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Too Tough to DieMcCain gets the good news.

By John Dickerson
Posted Tuesday, Jan. 8, 2008, at 10:24 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

Immediately afterward, rival Mike Huckabee called. To get some privacy, McCain backed into the bathroom off the living room and shut the door.

Back in the living room of the suite, McCain returned to the television screen, and we watched the returns from the Democratic race. "Boy, this Clinton-Obama race is interesting, isn't it?" he said to me, as he squinted into the screen. Aides were scurrying to find his speechwriter's laptop. The acceptance speech they'd written for him included this line: "I want to congratulate Senator Obama tonight on his impressive victory, and I salute his supporters who worked so hard to achieve their success and believe so passionately in the promise of their candidate." They had to edit that one out.

Was he happy? another reporter asked him. "I'm very happy," he said, showing no visible evidence of it. The room swarmed with his blogging daughter Meghan and her friends, but McCain kept returning to the pose he'd held since hearing the results, both hands grasping the lapels of his blue suit.

McCain retired to the bedroom to sit on the bed and practice. When he returned, he was inching back to his normal cut-up mood. He pretended to read the speech: "Despite the best efforts of the liberal commie media, I was able to overcome … no, no, we're going to try to talk about big themes."

When Mitt Romney came on the television to give his concession speech, McCain asked for the volume to be turned down. No one did it. "Well, I won the silver again," said Romney. McCain screwed up his mouth a little, rolled his eyes, and said, "See, that's why I wanted the television off."

McCain flies to Michigan tomorrow and then ends the day in South Carolina. The last time he flew there after winning the New Hampshire primary in 2000, it was as an insurgent out to destroy the GOP establishment. Now McCain heads to the state with no clear establishment opponent and plenty of establishment support. One of the state's senators, Lindsey Graham, a McCain ally then and now, reflected on the change as he sat in the corner drinking bottled water. "We're not going to put up with what happened last time," he said. "We're going to have a structure we didn't have before. I'm going to call some people tonight and see if they'll come over." Earlier in the night, he'd joked they'd need flak jackets and helmets to handle the onslaught from Romney.

By the time he had left to give his acceptance speech, McCain had rolled it to the diameter of a pencil. At this moment eight years ago, his daughter Meghan was drinking Shirley Temples, and his youngest son, Jimmy, was a little kid playing and dancing around the room. Now Meghan is old enough to have champagne. And Jimmy is a Marine fighting in Iraq.

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John Dickerson is Slate's chief political correspondent and author of On Her Trail. He can be reached at .
Photograph of John McCain by Preston Rescigno/Getty Images.
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