The campaign had been long and arduous and now it was Election Day, 2008. It would not take long before it was clear there would be no miracle for Senator John McCain, the Republican nominee for president. He was going to lose to Senator Barack Obama of Illinois.
I had covered the McCain campaign for ABC News since September of the year before. It had been a thrilling, rollicking ride. Now, from the riser -- the elevated media platform -- behind the crowd that was gathered outside the Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix, I watched as the Senator took the stage.
"My friends, we have come to the end of a long journey," he said. "The American people have spoken, and they have spoken clearly. A little while ago, I had the honor of calling Senator Barack Obama to congratulate him on being elected the next president of the country we love."
There were scattered boos from the crowd. McCain silenced them with a stern look and a gesture.
"I urge all Americans who supported me to join me in not just congratulating him, but offering our next president our goodwill and earnest effort to find ways to come together, to find the necessary compromises, to bridge our differences and help restore our prosperity, defend our security in a dangerous world, and leave our children and grandchildren a stronger, better country than we inherited."
The booing was replaced by cheers and applause.
McCain's concession speech was elegant and gracious, so much so that 13 years later, clips of it would become somewhat of a viral sensation because of its stark contrast to the defiant outburst from another defeated candidate, President Trump, in the predawn hours following Election Day, 2020.
Salter, McCain and Joe Lieberman credit: Getty Images
Watching that speech again in 2021 is like traveling back in time to a different era and, in many ways, a different country. But while the message was McCain's -- to bury our differences and come together for the common good -- the words he spoke that night were penned by someone else, Mark Salter, McCain’s speechwriter, adviser, aide, confidante, co-author of seven books* and his friend.
McCain died three years ago, but Mark Salter, now 66, is very much alive and well, still writing and, although no longer a Senate staffer, still observing American politics. What he sees alarms him.
We spoke by phone several weeks ago. Salter, who was spending the summer at his house in Maine, is wise, experienced in the realpolitik of Washington and blunt spoken. He is also a keen student of history. So, I wanted to get his take on the current American political scene, the partisan schism in the country, and especially his view of a Republican Party that seems to have gone in a very direction from where it was in 2008 or 2012, when Mitt Romney was its standard bearer.
I had seen some of Salter's blistering commentaries on Trump on Twitter, so I asked him first if he's still a Republican.
"I haven't formally declared I'm not one," Salter said. "I voted Democratic the last two presidential elections. I think the Republican Party, I don't know if it's fixable, to be honest. I'd like to think it is. I don't know where center-right voters like me go. I just don't know. Right now, the Republican Party seems to be running on falsely claiming a stolen election, on falsely claiming the pandemic was fake and falsely claiming the vaccine is bad. As far as I can tell, that's the Republican Party platform right now."
Salter was harsh in his assessment of the portion of Trump voters who several times he called "dumb asses," at one point adding, "I'm being cruel calling them dumb asses but that's what some of them are." But he reserved his greatest scorn for the elected officials who he says know better.
"It's just a cynical thing," he told me. "The vast majority of Republican members of Congress know who the guy is and what he is, and they are just willing to go along with it or turn a blind eye to it or pledge fealty to it or defend it or mouth his (Trump's) talking points or at least not stand up to it because they think that's essential to their re-election and the party re-taking Congress."
He concedes that Congressional Republicans got a major tax bill passed and Trump stocked the federal courts with conservative judges, but, he says, at a high cost.
"Enormous damage is being done to this country even now by this guy," he said.
Like many Americans, Salter was appalled by the January 6 assault on the Capitol by a mob of enraged Trump supporters and by what he sees as many Americans willing to discard democratic norms that have lasted more than two centuries and had always seemed inviolable.
"There's a legitimate argument whether we're sort of seeing a genuine, fundamental weakening of democratic values and institutions in our country. That's an existential crisis," Salter said. "It's something we just took for granted. We're a democracy. We'll be a democracy until the sun burns out. But maybe not."
Salter at McCain campaign rally 2008 Credit: Getty Images
As Salter sees it, the Trump base of the GOP includes many genuinely disaffected citizens who were susceptible to the dark appeal of a demagogue.
"You drive out of my town (and) you see Trump-Pence signs still up six months after the election and you see a lot of poverty," he said. "There's a lot of hopelessness and despair in rural America and all Donald Trump will tell them is: it's not your fault. It's not your agency. You're not responsible for any of this. It's some Mexican's fault. It's Congress's fault. It's the Establishment's fault. It's the Deep State's fault. It's China's fault. It's everybody's fault but yours. That's how demagogues work."
McCain believed in the give and tug of bi-partisan legislative compromise as the path to progress. When he returned to the Senate in July 2017 after being told by doctors he had terminal brain cancer, McCain went to the Senate floor to plead for cooperation for the good of the nation.
"I hope we can again rely on humility, on our need to cooperate on our dependence on each other to learn how to trust each other again and by so doing better serve the people who elected us," McCain said, his words containing an oratorical flair that sounds distinctly Salterian. "Stop listening to the bombastic loudmouths on the radio and television and the Internet. To hell with them. They don't want anything done for the public good. Our incapacity is their livelihood. Let's trust each other."
The notion of the Democrats and Republicans working together to address the nation's many urgent problems seems quaint, even quixotic today.
Salter said, "To make a little progress on our problems in a roughly cooperative way is a magnificent achievement. That's the way it used to be. You used to form the closest relationships with the members of committees you served on. You would have cross-party relationships. You would work on problems together, disagree on most of it, but would agree on some of it and you'd get something done at the end of the day. Once in a while, when an issue was really ripe, you might get big sweeping change. But mostly you made just modest progress on the problems of your time, which is really enough, you know? We don't do that anymore."
I have been especially shocked by the startling political metamorphosis of Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, one of McCain's closest friends. Graham has transformed himself from fervent Trump critic to fervent Trump ally. Trump, of course, openly disdained his friend McCain. So I wondered, what happened to Graham?
President Trump and Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina)
credit: Getty Images
"I don't know," Salter said wearily. He theorized that Graham started to shift toward Trump to help ward off a primary challenge when he was up for re-election last year. "Now he strikes me as just lost. He seems to me a man without a home."
I also wondered what McCain would be doing in such a polarized Congress. Where would he fit in in today's Senate?
"I'm sure he would've been doing what he can to get us back to normal," he said. "So, I think he'd be doing all he could. Whether it's fixable at this point is a question mark."
What Salter says scares him most is if state legislatures take away from state election officials the authority to certify election results.
"Do they reverse the results?" he said. "That's when you get to the end."
Salter at John McCain's funeral 2017 credit: Getty Images
* Salter is author of The Luckiest Man, a remembrance of McCain published last year.
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