--- title: Double Trouble description: After punching Obama hard, can John McCain and Lindsey Graham shake their rival's hand? canonical: https://time.com/archive/6596240/double-trouble/ author: Michael Crowley article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2013-03-11T04:00:00.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-03-20T23:32:32.398Z article:section: Politics og:title: Double Trouble og:description: After punching Obama hard, can John McCain and Lindsey Graham shake their rival's hand? og:url: https://time.com/archive/6596240/double-trouble/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: TIME og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Double Trouble twitter:description: After punching Obama hard, can John McCain and Lindsey Graham shake their rival's hand? twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production --- * [Politics](/section/politics/) # Double Trouble (11 Mar 2013) by [Michael Crowley](https://time.com/author/michael-crowley/) Mar 11, 2013 4:00 AM UTC by [Michael Crowley](https://time.com/author/michael-crowley/) Mar 11, 2013 4:00 AM UTC I’ll hit him high … … I’ll hit him low When republican senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham arrived for an Oval Office meeting with President Obama on Feb. 26, an icebreaker was in order. And so, teeing up a potshot at his close pal’s up-country South Carolina drawl, McCain cracked wise with the President: “When I travel around the world with Lindsey, I usually have to translate his remarks into English.” The quip captured much of what makes McCain and Graham the most interesting duo in Washington right now. The two Senators are “amigos,” as they call themselves, and merry about the partisan mischief they make–usually at Obama’s expense. They also have a kinship rare in Washington politics, a mix of real admiration and political symbiosis. “He is like a son to me,” the 76-year-old McCain says of the 57-year-old Graham. “I have watched him grow” as a politician. “It’s been a real joy,” Graham says of working with McCain. They may infuriate Democrats with their months-long fixation on the September 2012 terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya and tactics like their recent delays of the nominations of Chuck Hagel and John Brennan to run the Pentagon and CIA. But at a time of divided government and silly sequesters they’re relevant enough for the President to summon them to the White House to talk about immigration reform. Obama knows that getting a bipartisan reform bill will probably require cutting a deal with two of the GOP’s top proponents of overhauling the immigration system. Never mind that McCain has accused Obama of “a massive cover-up” in Benghazi or that Graham has said Obama could have saved lives if he’d taken more action the night of the attacks. But in Washington you can smack someone with one hand while extending the other for a handshake. Which is why McCain and Graham are keen to make it clear they carry no grudge against Obama. “I’ve been the same way with other Presidents. I called for the resignation of Rumsfeld over Iraq,” McCain says. “It’s not personal,” Graham says. “This is a business to me. You disagree on Monday, and on Tuesday you work together.” The Buddy Movie Graham and McCain have been friends for more than a decade, a partnership born of their shared passion for national security (McCain was a Navy pilot, Graham is still an Air Force Reserve lawyer), a willingness to poke their party’s base in the eye and an uncanny knack for attracting the media’s attention. More surprising and quotable than bland party leaders like Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, they are virtual fixtures on the influential Sunday talk shows, a platform they use to drive the Washington agenda. Last March, McCain’s 64th appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press set the show’s all-time record. Graham may break it someday, having appeared on at least one Sunday show five of the past 10 weeks. The pairing benefits them both. McCain, for his part, seems to relish grooming a protégé (though he insists that Graham is more “partner” than disciple). Having Graham by his side may also insulate him from suggestions that he’s still embittered by his 2008 loss to Obama. “I have no reason on God’s green earth to be angry,” McCain insists–so animated that he hops out of his chair and takes a quick lap around his desk for no apparent reason. “It’s interesting to me that if I’m critical of a President who’s a Republican, well, it’s the brave maverick taking on his own party. And then when it’s a President of the other party? Ah! It’s the angry old man again that’s out there, bitter and angry.” For Graham, McCain offers credibility with the party establishment, not to mention a black belt in manhandling the media. Graham might also need McCain’s support for his very survival in politics. Tea Party activists still haven’t forgiven Graham for the way he played footsie with Obama early in the President’s first term on issues ranging from immigration to climate change to closing the Guantánamo Bay prison camp. Back then, Graham almost seemed to revel in defying his party’s base. “Everything I’m doing now … is completely opposite of where the Tea Party movement’s at,” Graham told the New York Times in June 2010\. He called the movement “just unsustainable” and said, “It will die out.” It didn’t, of course, and Graham has since backed away from his conciliatory positions. But many South Carolina Republicans–some of the nation’s most conservative voters–haven’t forgotten that history. “He’s basically a Democrat in Republican clothing,” says Michael Brady, a Tea Party activist from Boiling Springs, S.C., who recalls a meeting with Graham early in Obama’s first term. “Mr. Graham told us that he wasn’t going to listen to the Tea Party, that he would be voting his conscience,” Brady says. Graham has yet to draw a serious primary challenger, though he predicts he will sooner or later. (“Oh, I definitely expect that.”) Working with the President on immigration reform–“Grahamnesty,” his critics call it–isn’t likely to help his chances of running unchallenged. Neither is his recent statement that he could accept a deficit-reduction deal that traded higher tax revenue for cuts to entitlements. Asked about that, McCain grins the way one friend might when the other is in trouble with his spouse. “Lindsey likes to say things that other people won’t say,” McCain says. Still, Graham has $4.5 million in his war chest and polls show his approval rating up among South Carolina Republicans. This may be the Benghazi effect. Conservative media have been fixated on the attack as an alleged symbol of Obama’s failed foreign policy and Nixonian dishonesty. Hammering at the issue has won Graham and McCain copious airtime on outlets like Fox News. To the delight of conservatives, their successful campaign to torpedo Susan Rice’s prospects to become Secretary of State after she relied on some questionable talking points about the attack shook the President’s cool. “If Senator McCain and Senator Graham and others want to go after somebody, they should go after me,” Obama snapped at a November press conference. Democrats suspect that Graham and McCain are playing a clever political game, making exaggerated hay over Libya to score points with conservatives who might freak out over potential deals with Obama on immigration and the budget. (McCain, too, has hinted he could accept higher tax revenues in a budget deal.) “What I’ve seen is Senator McCain doing what he can to protect Graham’s flank while Graham is out there using the media to beef up his conservative bona fides,” says Jim Manley, a former aide to Senate majority leader Harry Reid. More recently, Graham and McCain trained their fire on Hagel and Brennan, delaying Obama’s nominee for Defense Secretary and now his pick for CIA chief with demands for more Benghazi facts, including details about exactly what the President was doing during the attack. (The White House says that Obama was in close touch with his national security team and that every effort was made to save the besieged Americans.) Hagel was confirmed just after McCain and Graham visited the White House. But as Graham told the pack of reporters who swarmed him at the Capitol that afternoon, “We still have Brennan.” With immigration, the amigos are about to face a mighty challenge. There are few things the GOP base hates more than the idea of amnesty. McCain’s 2008 campaign almost didn’t make it past the New Hampshire primary because of anger over his immigration position. At a recent Arizona town hall, McCain parried several questioners on the issue, including one who suggested that only guns can keep the border secure and another whose invective led McCain to call him a jerk. But both men insist that their party’s survival requires an end to its anti-Latino image. And their trip to the White House, which both sides called constructive, proved that the amigos’ slap-and-stroke act might just be working. As Obama has reached out to them–including by phone days before the meeting–their Benghazi rhetoric has seemed to cool. Asked whether he can imagine the Libyan trail leading to impeachable offenses, Graham says no. “This is not the first Administration to shade national security matters for their own benefit,” he says. “It’s nothing that hasn’t been done before in some fashion.” Reflecting on his recent history with the President, Graham says, “Over time, I think the President kind of went one way and I went the other. 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