While the focus has been on Clinton and Obama's fight for the Democratic candidacy, the man they both fear most has all but wrapped up the Republican nomination. But will John McCain's Straight Talk Express be able to take him all the way to the White House, asks Denis Staunton.
On Thursday afternoon, John McCain stood before hundreds of conservative activists in a packed Washington ballroom and asked them to put aside their long-held antipathy and unite behind him. Two hours earlier, Mitt Romney had told the same audience that he was leaving the presidential race, effectively clearing the way for McCain to become, at 71, the Republican Party's nominee for president.
Some of the activists booed McCain as soon as he appeared onstage and others gazed sullenly ahead in disbelief that a man they have viewed for years as the sworn enemy of the conservative movement is about to become their party's standard-bearer.
Just six months ago, with his campaign broke and in disarray after most of his senior staff had resigned or been fired, McCain was almost universally dismissed as a dead man walking in the presidential race.
"His poll numbers plummeted, the fundraising dried up and he was really written off as a candidate for most of 2007," says Grant Lally, a member of McCain's legal team and his campaign's vice-chair in New York. "It's really by dint of his hard work and his decency and his sincerity that a lot of people in the Republican Party who had walked away from him gave him another look and came back into the fold."
McCain, who had started out as his party's frontrunner, burned through $24 million (€16.5 million) in the first few months of last year, hiring teams of consultants and flying the media around the country to campaign events. By the summer, he was travelling by bus and staying in cheap motels as he campaigned in New Hampshire, sometimes before audiences numbering less than two dozen people.
"A lot of people disappeared. A lot of people signed up to other campaigns," Lally says. "I hosted an Irish for McCain fundraiser at the very end of June of 2007 and it was very tough to get people to come to the event or to write cheques to support Senator McCain. By contrast, at that point, Rudy Giuliani had raised $60 million for his campaign and Mitt Romney was raising inordinate amounts of money."
Last November, with the first caucuses and primaries looming and $500,000 in debt, McCain applied for a $3 million overdraft from a Maryland bank, offering his fundraising lists as collateral. The bank told him that, because of his age, he would have to take out a life insurance policy in case he didn't survive the campaign.
McCain has not only survived but thrived on a punishing schedule of 18-hour days packed with events, campaigning harder than the younger rivals he has dispatched one by one. Losing his frontrunner status seemed to liberate McCain, and as he recaptured the straight-talking, irreverent style he adopted during his 2000 presidential run, Americans saw the side of him they like best.
"John McCain is always strongest as the underdog and when he faces adversity he fights hardest," says Lally.
NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCES are nothing new to John McCain, who has survived three plane crashes, a fire aboard an aircraft carrier that killed more than 100 men, a bayoneting by a Vietnamese mob and 5½ years of torture and beatings in a Hanoi prisoner-of-war camp. He is still unable to lift his arms to shoulder level or to comb his own hair on account of broken bones left untreated by his Vietnamese captors.
The son and grandson of admirals, McCain spent much of his childhood moving from one naval base to another, and, when he left school, he went to the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis.
"He says he didn't like going to the Naval Academy, but I was unaware of that," his 96-year-old mother Roberta recalled in an interview last month. "In our day, a boy, if his father was in the navy, he just went to the Naval Academy. In my mind, it was just automatic."
Rebellious and stubborn, McCain was seldom out of trouble at the academy and came close to being expelled for receiving too many disciplinary actions. He graduated fifth from the bottom of a class of 899 in 1958; John Poindexter, one of the key figures in the Iran-Contra scandal during the 1980s, came first.
McCain became a naval pilot, flying attack aircraft, and in 1964 he married Carole Shepp, a divorced mother of two children. In the spring of 1967, he was sent to Vietnam aboard the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal, receiving shrapnel wounds a few months later when a rocket was fired accidentally on board, causing a fire that killed 134 men.
On October 26th, 1967, McCain was flying a bombing mission over Hanoi when his plane was hit by a surface-to-air missile. As he ejected from the aircraft, he struck part of the plane, breaking his left arm, his right arm in three places and his right knee and was knocked unconscious.
He plunged into a lake in the centre of Hanoi and, when he came to, he was being hauled ashore by a group of angry Vietnamese civilians.
"A crowd of several hundred Vietnamese gathered around me as I lay dazed before them, shouting wildly at me, stripping my clothes off, spitting on me, kicking and striking me repeatedly," he wrote in his memoir, Faith of My Fathers.
"Someone smashed a rifle butt into my shoulder, breaking it. Someone else stuck a bayonet in my ankle and groin." An army truck arrived and took McCain to Hoa Lo prison, known to prisoners of war as the Hanoi Hilton, where he was interrogated and told that he would not receive medical treatment until he gave them information about his aircraft and future targets. After the Vietnamese discovered that McCain's father was one of the most senior officers in the US Navy, they took him to a hospital where he was given blood and glucose and several shots but received no treatment for his injuries.
MCCAIN SPENT TWO years in solitary confinement and at one stage the beatings he received became so regular and intense that he agreed to write and record a false confession, describing himself as an "air pirate" and denouncing US policy. He deliberately used stilted, communist jargon to signal that the confession was coerced but was so ashamed of having broken the navy's code of conduct that he tried to hang himself in his cell, only to be interrupted by a guard.
He refused to accept an early release, insisting that those Americans captured before him should be freed first. It was not until March 1973, after the Paris peace accords ended the direct involvement of the US in Vietnam, that McCain was released.
Returning to the US, McCain discovered that his wife had been badly injured in a car accident and was using crutches. They resumed their life together for a few years, but by the late 1970s McCain had started seeing other women and they divorced in 1980.
Too severely disabled to return to a combat role, McCain became the navy's liaison with the US senate, developing an interest in politics and an admiration for Ronald Reagan.
At a party in Honolulu in 1979, McCain met Cindy Lou Hensley, a teacher from Phoenix, Arizona, where her family owned a large beer distribution business. She was 18 years his junior, but they discovered when they married the following year that each had lied about their age, she pretending to be three years older and McCain knocking four years off his age.
Cindy's father's wealth and political connections helped McCain to secure a congressional seat in Arizona in 1982, and he won Barry Goldwater's senate seat in 1986. His first senate term was overshadowed by a scandal that linked him to the collapse of a savings and loan association owned by Charles Keating, a generous Republican donor.
McCain, who had received more than $100,000 in donations and a number of private plane trips from Keating, was accused with four other senators of trying to pressure regulators on Keating's behalf. A senate investigation found that McCain had exercised poor judgment but he was not prosecuted.
AS MCCAIN STRUGGLED to rescue his reputation, his wife was secretly enduring an ordeal of her own as she became addicted to the prescription painkillers Percocet and Vicodin following a back injury.
"When people think of drugs, they envision some guy in the street with cocaine, which, quite frankly, was my arrogant attitude as well," she told Harper's Bazaar last year.
"That was the darkest period of my life. I was in pain, took too many pills, and, like many women, just fell into it." Cindy started stealing painkillers from a charity she ran, which sent medical teams to Third World countries, and she was investigated by federal authorities. Cindy had three children with McCain, but after a number of miscarriages, she adopted a Bangladeshi girl she met during a field trip to India with her medical charity, calling her Bridget.
During McCain's 2000 presidential bid, supporters of George W Bush in South Carolina spread a rumour that McCain had fathered a biracial child with another woman. Googling her name recently, Bridget learned about the rumours.
"Over the years, I was always afraid that someone at school would say something, but they didn't," Cindy said. "It just never clicked that she'd look herself up on the internet. She was so upset, took it so personally. John and I tried to make Bridget understand that people who say things like that are very wrong; it's not what we - nor most people - are about."
Despite suffering a stroke in 2004, Cindy has been an almost constant presence on the campaign in recent months, adding a touch of elegance to McCain's rough and ready events.
McCain prides himself on his readiness to voice unwelcome truths, christening his campaign bus the "Straight Talk Express" and bragging about his refusal to pander to public opinion. His support for comprehensive immigration reform, which would have allowed most of the 12 million undocumented immigrants in the US to remain in the country legally, has alienated much of the Republican base.
Groups such as the National Rifle Association and anti-abortion organisations will never forgive him for sponsoring campaign finance legislation that limits their role in elections. And many congressmen resent the role he played in exposing Jack Abramoff, a corrupt Republican lobbyist who pleaded guilty to a number of felonies in 2006.
He has been the strongest and most consistent supporter of Bush's surge strategy in Iraq, but he stood against the president in opposing the use of torture on terrorist suspects. And he has angered the oil and motor industries with his demand for tougher environmental standards and a new international agreement on combating climate change.
McCain's temper is legendary in Washington and numerous lawmakers have faced his foul-mouthed diatribes, only to receive a letter of apology the following day.
McCain served up a more measured dose of straight talk when he addressed the American Ireland Fund dinner in Washington three years ago and, with Gerry Adams in the audience, launched a blistering attack on Sinn Féin and the IRA.
"Stealing from banks and slaying men in the streets to settle personal grievances are not the acts of freedom fighters. They are the work of a small minority trying to hold back the forces of history and democracy, and they hurt the very people for whom they claim to fight," he said. "Whatever your views about the historic cause they claimed to have served or the methods they employed - which were, in my opinion, indefensible - no one can honestly claim today that the IRA is anything better than an organised crime syndicate that steals and murders to serve its members' personal interests."
Although he traces his ancestry to Co Antrim, McCain's interest in Ireland is relatively recent and he initially opposed Bill Clinton's engagement in the North. He warmed to the peace process later, however, and is now an admirer of all things Irish, including the books of William Trevor and Roddy Doyle.
"A McCain presidency would be great for Ireland," Lally says. "John McCain loves Ireland. He loves Irish America. He's part of Irish America and he identifies very closely with Ireland. He knows his family roots very well. He knows they go back to Ireland and Scotland and he's very familiar with the Irish peace process. He knows Bertie Ahern, he's met Ian Paisley and all the leaders in the Irish political world. He's very comfortable with the Irish political leadership."
If McCain wins in November, he will be the oldest man ever to be elected to the White House but also the president with the most remarkable and compelling personal story. He is the Republican candidate Democrats fear most on account of his appeal beyond the Republican fold.
Despite his differences with the Republican mainstream, a McCain presidency would be uncompromisingly conservative, cutting government spending and taxes, appointing conservative judges to the supreme court and keeping US troops in Iraq.
He would bring to the White House a sensibility seldom found outside the military, an old-fashioned sense of honour and a patriotism shaped by his captivity in Vietnam.
"In prison, I fell in love with my country," he wrote in his memoir."I had loved her before then, but like most young people, my affection was little more than a simple appreciation for the comforts and privileges most Americans enjoyed and took for granted. It wasn't until I had lost America for a time that I realised how much I loved her."