ANCHESTER, N.H. - When you've done all that can be done, all that you could possibly do, and done a whole lot better than anybody but you and your mom ever thought you could do, there are no regrets.
John McCain has no regrets.
He kicked back Friday morning before heading down to the seacoast for a noon rally, swapping campaign yarns with his wife and staff, chortling over the odd moments, leaning forward with zest to describe the peaks of hand-to-hand political combat. Like a fighter pilot debriefing after the last mission, the onetime Navy flyboy mused on the tactics of recent engagements.
He may not finish first when they count the votes Tuesday night. But he will not have been beaten. His long-shot maverick candidacy has flown farther and faster than anyone expected. He catapulted to a slim lead here in recent polls, but faced a strong finish from Texas Governor George W. Bush, with the outcome to be determined by the independent voters.
The good news is that, in the nightly polling conducted by the Democratic campaign of Vice President Al Gore, about 40 percent of the canvassed independents said they planned to vote, when in other years far fewer actually did. And these independents are breaking 3 to 2 in favor of McCain, as opposed to the 2 in 5 who plan to vote for Bill Bradley in the Democratic race.
The bad news? Independents, or ''unenrolled'' voters, as they're called here, can be fickle, fainthearted summer soldiers, easily put off by lousy weather, a last-minute negative ad barrage, or congenital apathy. Media tracking polls suggested Friday that Bradley's challenge was fading.
The former New Jersey senator led Gore here by 15 points among most-likely voters only a few weeks ago. But Gore's aggressive campaigning, his solid 2 to 1 victory in the Iowa caucuses, and endorsements uncorked by the likes of Ted Kennedy, Robert Rubin, the former Treasury secretary, a host of labor unions, and, most significantly, Governor Jeanne Shaheen, turned the tide. The Shaheen blessing translates into a get-out-the-vote operation Bradley's energetic volunteers seem unlikely to match.
McCain is the hottest pol on the trail up here; his crowds would pay money to hear their guy take on the system of big-shot lobbyists, greasy campaign contributions, and a deaf-and-dumb Congress hooked on the crack cocaine of politics and special interest money.
But Bush, who leads everywhere else, is well organized here. His basic pitch is that he is so well-heeled he can win in November. In terms of crowd appeal and favorable press, Bush has improved steadily as a campaigner and debater. McCain agrees on that point. But he is baffled by the apparent sag in the fortunes of his former fellow senator, Bradley.
McCain mused idly about why Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts and a fellow Vietnam vet with whom he worked closely on the POW-MIA issues, chose not to run. McCain is expected to be the beneficiary of Bradley's swoon. Those independents who want to strike a blow for campaign finance reform could pick either McCain or Bradley, and indications are they are going for the Arizonan.
Will it be enough? McCain shrugged. Things that are out of his hands are out of his hands. You learn a certain kind of fatalism when you are a combat pilot, and then, for 51/2 years, a prisoner of war. He cruises serenely above the fray. So Bush's friends in New York conspire to knock McCain off the ballot? That's just cheap politics. The reporters who clamor to ride along with him play a daily game of stump the candidate? That's part of the game, too.
McCain's campaign has become a crusade, uniting disparate types from all bandwidths of the political spectrum. Here's a guy who tells it like it is, doesn't trim, and doesn't hide. He scorches those practices of his own party that he regards as corrupting - sopping up $7 million in tobacco industry soft money is one of his latest pet peeves. But he's vitriolic on President Clinton's character, and genuinely irate over GI families on food stamps and shoddy veterans' hospital care.
Two uniformed soldiers, one male, one female, lurked outside McCain's hotel Friday, waiting for their man to emerge. ''Good luck, Senator,'' murmured a sergeant as McCain paused for a photo. I spent an hour Friday morning fielding calls from viewer's of C-SPAN's morning show, and from all points of the compass came the same refrain: I'm a Democrat, I'm a Republican, I'm an independent, I'm an 18-year-old high school senior from New Hampshire, and I'm for McCain.
Millions of Americans are. Me too. But if he does not flat-out win here Tuesday, his campaign probably dies here in the wintry terrain of the very first primary. Only a genuine prairie fire, ignited here by a perfectly possible victory over Bush, can keep the McCain phenomenon going.
''I can feel it,'' he said matter-of-factly of his crowds, whose size and fervor grow daily. ''I go to a town where six months ago I got 40 people; now it's 400. You can absolutely feel it.''
It is a crusade. But you know what typically happens to crusaders. They tend to die, valiantly, far from home and, as the senator says every day of America's young soldiers, ''for a cause greater than themselves.'' We already know how this man put his life on the line, repeatedly, for a cause greater than himself.
We find out Tuesday night how much that means to New Hampshire.
David Nyhan is a Globe columnist.
