Raising Arizona - McCain's backyard bid to beat Obama

AT AROUND seven in the evening, the desert rocks begin to glow a bright crimson and the setting sun splays distended shadows across the baked earth. "This is where the power spot is strongest," says Hugh Hoglan. "Put your hands around the earth ball."

The sound of a Native American flute drifts on the breeze as our small group sits in silent meditation. Following our guide's instructions, we cup our hands around an invisible sphere, feeling for power emanations.

We're sitting in the heart of a "power vortex" near Boynton overlooking the Arizona town of Sedona. Since 1981, when psychic Page Bryant pronounced that Sedona is "the heart chakra of the planet", it has been a source of pilgrimage for those in search of enigmatic truths.

It is an unlikely place to come looking for a Republican candidate for the presidency of the United States. But John McCain, war hero, political maverick, Senator for Arizona and candidate for the highest office in the land, is nothing if not an enigma.

And Sedona, which seems to have been teleported from the wackiest reaches of California to the middle of the bone-dry Arizona desert, is bang in his back yard.

McCain, who will be formally adopted as his party's candidate at the Republican National Convention starting tomorrow in Minneapolis-St Paul, owns a house with his millionaire second wife, beer heiress Cindy, in nearby Hidden Valley.

To the delight and dismay of the town's residents, McCain, who recently seemed confused over the exact number of properties he owns, has put his Sedona ranch at the centre of his campaign.

It is here – rather than one of his other six houses (three beach-front apartments in California, a three-bedroom apartment in Virginia, two apartments amalgamated to create a deluxe 7,000 square foot home, with indoor and outdoor swimming pools, in Phoenix) – that McCain comes to fire up his barbecue and cook slabs of red meat for local dignitaries, journalists and politicians.

If McCain is elected president, Hidden Valley will become as famous as George W Bush's Crawford ranch or the Kennedy Compound in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts.

It is the second time that Sedona's dramatic natural landscape has become the backdrop to a McCain presidential bid. When he quit the race to become the Republican presidential candidate in 2000, McCain made his concession speech in front of the world's media at Sedona's Mesa Airport, in a natural amphitheatre created by the towering red rocks.

ONCE a Republican stronghold, Arizona has become more volatile, voting for Democrat Bill Clinton in 1996 and for Bush in 2000 and 2004. The state's changing fortunes are mirrored in the transformation of its capital, 119 miles to the south of Sedona and just an hour or so from the Mexican border.

Phoenix is a sprawling monster, the fastest expanding metropolis in the country, with the average temperature and intimate charm of a baking oven.

In 1950, Phoenix covered 17.1 square miles. Today it covers 515 square miles and is home to almost four million people. If Sedona is McCain's unlikely backyard, this sprawling business and political hub is his front office, the place where he has his state headquarters, where he meets, greets and does the deals which have sustained his position for 26 years.

Dan Nowicki, political reporter at the Arizona Republic newspaper, has traced the development of the state's capital, and McCain's complex connections with it.

He says: "Arizona is changing. It used to be a more reliably Republican state but as people have come in from other states, they have taken their politics with them. McCain has the same problem with Republicans in Arizona as he has with Republicans in the rest of the country."

McCain's candidacy is based on a carefully cultivated reputation as a maverick, emphasised on Friday with his choice of little-known Sarah Palin, Alaska's female governor, as his running mate.

He is the Republican who spoke out against torture in Abu Ghraib, who sponsored a campaign finance bill which clipped the wings of lobbyists and corporations.

At 72, he would be America's oldest first-term president. He is the Republican who is palatable to liberals, the war hero whose imprisonment and torture in a Hanoi prison 40 years ago earns him respect today across the political spectrum.

But there is a darker side to McCain: his career has been entwined with lobbyists and special interests.

The Obama camp points out that his presidential campaign team contains so many lobbyists that at least four have had to resign. They included Doug Goodyear, McCain's convention chair, who had worked for a company paid to improve the image of Burma's military junta.

Thomas Mann, a senior fellow with Washington think-tank the Brookings Institute, says: "He is conservative enough on social and foreign policy, and some economic policy, to appeal to those elements, while also deploying the occasional liberal view, which appeals to independents and undecideds."

It's a powerful brand and one that McCain is pushing as hard as he can, but it may not survive the election.

To win the presidency, McCain now needs to build bridges with those parts of the Republican family he snubbed to win the primaries.

The outspoken, formidably driven candidate, who quipped as recently as four years ago that the problem with the Religious Right is "it is neither", has set his sights firmly on winning their backing.

Just a few weeks ago he agreed to a Q&A session with Pastor Rick Warren at Saddleback Church in California. McCain has been a member of a Southern Baptist church for 10 years. In front of the crowd, he pledged that if he gets into the White House, he will preside over a Christian, anti-abortion administration.

Unlike Bush, McCain is not a born-again Christian. There are no prayer meetings in his camp. The candidate is saying what he needs to say to get elected.

Though McCain may be making inroads with Christians, he may yet become the victim of his own character traits, including a legendary temper.

"He is notorious in Arizona for bearing a grudge," says biographer Matt Welch, who wrote McCain: The Myth Of A Maverick after developing a deep fascination with the contradictory politician. "If you cross him, he doesn't forget – he's like an elephant.

"But he is just as famous for his showy acts of conciliation; luxurious gift baskets saying 'I'm sorry I blew up at you'.

"A large part of him and his appeal is that he feels he can talk himself out of anything and he is notoriously fearless when challenged."

Arizona and Washington are full of stories of people who have fallen out with the man dubbed "Senator hothead", from colleagues told to "f*** off, you asshole" on the Senate floor, to a journalist's father who was allegedly warned that his public works job would be on the line if his daughter continued writing critical articles about McCain.

Cliff Schecter, author of The Real McCain, tells a story from 1992 about McCain reacting badly to his wife's teasing him about his growing bald spot: "At least I don't plaster on the make-up like a trollop, you c***."

Among McCain's former colleagues, former Republican Congressman John LeBoutillier says: "I think he is mentally unstable and not fit to be president."

There is little doubt in which direction President McCain's finger would itch: Iran. Asked in a town-hall meeting in South Carolina, "When are we going to send an airmail message to Tehran?", McCain responded with a chilling ditty sung to the tune of the Beachboys' 'Barbara Ann': "Bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb Iran."

A MIXTURE of political ambition and emotion drew the volatile John McCain to Arizona. If the young McCain had a home it was the Navy. He was born on the Coco Solo Naval Air Station in the Panama Canal Zone.

After an undistinguished stint at the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis where he emerged 894th out of a class of 899, he requested a combat assignment: in 1967 he was sent to fight in Vietnam.

On October 26, 1967 he was shot down over Hanoi and spent the next five and a half years as a prisoner of war in the infamous "Hanoi Hilton".

Offered early release because of his father's position as commander of US forces in Vietnam, McCain refused unless his fellow prisoners were also set free.

He has never entirely recovered from his torture in Vietnam. His stiff-limbed gait and inability to raise his arms above his shoulders are lasting effects of his ill-treatment. When he was released to the US in 1973 his marriage to his first wife Carol fell apart and he began dating Cindy Lou Hensley, a teacher from Phoenix and heiress to the Anheuser-Busch beer fortune. McCain's divorce from Carol came through in 1980; a month later he married Cindy.

His first civilian job was as vice-president of public relations at his new father-in-law's company. He got to know key figures in the Arizona business community and, in 1982, he ran for Congress.

A newcomer to the state, McCain was repeatedly accused of being a carpetbagger. At one meeting his temper snapped: "Listen, pal. I spent 22 years in the Navy. My father was in the Navy. My grandfather was in the Navy. We in the military service tend to move a lot. We have to live in all parts of the country, all parts of the world. I wish I could have had the luxury, like you, of growing up and living and spending my entire life in a nice place like the First District of Arizona, but I was doing other things. As a matter of fact, when I think about it now, the place I lived longest in my life was Hanoi."

McCain won the election: his political career had begun.

AT THE beginning of the last century the small farming community of Cottonwood was famous for having the best bootlegged booze in the Southwest, attracting visitors from as far afield as California and drawing patched cowboys and prospectors out of the desert.

Today its run-down main street couldn't be a bigger contrast with Sedona just 18 miles away. Pawnbrokers, fast food outlets, gun shops and cheque cashing kiosks jostle for space in a tableau of decline. Unemployment is high and the community struggles with a crystal meth problem.

Farm worker Dick Randel grew up in Cottonwood and remembers its more romantic past as a cowboy staging post. "For a politician McCain sure talks a lot of sense. I admire him, he has life experience, and he speaks out for what he believes in," he says. Other Cottonwood residents cite McCain's support for gun rights, his anti-abortion stance and his desire to stay in Iraq until the job is done.

But there are signs in this shabby backwater that McCain's campaign could also falter through a simple lack of interest. Donell Welcott, a Tucson native visiting relatives, looks blank when asked how she would vote in the forthcoming presidential election. "I wouldn't vote for Obama. No way. He's a Muslim," she says squinting in the sunny main street.

When I point out that the Democratic presidential candidate is a Christian, she shakes her head dismissively. And what about John McCain? "Who? We don't do politics in my family."

FOR McCain, family and politics are deeply intertwined. The wealthy Cindy, with whom he signed a prenuptial agreement ring-fencing her fortune, seems to be McCain's human face.

McCain has four children with Cindy, including their youngest, Bridget, a 17-year-old high school student, who the couple adopted after Cindy visited an orphanage in Bangladesh and brought the child back to the USA for surgery to correct a cleft palate.

Their son Jimmy joined the Marines to fight in Iraq last year. (McCain's children with Carol – he adopted her two sons and also had a daughter with her – are now in their forties.)

Insiders claim that Cindy will be a traditional First Lady. The blonde heiress may come across as tightly wrapped but in 1994 she revealed her addiction to prescription pain killers, and confessed to locking herself in the bathroom to pop four or five times the daily amount.

It was an addiction sustained first by getting different doctors to write her parallel prescriptions, then by stealing the drugs from her own non-profit medical relief organisation.

To glimpse a little of the domestic life which Cindy and John McCain enjoy you must drive down a sweeping dirt track off the road to nearby Cornville, between Sedona and Cottonwood.

At the end of the dusty road, boards warn trespassers to keep out and a long winding driveway lined with trees with low hanging branches obscure the view from the road.

One neighbour, who asked not to be named, confesses she can't wait for the election to be over. "And I hope McCain doesn't get it." Why? "Because living here will be unbearable if he does."