ILTON HEAD, S.C. - All of the other presidential candidates have spent the past week trekking back and forth across Iowa's frozen cornfields, hoping to seduce voters into their corners at tonight's caucus.
Not Senator John McCain. He took last week to swing through the Northeast gathering campaign funds and to visit South Carolina, his make-or-break state, which holds its Republican primary Feb. 19.
Not that McCain had many options about Iowa. He opposes tax breaks for ethanol makers, incensing farmers whose corn is used to manufacture the fuel. And even without his ethanol stance, his scant support from politicians in Iowa would probably have yielded him a humiliating defeat.
With only 60 full-time staff members nationwide, McCain's campaign depends on something other than national party machinery, something more commonly found in municipal politics: eye contact. Today he holds his 100th town hall meeting in New Hampshire. In those meetings, which he has also held all over South Carolina, crowds cram small, well-lighted venues to hear him speak and get answers to their questions. And McCain has shone, drawing adulation even from voters who had been uncommitted.
But in less intimate settings or during prepared speeches, he can seem like a quite different candidate, almost wooden by comparison. It is a contrast that augurs a challenge for McCain, as the campaign hurtles toward the stage, after New Hampshire, when person-to-person politicking must give way to efforts at mass appeal.
Conveying his singular appeal in more impersonal campaign settings can be hard for McCain. For example, as McCain arrived at the Greenwood Area Chamber of Commerce annual dinner and awards ceremony Friday night, Motown music played in the background and the huge hall was darkened. But once on the stage, he was lit by a spotlight, unable to see his audience.
McCain's usual laugh-a-minute opening routine fell mostly flat. Unable to feed off crowd reaction, McCain's usually acute sense of timing left him. His smooth senatorial delivery turned bumpy. He ended up resorting to his rarely used big rhetorical guns, telling his most powerful story from his days as a prisoner of war in Hanoi, in which his cellmate was severely beaten for sewing an American flag into the inside of his prison shirt. That story has held other audiences in thrall, and occasionally brought even McCain close to tears, but these diners seemed almost blase.
By Saturday night, though, the discomfiting dinner speech was a distant memory.
Organizers said they expected 300 people to come to hear the Arizona senator speak at an oyster roast at a hotel by the beach in Hilton Head. More than 1,200 people showed up. And as McCain spoke, his listeners surrounding him, the cracking of oyster shells stopped, the audience was captivated, and the gathering took on the feel of a revival meeting. They slapped knees and roared with laughter at his jokes, and greeted his calls for fairer treatment of soldiers and veterans with deafening applause.
After he spoke, dozens of audience members surged toward him, looking for handshakes and autographs.
Hilton Head, in South Carolina's low country, is traditionally more liberal than other parts of the state, partly because there are many retirees here from the Northeast.
But most voters will not see this version of the senator after South Carolina, where he still trails Bush by more than 20 points among likely Republican voters.The town hall meetings will be fewer, as he scrambles to cover dozens of states for the March primaries. His strategists hope that by then, McCain won't need to convince voters one by one.
