MESA, ARIZ. — When John McCain arrived in the Valley of the Sun nearly three decades ago, he was weighed down with enough negatives to sink most budding politicians.
Some Arizonans dismissed him as a carpetbagger shopping for an available House seat -- and a future in Washington politics. Others were annoyed that he had left the wife who waited valiantly for his return from a Hanoi prison, and that he had then married a much younger bride. His political opponents derided his marriage into Arizona's Hensley beer distributor fortune as a "money-in-law" arrangement to boost his campaign coffers.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Saturday, June 21, 2008 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 39 words Type of Material: Correction
McCain's first race: A May 30 article in Section A about the start of John McCain's political career in the early 1980s said that Mesa, Ariz., "soon would be the state's second-largest city." It should have said "third-largest city."
It was a daunting start in his quest to retool himself from Navy war hero to political sensation.
"I was viewed with resentment by some for my lack of an Arizona pedigree," he acknowledged in a recent speech in Prescott, Ariz., a stop on his current campaign -- this one as the presumed presidential nominee of the GOP. "And in truth, I did not know as much about the state as one of its representatives to Congress should know."
In the end, it didn't matter. When a House seat opened in 1982, McCain bested three others in the Republican primary and trounced the token Democratic opposition in the heavily conservative state.
He was reelected in 1984 and then moved up, winning four Senate campaigns in a row. Although a moderate in a traditionally conservative state, he transformed himself into one of Arizona's favorite sons.
But it was in that first run that McCain showed his political mettle.
His life perhaps half-done, his war heroics behind him, McCain had tasted the nectar of official Washington as the Navy's liaison to the Senate and was eager to forge his own way. In what many describe as typical McCain-style determination, he plunged right in.
Though new to politics and Arizona, McCain quickly assembled a circle of influential friends and wealthy backers. And he was not shy about running on his record as a former Navy pilot and prisoner of war.
Some people look back and realize that in the early 1980s, McCain already was trying to position himself for higher office. But in his political debut, McCain showed he could be impulsive and sharp-tempered -- traits that still haunt him politically.
"I was in my 40s and in a hurry," he said in his autobiography. To wait, he said, "I had neither the time nor the patience." While other aspiring politicians mapped out 10-year plans to capture a seat in Washington, McCain worried that to sit out even one election cycle would mean "my chances were diminishing by the day."
