2006 - America : In a big election year, with the president on the ropes and the right at war with itself, one man can save the Republicans, and he is a maverick Vietnam hero aged 69
George W Bush's ratings are at an all-time low. The Republicans, beset not only by Bush and Dick Cheney but by corruption scandals that will get far worse in 2006, are more divided than ever. Midterm elections coming up on 7 November, with all the House, a third of the Senate and 36 governorships up for grabs, will be the nation's most definitive verdict yet on Bush and his administration. Can anyone, other than the almost equally divided and feckless Democrats, rescue the Republicans from political annihilation in 2006?
The answer, I suspect, is yes. What the Republicans desperately need in the coming months is a populist and popular figure who can start healing the wounds inflicted by Bush and Cheney on both the nation and the party. Step forward John McCain, the 69-year-old political maverick who I predict will be the crucial figure in US party politics over the next year at the very least. He has repeatedly said he has made no decision to run for the presidency in 2008, but I can reveal that, though he would be three years older than Ronald Reagan was at the same stage, he is already planning the assault that he hopes will lead him to the White House.
Had it not been for the diabolical tricks of Karl Rove, indeed, McCain might already be there. His campaign in the 2000 Republican primaries came so close to upsetting the Bush bandwagon that Bush's smear machine started spreading a series of vicious, false rumours to halt McCain's momentum: that he had fathered a black child; that he had given his wife a sexually transmitted disease which led to her becoming a drug addict; that he was mentally unstable as a result of his time as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. McCain duly lost the South Carolina primary, and the rest is history.
Initially, McCain then became a divisive figure on the right. He hated Bush and was at first seen by most Republicans as a threat to what was supposed to be the new era of a principled Bush presidency. He was even called a Rino, a Republican In Name Only. But after Bush's annus horribilis, Republicans (and quite a few Democrats, too) are turning back to McCain in droves. The more Bush is seen as a loser who is not nearly as principled as he claimed, the more McCain looks like the one zealous reformer perhaps capable of cleaning out Bush's Augean stables.
Politically he is an enigma: a consummate Washington insider who cultivates the image of an outsider; a man often to the right even of Bush who is loved by many on the left. He wants to increase the number of troops in Iraq (a position now taken by only 7 per cent of the population) but says he has "no confidence" in Donald Rumsfeld or the way the war is being run; he has also just fought to outlaw "cruel, inhuman and degrading" treatment of prisoners. He has tried to smash big tobacco and has co-operated with the likes of Ted Kennedy on liberalising immigration and tightening campaign finance laws; but otherwise he is a Reaganite hawk who scores a 100 per cent rating with the far-right Eagle Forum.
More than anything, though, he revels in the image of a straight talker. His political action committee is even called "Straight Talk America", which was the name of his 2000 campaign bus. And therein lies the reason for McCain's dramatic resurgence: increasing numbers of Americans believe that Bush and Cheney have not been telling them the truth over Iraq, and McCain is reaping the benefit. However maverick he may be politically, polls show that voters across the spectrum see McCain as a straight shooter. In a climate of corruption and mistrust, that is a very powerful card indeed.
So McCain is now capitalising on that sainthood image and, having run his 2000 campaign at least partly against the Republican establishment's money-raisers and lobbyists, is wooing the ever-growing band of Bush deserters. He held his nose (in the words of one mutual friend) and attended no fewer than 20 campaign events with Bush in the presidential elections of 2004, even ostentatiously sitting in the audience for one of the Bush v Kerry debates despite being a personal friend of Kerry - characteristically, his friendships cross party lines.
He has a stunningly helpful personal background, too. Meeting him for the first time, I was struck not only by his shortness - he is a little over 5ft 7ins - but also by how tattered and battered he seemed. I did not know at the time that there was an excellent explanation: he cannot raise his arms as high as his head, and so is unable even to comb his hair. The reason is that, as a 31-year-old pilot in the Vietnam war, his A-4E Skyhawk was shot down over Hanoi. Both arms were broken, the right in three places, and a knee smashed. His Vietcong captors took him to the Hoa Lo prison, the so-called Hanoi Hilton, and beat him repeatedly; they were leaving him to die in his own excrement when they discovered that both his father and grandfather had been distinguished US admirals. That made the young POW a potential propaganda weapon if he could be seen to have turned.
McCain told me how ropes were tied to his untreated broken arms and how he was then suspended by them; he survived such torture for 31 days but, in the end, reached his breaking point and signed a "confession" in Vietnamese. To this day he does not know what he actually confessed to, but told me he believes he failed his country because "there's still a piece of paper somewhere in Hanoi that says I confess to being a war criminal". He was held in solitary confinement for a further 31 months and spent five and a half years in total as a prisoner of war.
You would not think that the latest generation of Karl Roves could somehow stoop to use all this to discredit McCain. But after he introduced his anti-torture amendment saying that "torture does not work", enemies on the right crowed that he had personally demonstrated that it does. And they continue to whisper that his exterior of affability and charm masks a terrible private temper, all because of demons he acquired in the Hanoi Hilton.
Such is the ferocity of life on the right these days. Indeed, that McCain is perceived as a moderate shows just how far to the right America has swerved. But he is now the nearest the Republicans have to a rock star and is receiving far more invitations to campaign for other candidates in the midterm elections than anybody else, leaving Bush and Cheney far behind. He rushes from appearance to appearance, hosting Saturday Night Live and appearing on cult television programmes with young audiences such as The Daily Show With Jon Stewart.
McCain's age is against him, he has had three serious bouts with skin cancer and his private life before his present marriage was highly exuberant, but polls by the Marist Institute show that he is the Republican most likely to beat Hillary Clinton in 2008. Last month alone, Straight Talk America took in more than a million dollars. The momentum is with him, and the Republicans desperately need rescuing in 2006. Need I say more?
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