Far Cry Instincts Follow

Todd Purdum, who has been traveling with Sen. John McCain, says the Arizona's senator's once warm relationship with the press has cooled considerably as his aides force him to stay on message. "It's a far cry from when I last spent quality airtime with McCain, in the fall of 2006, as we logged thousands of miles over several days in small planes, often with no traveling companions but each other. No topic was off-limits, and virtually no answer was off the record." Purdum also reports that McCain is struggling "at having to rein in his natural instincts, in no small part because he well knows that it was his close relationship with the media that kept him alive a year ago when so much of the smart money -- and so many of the big mouths -- in his party had left him for dead."