ohn McCain has his enemies where he wants them: all lined up right in front of him, and blazing away in his direction.
The maverick Arizona Republican, the least programmed and most focused of the eight men still running for president, is attracting all kinds of flak in New Hampshire as the old fighter pilot comes around for his make-or-break strafing run before New Hampshire votes.
His enemies aren't the people he's running against. He treats his fellow competitors with gentlemanly refinement, by and large, save for his salvos against the incumbent administration. The old Navy man's real foe is the system - and the soft money, unlimited six- and seven-figure sums lavished by wealthy interests on cash-starved pols, that corrupts it.
''The billions of dollars in soft money is what corrupted the political campaigns'' of recent elections, McCain told two dozen Globe journalists yesterday at an editorial board meeting. ''The rise in soft money coincided with the drop in voter participation and the growth of cynicism among the young.''
Saying he does not wish to sound defensive after publication of letters he wrote to federal bureaucrats prodding them for decisions on matters important to corporations that contributed to his campaign or let him fly at government-approved rates on corporate jets for campaign trips, McCain owned up to being part of the very system he's trying manfully to overhaul.
''It taints us all,'' he readily acknowledged. ''One reason I got dinged up by the implication of the Paxon thing,'' he added, is that it reinforces a perception that every powerful Washington figure is somehow on the take, or doing favors for rich contributors, which he should not be doing.
McCain produced letters and tributes from a former Federal Communications Commission Chairman Reed Hunt, Public Citizen's Joan Claybrook, a Consumers Union executive, and others to buttress his claim that he did nothing more than needle the FCC and other bureaucracies to stop footdragging on decisions pending.
But the disclosure of his letters prodding the bureaucrats, which are a part of any lawmaker's normal duties, came at a time when he was vulnerable, running neck-and-neck with Texas Governor George W. Bush in New Hampshire's Feb. 1 primary.
''It taints me, it taints everyone,'' said McCain. ''I understand the implications. I understand why they (voters) would be cynical about me as well as about everyone else.''
Pressed as to why he has narrowed his campaign to clean up the dirty money in politics to just the single point of soft money, the unregulated transfers of massive amounts of cash to political parties or political action groups, McCain suggested he decided to target the most outrageous and flagrant abuses.
''Why do you think the tobacco industry just gave $7 million to the Republican Party,'' he asked. ''Good government,'' he laughed, adding, ''I've watched them try to addict children and lie to Congress.'' But their money is prized by his own party.
He was asked what a President George W. Bush might do for the corporate interest of giant Texas energy conglomerate Enron Corp., whose executives bundled some $550,000 in campaign gifts to the Texas governor. McCain chortled: ''They'll get what the tobacco companies got - good government.''Some of his listeners may not get the joke - but he does.
It is highly unusual for a presidential candidate who is only slightly ahead in New Hampshire, or maybe even with his chief rival, to be as loose and free-swinging as McCain. But five-and-a-half years in a North Vietnamese prison camp, enduring torture and deprivation on top of plane crash wounds that still hamper his arm movement, toughened McCain to the point of being bullet-proof in the normal political sense.
Even while he's being targeted by a batch of negative ads from lobbyists who fear the public ratification of his crusade to clean up politics, McCain is spirited and defiant. He may not wind up being elected president. But no one is having more of a blast this season than McCain, the Annapolis wise guy and irreverent jet jockey who has sparked the closest thing to a groundswell of spontaneous support in New Hampshire.
He freely takes on his own party's shibboleths. Though he has been elaborately polite to Bush and the others, McCain has no problem training his cannonfire on Bush's extravagant tax giveaway. Seeking to obliterate political memories of his own father's vow-breaking (''Read my lips - no new taxes'' ring a bell?), Bush Jr. is vowing to hand back to taxpayers an incredible $800-plus billion, as much as $2,000 a year for a family of four earning $50,000.
This is a huge bribe to the GOP primary voter, a tax giveback that is twice as much as McCain deems prudent. ''Sixty percent of his tax cut goes to the richest 10 percent of Americans,'' replies McCain, and does nothing to save Social Security or Medicaid. He's not for ''class warfare,'' he grins, he's just for ''giving the low- and middle-income people a break.''
He flies a high-risk heading, with ack-ack coming from lots of lobbyists. I won't go negative on anybody, he vows, you just have to keep your cool, fly straight and level, ''and mostly what you have to do is do your message, do your campaign, you can't be knocked off stride.'' That's the thing that makes McCain so different. You can wing him, you can slow him down, you can shoot him down, but you cannot cow him.
David Nyhan is a Globe columnist.
