The award for hardest tire swinging ever goes to the LA Times‘ Maeve Reston, who today dreamily relives her time on the Straight Talk Express as if she were Streisand to McCain’s Redford.
I hate to excerpt any of it because you really should read the whole thing, but it’s just too perfect. Reston, on the way they were:
By July, I had covered McCain for almost seven months. I could recite many lines of his stump speech by heart, dreamed about his events at night and spent so much time scrolling through campaign e-mails on my BlackBerry that my fiance joked to our friends about the other man in my life.
Over those months, McCain had artfully created a sense of intimacy with the reporters who traveled with him. He barbecued for us at his Arizona cabin, and opened up about matters as personal as his faith and his son’s girlfriends. On one of my first days covering McCain, another reporter protectively warned me that it was important to be judicious with the material I used from McCain’s bus rides to keep the conversations in context. …
Later that summer, the frequency of McCain’s news conferences dwindled to late-afternoon, end-of-the-week affairs where he began calling more often on reporters he didn’t know.
We now watched from afar at most events — listening for the few sentences that would change each day in his stump speech. We would catch glimpses of him through the window of his SUV from five cars back in the motorcade or watch him get off the plane.
At the height of vice presidential speculation, we rushed the staff cabin of the plane, frustrated that no one was around to address the rumors.
“What do you want, you little jerks?” McCain said, using his former term of affection, before turning away.
On a recent Sunday during a brief stop at a Virginia phone bank, I got unusually close to McCain in the line of people waiting to shake his hand.
Tape recorder out and within a foot of him, I asked if he could talk about his new economic plan, which he was to unveil that week. The man who once asked me about my wedding date returned my gaze with a stare, shook the hand of the strangers to the right and left of me and continued out the door.
Hankie anyone?
