McCain unbelievably superstitious

Okay, I have my quirks, but this is ridiculous. Do we really want a president who isn't going to respond to that 3 am phone call until he can find his lucky feather?

McCain channeling all his luck toward 2008 race


April 16, 2008

By Joseph Curl - Don't try to pass a salt shaker to John McCain. He won't take it from your hand because it's bad luck.

The Arizona senator also won't throw a hat on a bed — it means death will soon visit the household — but he regularly carries 31 cents in lucky change in his pocket.

Now the presumptive Republican presidential nominee has converted his staff to his famously superstitious ways. Whenever anyone says something optimistic — especially about this fall's general election — a slew of staffers join him in knocking on wood.

"That's an ugly habit I've picked up myself," Brooke Buchanan, the senator's national press secretary, said with a laugh. "We were in Kansas City ... and someone mentioned winning in November, and three of us knocked on wood. We don't want to jinx anything. We're all very superstitious people."

Top adviser Mark Salter also has been influenced.

"I grew a beard in 2000 and didn't shave until the campaign was over, and I did it this time, too. That's my little superstition. I probably won't shave it until November," he said, adding that he's not sure if Mr. McCain "considers it lucky, or if he considers it an eyesore."

Mr. McCain has dozens of superstitions and rituals, many stemming from his days as a Navy fighter pilot, a notoriously superstitious bunch. He carries a lucky feather, a lucky compass and a lucky penny — not to mention a lucky nickel and a lucky quarter.

"He had so many of them that we had to cut down. It was like a change purse in his pocket," Miss Buchanan said, laughing.

Joseph W. McQuaid, publisher of the Union Leader newspaper of Manchester, N.H., gave Mr. McCain a lucky penny he'd found (heads up, of course) just before Mr. McCain won the New Hampshire primary, on Jan. 8.

Mr. McCain also pocketed a nickel he found outside his hotel in Columbia, S.C., just before that state's primary — his second primary win.

As for the quarter, "I think he just found that on the ground," Miss Buchanan said. "It's always what he finds, heads up."

Still, it's what she called "a lucky drummer boy quarter" — a 1976 bicentennial commemorative quarter.

He doesn't have a dime — a lucky one, that is — but he almost picked up one in January. When he went to the Republican debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, Mr. McCain noticed a shiny dime on the stage floor. He stooped for a closer look, but it was tails up — rejected.

"The Irish have a thing about heads and tails," said Catherine Yronwode, co-founder of the Lucky Mojo Curio Co. and an authority on talismans. "People of Irish descent think that if a coin is heads up, it's lucky; if it's tails up, leave it, let the poor have it."

Irish, indeed. On St. Patrick's Day in Chicago, "this guy had a lucky four-leaf clover that was laminated," Miss Buchanan said. "He pulled it out of his pocket and told the senator it had brought him good luck, and now the senator carries it around in his wallet."

"Am I superstitious? I'm that," Mr. McCain said. "But I don't think I'm alone there."

Especially among his staff.

"I've always been superstitious as well, like, I hate the number 13," Miss Buchanan said.

Oddly, the campaign's headquarters is on the 13th floor of a high rise in the Crystal City neighborhood of Arlington, even though the elevator button says "M."

"Why did you have to bring that up? It is the M floor, the M floor, for McCain!" Miss Buchanan said.
- [link to www.washingtontimes.com]




A Candidate's Lucky Charms
John McCain Is Hoping Superstition Will See Him Through

By Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, February 19, 2000; Page C01

COLUMBIA, S.C.—If John McCain wins today's South Carolina primary, some will credit his tax plan, while others will point to his war record. Those in the know, however, will attribute victory to the Spring Hill Lizard.

The reptile, believed to have mysterious powers, is the property of one Lanny Wiles, McCain's trip director. Wiles used it to help Texas A&M beat Nebraska, and to force a golfing opponent to miss a $100 putt. He employs the lizard (which isn't a lizard at all but a certain spell cast by wiggling the right pinkie) only on rare occasions, such as today. "We use it only if we're at Def Con One," says John Weaver, McCain's political director and occasional witch doctor.

This isn't the first campaign to honor strange superstitions. During Bill Clinton's 1992 run, James Carville was known to wear the same underwear for days at a time when things were going well. But this time, there's a new twist: The candidate himself is the leading shaman. He keeps on his person a lucky compass, a lucky feather, a lucky penny and, at times, a lucky rock. He assigns Weaver to carry his lucky pen--a Zebra Jimnie Gel Rollerball (medium, blue)--at all times. For added luck, he wears his magical L.L. Bean rubber-soled dress shoes.

"I'm wearing my lucky shoes from today till Sunday," McCain says from his bus on Wednesday. At the moment, his pockets contain the compass, feather (from a tribal leader) and penny (flattened, in his wallet). When McCain once misplaced his feather, there was momentary panic in the campaign, until his wife found it in one of his suits. When the compass went missing once, McCain assigned his political director to hunt it down. Weaver found it, and it remains safe, knock wood.

- [link to www.washingtonpost.com]