tennessee and Mississippi, as well as the Washington, D.C., area.
Mr. McCain yesterday told “Fox News Sunday” he expects his campaign will try to tap voters in many places where Republicans have traditionally not done well.
“We need to go all over America, and not just the specific places you’re talking about, but compete hard in every section of the country,” Mr. McCain told host Chris Wallace, saying that’s the only way to compete for the increasingly important independent voter.
The question is whether his mea culpas will let him take the high ground for the rest of the campaign.
He seemed to try to settle that early in the week, answering questions from students at his posh former high school. He told them they have been given a moral compass, thanks to the school’s honor code, and that this helped him refuse his North Vietnamese captors when they wanted him to make a propaganda tape.
Even though they told him it would just be his voice, and he would be anonymous, he told them he wouldn’t do it.
“There are many times when you will be tempted, or someone will tempt you to do something, and no one will know. The problem, if you have been imbued with the honor code, is that you will” know, he said.
He then hastened to tell the students: “I have been a very imperfect, very imperfect public servant.”
“The moral of the story is … when you make a mistake, and you do something you know in retrospect is not right, that you never make that mistake again,” he said.
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