(continued)

Birmingham, Alabama
I arrive at the hotel in downtown Birmingham while my colleagues are busing back from Gee's Bend, an isolated former sharecropping community 122 miles to the south, where McCain held an event. In the lobby, a team of fresh-scrubbed volunteers—girls in skirts, boys in ties—stand attentively in front of a table draped in pink cloth. Envelopes bearing the names of my colleagues are neatly laid out in alphabetical order. "Can I help you?" two of the volunteers say at once, laughing sweetly.

When I began traveling with McCain in the spring of 2007, his operations were not so tight. Short on funds and paralyzed by internal strife, the campaign seemed to be going belly-up just as Mitt Romney was surging. For the handful of us that hung around, McCain was compulsively, absurdly available. But the travel schedule was a constantly evolving mystery, and the hotels were generally, well, shitty. (The Wayfarer Inn in Manchester, New Hampshire, had leaky ceilings, plasticky sheets, televisions that didn't carry any of the major news channels, and, worst of all, a hotel bar that closed at 9 p.m.) McCain's tiny staff was much too overwhelmed figuring out how to get from point A to point B to worry about our comfort.

At one point, the campaign was so cash-strapped they stopped feeding us. To be fair, they stopped buying food for themselves as well. One overly bright, hungover morning in some steamy New England diner, a senior aide bought a bag of breakfast sandwiches with his own credit card and started handing them out. Which is how I ended up sitting beside John McCain with a mouthful of bacon and no questions to ask him. While other major campaigns are run like corporate events, McCain's was like Harold & Kumar Go to Concord. The pink tablecloths and meticulously arranged orientation kits underscore how different things are these days.

The changes began last January, after McCain's surprise win in the New Hampshire primary. The next morning, a bleary press crew boarded a private charter out of Manchester at 6 a.m. Our ranks had swelled almost tenfold overnight, to something like 50. I had an interview scheduled with the candidate during the flight, so once we reached cruising altitude, I picked my way to the panels separating the first-class cabin, where he was sitting with his wife, Cindy, and his daughters Meghan and Sidney. McCain looked up from his newspaper and motioned me over. "Ana! Have a seat!" he said. I sat. He asked if I minded if he finished the paper before we started. I didn't. "Would you like a section?" he asked. No, I replied, I'd just go over my notes.

"Suns are going to acquire Shaq," he grunted, not really expecting an answer. Meanwhile, one of his aides was glaring at me. After the interview—mostly about his relationship with the party base, blah, blah, blah—the aide buttonholed me.

"You can't just go up there! You have to wait for one of us," she said plaintively. "Things have changed!"

Things kept on changing. Travel on planes is much less conducive to a road-trip vibe, and the freewheeling bull sessions have become much rarer. In the old days, McCain likely would have traveled from Gee's Bend back to Birmingham on the press bus. Today he took off for a fund-raiser in an SUV.

I find two of McCain's senior staffers drinking beers on the patio of the Birmingham hotel (you always find reporters and campaign staff at hotel bars). Steve Schmidt, McCain's top strategist, and Mark Salter, a long-serving and long-suffering advisor, are on their second round. Other reporters, back after a slow and bumpy bus trip, trickle in after a while. Discussion turns to the events at Gee's Bend, including the moment when an elderly black women, a quiltmaker, sang gospel songs to McCain.

"Awwwwk-waaaard," opines a television producer.

"Come on, now," Salter says, sipping his beer. "It was moving!" Eyes are rolled. This is what passes for spin in McCain World.

This whole trip is predicated on the press passing along the sort of scenes we're discussing now. "It's the 'McCain Visits the Poor Black People Tour,'" notes someone. "McCain Visits the Poor and/or Black People Tour," I correct—the people of Inez, Kentucky, a later stop, are mostly white. Salter scowls.