Once rivals, McCain and Romney make up

By MICHAEL COOPER and MICHAEL LUO

updated 9:16 p.m. ET July 18, 2008

WASHINGTON - It was not so long ago that the idea that Senator John McCain would even entertain tapping Mitt Romney, his bitterest primary rival, as his running mate would have seemed preposterous. On the strange-bedfellows scale, it would have ranked somewhere between Tom teaming up with Jerry and the Red Sox joining forces with the Yankees.

The McCain-Romney feud was the juiciest of the Republican primary season, featuring two men who generally just did not seem to like each other. Mr. Romney said Mr. McCain would set a “liberal Democrat course as president.” He said that one of Mr. McCain’s proudest accomplishments, his campaign finance bill, took “a whack at the First Amendment,” and told voters grappling with money woes that Mr. McCain “has said time and again that he doesn’t understand the economy.” Mr. McCain, for his part, witheringly cast Mr. Romney as a flip-flopper.

But that was then.

These days Mr. Romney, the telegenic former Massachusetts governor, is serving as a wingman extraordinaire for Mr. McCain. He is ubiquitous on cable television, where he talked up Mr. McCain’s economic proposals on CNN, Fox News and MSNBC on Wednesday alone. He has dutifully raised money for Mr. McCain. And Mr. Romney has developed a reputation as a campaign surrogate who can talk fluently about the economy, and who has roots in Michigan, an important swing state. Now Mr. Romney is attracting perhaps more buzz than anyone else as a potential running mate for the man he once derided.

And if the initial rapprochement between the two men seemed a tad forced after Mr. Romney pulled out of the race last winter, something approaching warmth seems to be entering their relationship now. At a fund-raiser in Albuquerque this week, Mr. McCain even aimed a gentle jibe at Mr. Romney — raising eyebrows among veteran McCain watchers, who know that his irreverent teasing and sarcasm are often his way of showing affection.

“Mitt and Ann Romney and Cindy and I have become good friends, and I’m appreciative every time I see Mitt on television on my behalf,” Mr. McCain told donors at the fund-raiser, according to a pool report of the event. “He does a better job for me than he did for himself, as a matter of fact.”

The McCain campaign has been notably tight-lipped about its vice-presidential selection process. But when asked about it, Mr. McCain has tended to say that he does not believe geographical considerations matter much in modern politics — which might make the Michigan argument weaker — and that he is most concerned about finding someone who shares his beliefs and who could take over as president if necessary.

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Of course in politics the pragmatic often trumps the personal, and rivals have often wound up sharing tickets, from Lyndon B. Johnson signing on as John F. Kennedy’s running mate to George Bush signing on as Ronald Reagan’s (after memorably excoriating Mr. Reagan’s fiscal proposals as “voodoo economics”). But that was all in the pre-YouTube era, when political jabs had a much shorter shelf life.

But for Mr. McCain, who likes to surround himself with friends on the campaign trail, the personal is known to be an important factor. To that end, a social weekend Mr. McCain held for the Romneys and other supporters at his ranch near Sedona, Ariz., this spring was seen as an important turning point in their relationship, and a moment when the McCains and the Romneys seemed to decide that they could get along after all.

The former rivals spoke the lingua franca of men who are unsure of what to talk about — sports — and also talked about their families, politics and some of the funniest moments of the campaign, including the many gustatory delights of the Iowa State Fair, according to several people who were either at the gathering or were later told about it who were granted anonymity to describe the private get-together.

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