How John McCain launched my career
John McCain’s death has sparked multiple tributes and obituaries, rightfully memorializing his service to our nation, his leadership, and his larger-than-life personality.
One of the best elements of the social media age is that, amid the obituaries recounting the big events of his life, we also get to hear all the personal stories about the lives McCain touched along the way. I have my own McCain story, too: By virtue of timing and luck, John McCain’s political career helped launch my journalism career. Simply put, I’m not sure I would be writing this without him.
Here’s the story: My first paid job in journalism came in 2007, when I was hired by Townhall.com to be their Director of Operations. That mostly meant overseeing a team of designers and programmers, and as part of the deal I negotiated, they allowed me to blog there, too. I wasn't a professional writer yet; They intended it as a fringe benefit to keep me happy. But I got lucky.
At the time, Townhall's blog was loaded with Mitt Romney fans (the most famous being Hugh Hewitt, who actually wrote a sort of hagiography about Romney called A Mormon in the White House). Although I’ve warmed to him more recently, during the 2008 primary I viewed the former Massachusetts governor as someone willing to retreat from his policy record for the sake of political expediency. McCain, I argued, was arguably more conservative than Romney. What is more, he struck me as way more authentic. So I blogged about it.
And McCain’s people noticed.
I was no sycophant, but I didn’t need to be. McCain’s people were so desperate for a conservative writer to give him a fair shake that a fair shake was all they asked for. It turned out that the candidate who spoke about "straight talk" really wanted nothing more than that.
They needed it, too.
Remember that in 2007, McCain's campaign was floundering and he very nearly fell out of the race altogether. To help get his mojo back, McCain turned to the blogosphere. With Twitter and Facebook not nearly as pervasive as they are today, conservative bloggers were the social media influencers of the day within the Republican Party. A campaign strategist named Patrick Hynes, wisely recognizing the natural appeal of his candidate to online audiences, began hosting weekly conference calls where lowly bloggers could (and did) ask McCain anything.
The candidate gave generous access to writers who, otherwise, might never have dreamed of covering a Presidential campaign. The calls lasted an eternity, and if a staffer tried to end the call, McCain would insist on taking “a few more questions.” And the fact that anyone could start a blog didn't seem to matter - we got to interact with the same John McCain everyone else might have seen on TV bantering with Tim Russert or Chris Matthews.
Through these connections, I went to New Hampshire to cover McCain’s campaign (read my column here and see a video here). This experience gave me a reason to pitch myself to cable news to talk about the race, and my career as a TV commentator began. Being on the ground gave also let me experience Granite Staters reacting to McCain’s town hall meetings, even when he was lagging in the polls. This insight allowed me to correctly predict that he would come from behind and win the 2008 GOP primary in New Hampshire, which made me sound smart.
Once McCain became the presumptive GOP nominee, I was in the catbird seat for covering the Republican National Convention. Within a couple months, I had a paid gig as a political writer for AOL and I started appearing widely on cable news shows.
John McCain did a lot of big and important things in his life. But he also did much which may have seemed small to him, but which carried reverberations into the lives around him. After suffering as a prisoner of war, serving as a Senator, maybe it wasn't that big a deal for John McCain to spend a few hours giving bloggers access to an eventual Presidential nominee. But to me, it meant a career.