John McCain sewed up the Republican nomination last February, but his cash-strapped campaign didn’t conduct its first serious poll until April. At that time, McCain still enjoyed the luxury of planning for the general election while Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were busy slugging it out. But when pollster Bill McInturff briefed McCain’s inner circle, he had some sobering news to deliver. “He said, ‘This is going to be the worst environment since 1992 for a Republican, and it could get even worse,’” top McCain aide Charlie Black told me recently. Black paused a moment before adding, “And now, it’s gotten worse.”

Not just worse — historically so. No Republican since the members of Congress who ran in the Watergate mid-term elections of 1974 has faced as many obstacles as John McCain does now. Among them:

— The difficulty of succeeding a two-term president of one’s own party — a feat accomplished only once since Truman succeeded FDR.

— The even greater difficulty of succeeding a two-term president of one’s own party who has a job-approval rating of 25 percent and a disapproval rating of 70 percent, as George W. Bush had in a recent Gallup poll.

— The historically high proportion of Americans who say the country is on the wrong track — as high as 90 percent in a recent Washington Post survey.

— The enthusiasm gap, with far fewer Republicans than Democrats saying they are fired up about supporting their candidate.

— The Republicans’ deficit in party identification, which ranges between five and ten percentage points.

— The financial crisis, including the 5,500-point fall in the Dow Jones Industrial Average between November 2007 and October 2008.

— The war in Iraq, with nearly 4,200 Americans dead and a majority of Americans judging that the gains have not been worth the cost.

— Republican gloom on Capitol Hill, where nearly two dozen House Republicans have chosen to retire rather than face reelection, while Democrats stand a chance of winning a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.

— Barack Obama’s enormous advantage in fundraising.

— McCain’s continuing problems with the Republican base, which persist despite his selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate.

It’s difficult to imagine a more daunting set of circumstances. Inside the campaign, McCain has displayed his well-known stoicism, mixed with a dose of black humor, in the face of each new obstacle. Among his staff, it has become something of a mantra to say that whatever has to be done, no matter what it is, will have to be done the hard way. “You could think of this as trying to summit a mountain,” one senior aide, who asked not to be named, told me. “Both campaigns have to summit the mountain. In most elections, one campaign has some kind of advantage over the other — maybe they get a ten-minute or a half-hour head start — but both sides have to climb the same face of the mountain. In this election, we’re not climbing the same face of the mountain. They’re climbing the side of the mountain with boardwalks and latte stands and playgrounds for the kids, and we’re climbing the side of the mountain with axes and ice picks, and one slip and you’re dead.”

BEARING THE BURDEN

Ask McCain’s top aides about the obstacles and they’ll remind you that before the financial crisis hit, as recently as mid-September, the race was tied. On September 17, the RealClearPolitics average of polls showed McCain and Obama each with precisely 45.7 percent of the vote. The message Team McCain took from the numbers was that McCain had overcome the challenges that could have sunk his campaign in the previous months. “You had the red states red, and in the blue states, we were coming on,” the senior adviser told me.

And then came the financial meltdown. “We’re not talking about a bad jobs number, or a day of bad economic news,” the aide said. “No — this was a global financial crisis the likes of which the world has not seen since 1929.” The crisis stopped McCain cold and helped Obama surge to his biggest lead of the race. The McCain campaign had one more obstacle to surmount. But the problem for the campaign was that, in the eyes of many voters, the economic crisis wasn’t a totally new, discrete event but rather a continuation of some of the existing problems McCain thought he had overcome. People have been worried about the economy for quite a while, and many of them blame George W. Bush. Their new anxiety in the crisis showed up in even lower job-approval ratings for the president, and the Bush Burden — which McCain thought he had escaped in September — returned with a vengeance.

It’s something McCain has struggled with from the very beginning, when he began contemplating a second run for the presidency after the failure of his 2000 primary battle against Bush. In 2006, as McCain laid the groundwork for his present campaign, it appeared his biggest problem — and also the best opportunity to differentiate himself from Bush — was the war in Iraq. Bush seemed to have no idea how to stop Iraq’s growing sectarian violence, and his approval rating fell with each new episode of mayhem. At the beginning of the year, it stood at 43 percent in Gallup. A few months later, it was 31 percent, with a disapproval rating of 65 percent.

At first, McCain and his team thought Bush’s situation would improve. “I’ll be honest with you, I didn’t think his rating would stay at Nixon-like levels,” John Weaver, who was a close McCain aide at the time, told me recently. “I thought it would go up.” But it didn’t. And with each tick downward, McCain had more work to do. When George H. W. Bush campaigned to succeed Ronald Reagan in 1988, Reagan’s Gallup approval rating was in the middle 50s, with a disapproval rating in the mid to high 30s. McCain never expected to be running to succeed a popular president, but he was surprised to see Bush fall into the 20s and stay there. It was at that point — with Bush down, pressure to withdraw from Iraq increasing, and Republicans wobbling — that McCain defied the president and made the bet that won him the Republican nomination. Even some of McCain’s closest advisers weren’t on board. “There was definitely nervousness about the surge, and not everyone supported the idea,” former McCain aide Mark McKinnon told me in an e-mail exchange. “On the other hand, when it came to matters of national security, we all deferred completely to McCain, trusting his judgment over our own.”

Republican primary audiences responded well to McCain’s daring and courage. Advocating the surge helped McCain establish a measure of independence from Bush. But in 2007, McCain squandered much of the progress he had made. He had been hurt among the Republican base by his stand alongside Bush on immigration, and his campaign virtually imploded when he discovered that its spending far exceeded its fundraising. McCain very nearly dropped out of the race. But more important, in retrospect, the crisis left him struggling to stay alive at a time when he should have been reinforcing that image of himself as independent of Bush. “After the meltdown, we were in total survival mode,” McKinnon told me. “We became political cockroaches, scavenging off the land. We literally were campaigning one day to pay expenses for the next day. We didn’t have a lot of time to think about the big picture except that when it came to Iraq, we were ‘all in.’”

But the Bush Burden continued to drag on the campaign; the success of the surge did not change the president’s approval numbers. By January 2008, Bush was still in the low 30s, with disapproval in the mid-60s. It was the same on Super Tuesday. By October, as the campaign reached its final stages, Bush had sunk to 25, with a 70 percent disapproval rating. What to do? McCain received a lot of advice to distance himself from Bush. But he needed the votes of that 25 percent of the electorate that still approved of the president. And with Republican voters putting national security high on their list of concerns, was McCain supposed to throw over the man whose administration had kept the United States free from a major terrorist attack in the seven years after September 11? Bush had made some serious mistakes, but there was real danger in appearing to run away from him.

Given all that, McCain’s biggest challenge was not to distance himself from Bush but to move beyond him. “One of the things you saw Sarkozy do in France was he just made a very clean break with Chirac,” David Winston, a Republican pollster who works with the GOP leadership in the House and Senate, told me. “He said, ‘Whatever [Chirac] has done, he’s an admirable person, but we’re going in a different direction.’ With McCain, he wouldn’t be passing judgment on Bush — just saying that, given the new circumstances, we have to go in a new direction, and this is the direction I intend to go.” For whatever reason, McCain never quite embraced that approach in a systematic way. Instead, he began to say that “change is coming,” which sounded like a knock-off of Barack Obama’s theme. The result is that the Bush Burden remains McCain’s biggest obstacle today.

‘THE OPPOSITE OF RISK-AVERSE’

The Obama campaign has taken to accusing McCain of being “erratic,” of displaying a dangerous impetuousness when it comes to handling serious issues. But Obama has the luxury of the political fundamentals’ favoring his campaign and hurting McCain’s. In the face of that, McCain’s strategy has been to try a lot of different things. “There has been a recognition about the difficulty of the challenge,” the unnamed senior adviser told me, “which is to condition the campaign to be the opposite of risk-averse.”

Exhibit A of McCain’s non-risk-averse approach was his hastily made decision to suspend campaigning to go to Washington for talks on Congress’s $700 billion economic-bailout plan. It was a good idea — McCain is, after all, a senator, and there was momentous work to be done on Capitol Hill — but McCain couldn’t follow through. Yes, he helped bring House Republicans to the negotiating table, but after his much-publicized return to Washington, McCain didn’t have a proposal to offer. While it is true that no one else had a clear idea of what action was necessary, McCain’s empty-handed trip to Washington was perhaps symbolic of his sometimes struggling effort to find a clear and coherent economic message.

The Obama campaign responded by calling McCain “erratic.” But the truth is much more complicated. In the various crises his campaign has endured, McCain has stayed remarkably steady when some others were ready to give up. At those times, McCain talked about keeping a “steady strain,” an old Navy term that refers to keeping the proper level of tension on ropes tying one ship to another, to prevent abrupt motions that could snap the lines. It was advice to maintain equilibrium, not to get too up about good news or too down about bad news.

Now, as he presses against the strongest political headwinds in many, many years, he’s trying to follow his own advice. Looking back to the early days of the campaign, John Weaver told me that McCain, politically, was “facing a Category 1 hurricane” when he began his race. Now, Weaver says, “it’s a Category 5.”

Despite it all, McCain pushes on, propelled by a drive most people just don’t have. I remember traveling to Iowa in the fall of 2007, after McCain’s campaign meltdown had left him in dreadful financial straits. We were going to the farthest reaches of northwest Iowa, near the Minnesota border. McCain was staying in a Holiday Inn Express in the middle of nowhere — when you walked out the door, the smell of fertilizer got your attention pretty quickly — and he was traveling around in a minivan because his bus had broken down. He spent his days talking to small groups — sometimes really small groups — in diners and pizza joints.

He was 71 years old at the time, wealthy, with a safe and senior spot in the Senate and a career that few, if any, public servants could match. On top of that, his campaign had blown up in an explosion of mismanagement and bad feelings that had many political insiders and journalists writing its obituary. And yet there he was, plugging away, every day, animated by something that is unique to his character.

And why shouldn’t he feel that he can overcome just about anything? This is a man who has dodged death — real death, not political death — many times. There’s more to the story than his enduring five and a half years as a prisoner of war — just look at the fuzzy old black-and-white film of McCain on July 29, 1967, leaping off the refueling probe of his jet after it had been struck by a missile on the deck of the USS Forrestal. It was one of the worst disasters in Navy history, killing 132 men. McCain, miraculously, walked away from it. On one of those trips around Iowa, sitting in the back of his bus — after his campaign found one that worked — McCain described the days after the Forrestal fire. He was at a meeting in which the commanding officer asked if anyone would like to volunteer to transfer to another carrier, the USS Oriskany, which had itself undergone a fire, although a less serious one. Describing himself as if he had been an outside observer, McCain said that he saw his hand go up to volunteer when he could have sought out a less dangerous assignment; on that day in Iowa, 40 years later, he still seemed a little surprised by what he had done. But off he went, and it was from the Oriskany that he took off on the mission that led to his capture and imprisonment, events that would inform so much of his subsequent political career.

The lesson is that McCain is always searching for something new to overcome. Of course he would rather not be facing quite so many political adversities at once, but he is a man who, if he makes it out of one scrape, puts himself in position for another.

And now, he’s doing it again. “How many times, my friends, have the pundits written off the McCain campaign?” he asked a crowd in Wisconsin on October 10. “We’re gonna fool ’em again. We’re gonna fool ’em one more time.” A few days later, in Virginia, McCain described the forces arrayed against him and declared, “My friends, we’ve got them just where we want them.” People in the audience laughed. But in some sense, deep inside, McCain meant it.