McCain hopes for top job as campaign enters final day

New York, Nov 3 (PTI) Republican Presidential candidate John McCain has "liberated" himself from the irritable, edgy candidate a month ago and is now relieved and hopeful as the campaign for the top job is almost over, a media report said Monday.

McCain's aides were quoted by the New York Times as
saying that he is relieved that the race is almost over and
for the most part out of his hands.

The Republican candidate is also buoyed — and
obsessed, his staff says — with polls that show the race
tightening in some battleground states and allow him hope that
he might still have a shot.

He is also now in the role that he finds at least
familiar, if not comfortable — the scruffy underdog barking at
Washington.

"If we were 10 points up, we'd all be a little bit
happier," Mark Salter, one of McCain's closest aides, was
quoted as saying. "But you throw a lot of stuff at the guy,
and he fights all the harder."

Graham and McCain's other travelling buddy, Senator
Joseph I. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, are a
frequent part of the road show and will fly home with him to
Arizona in the small hours Tuesday morning, the Times says.

Aides say they are essential to improving the
candidate's mood, Graham in particular. McCain's wife, Cindy,
who is now constantly at his side, introduces Graham at each
stop as "my husband's best friend."

"He's like campaign Prozac," Nicolle Wallace, a top
adviser to McCain was quoted as saying. "They just sit there
and laugh."

McCain has also been moved these last few days, his
aides say, by the panorama of America that has unfolded before
him. He has made appearances at high school football fields,
town squares and lumberyards, and he held a nostalgic final
town hall meeting Sunday night here in Peterborough one of the
earliest stops of his first presidential campaign in 2000.

On Friday McCain marvelled to aides about the beauty
of the rolling Appalachian foothills on Ohio's border with
West Virginia. On Saturday, his motorcade sped through a
tunnel of gold leaves in Bucks County, Pa.

Two hours later, the caravan was navigating Midtown
Manhattan so McCain could open "Saturday Night Live" with Tina
Fey, where he good-naturedly mocked his circumstances.

Whatever happens Tuesday, McCain's aides say he is
too much a student of history not to be astonished and humbled
by his own place in it.

As a prisoner of war in Vietnam, McCain mused to his
cellmates about becoming president one day. Now he is amazed
that a candidate who was left for politically dead a year ago
has managed to "lurch" — his own choice of verb from a recent
interview — toward the finish line at all. That is not to say
that he is about to ease up on his decade-long pursuit of the
White House.

"He wants this very badly," Graham said. PTI D.S.