PHOENIX — Gary Godsey liked all that "Straight Talk Express" stuff from John McCain's 2000 presidential campaign, liked that he seemed to make up his own mind on issues and not bend with the poll-driven winds. But these days, Godsey is less sure.
The same straight-talking, no-nonsense traits that Godsey once admired in the Vietnam War hero have morphed, in his mind, into intransigence. It's a fine line, Godsey acknowledges, but a line nonetheless, and it is evidence of how McCain's national political troubles have begun seeping into his support at home in Arizona's parched landscape.
"I think he's losing who he really is," said Godsey, 64, a retiree from San Diego who lives in a new subdivision in Tolleson, Ariz., just outside Phoenix. Godsey said he voted for McCain, the Republican incumbent, in the state's 2004 Senate race.
"He doesn't come across like he used to. He's too much like a control freak: 'My way is the right way.' He's not going to bend," Godsey said last week as he tucked away groceries in his tract house at the desert's edge.
No one is ready to declare McCain vulnerable in Arizona -- he won 76.7% of the vote in 2004 and doesn't face reelection until 2010 -- but, for the first time in a long time, political analysts and watchers say they see signs of weakness.
The cause is the same force weighing down McCain nationally: The war in Iraq is just as unpopular in Arizona as elsewhere, and it has cost McCain support among independents, the state's fastest-growing block of voters.
At the same time, McCain's immigration reform proposal has alienated Arizona conservatives, who believe the senator supports amnesty for undocumented immigrants already in the United States -- a top issue here, where every year more than 100 people die trying to cross Arizona's deserts from Mexico.
"It's kind of like the dike is broken" for McCain's support, said Earl de Berg, a Phoenix pollster and analyst. "He was the most well-regarded politician in Arizona for a long time because of his national image. But some people who were not really all that enthusiastic are beginning to cut loose.... Anti-immigration people are going so far as to call him a traitor. That's pretty tough language to level against a war hero."
So far, De Berg said, the slippage has been measured only in anecdotes and an increase in critical letters to the editor in local papers.
