DOVER, N.H. — John McCain starts with the jokes. Always. Just before he segues into the decidedly unfunny issue of Iraq.

In fact, McCain begins his stump speech as if he's delivering a Johnny Carson monologue - that's the right era for a presidential candidate who's 70 years old.

If you're timing it, McCain usually gets to Iraq about eight or nine minutes into the speech. That's when I start paying attention. Iraq isn't simply the issue that defines this presidential campaign. It's the issue that defines McCain. It's his experience in dealing with issues like Iraq, he insists, that qualifies him to be the next president. It's his signature support for the war and the surge, though, that may be the chief reason he's not.

There's time for all that, however. First, he tells the Mo Udall joke. And he tells the twin Irishmen in a bar joke. He says the "media jerks" are a bunch of Trotskyites., and I'm wondering if anyone in the room is old enough to possibly get the reference. The crowd is eating it up, and so are the reporters. It's almost as if this were 2000, when he won the primary here in a shocking upset of George Bush. Then came South Carolina.

Now, at a Dover house party, McCain is standing on the staircase with his wife, Cindy, facing the deck that looks out onto one of the iced-over rivers that run past Three Rivers Farm.

And says McCain: "Welcome to this modest middle-income tract home. One of the differences between me and Senator Clinton is that Senator Clinton wants every American to have a home. I want every American to have a home like this one."

Then, it's on to Iraq. Unless he does the why-would-anyone-want-to-be-vice-president joke. "I spent all those years in a North Vietnamese prison camp. Kept in the dark. Fed scraps. Why would I want to go through that again?"

He's good at this. Ask anyone who books late-night TV. People had talked about him being flat the week before in Iowa, but I didn't see it here. He's 70 and, at times, he looks it. He's been through this before - and you wonder why anyone would want to do it again. It's hard. It's grinding. And in New Hampshire they insist that you make house calls. He consults his notes only to remember whom to thank, and then he really begins:

"First of all, I have to talk to you about Iraq. We're all sad. We're all frustrated. We all feel terrible about what has happened over the last four years in Iraq. This war was very badly mismanaged. I don't have to tell you that. We've paid a very heavy price because of that."

McCain likes to say that he has been the "greatest" critic of how the war has been handled. Some McCain critics debate that assertion. Certainly, he has been outspoken, particularly on Don Rumsfeld and even on Dick Cheney.

But It's hard to be the war's greatest critic and quite so publicly embrace the man who has presided over it all. McCain embraced - that's the nice word for it - Bush in 2004, and now, particularly since the surge, Bush's war has become McCain's war. It's the hug that won't quit.

McCain is good on what has gone wrong in Iraq. He says he'll give you the names of books that detail all that has gone wrong. But he also says, the surge is the one thing that could go right. At the same time, he freely admits he doesn't know what to do if the surge doesn't work.

"I've seen some signs of success," McCain says, " but I'm not going to hype them to you. It's one of the reasons why we're so frustrated, because there have been so many optimistic statements made about the war. You know, 'last throes,' 'a few dead-enders,' 'mission accomplished,' - all that stuff.

"I believe this can succeed. One thing I guarantee you, though, if we leave now then we'll see catastrophic consequences. Well see chaos. We'll see genocide. And we'll be back sooner or later."

We're on the bus, the Straight Talk Express, rolling along the the frozen New England countryside. Calling But to call the bus an express, though, might be a stretch. Leading the convoy is a slow-moving snowplow. It's an ordinary looking piece of machinery, which is what makes it perfect for a straight-talking photo op.

But the blizzard is very much yesterday's news. And as I sit on the bus, watching a flat-screen TV that doesn't get CBS - meaning no NCAA games - I'm thinking I've landed on a metaphor. Is McCain's time past? Is that why he's trailing Rudy Giuliani?

In 2000, McCain began with a van and some doughnuts and a few reporters. He likes to say he started at 3 percent in New Hampshire, with a margin of error of plus-or-minus 5 percentage points.

This year, the stories are all the same - about McCain trying to recapture that magic, and also the percentage points.

All the stories make the same points, too, about how what happened to the old McCain, the maverick McCain. Once, he opposed Bush tax cuts, saying Bill Gates didn't need a tax cut. Now, he's pro-tax cut. He's toning down his immigration stance. He's saying Roe vs. Wade should be overturned. Once he called Falwell and Robertson "agents of intolerance." Now, his tolerance level is way up.

And yet, conservatives still mistrust him because of the McCain-Kennedy immigration bill and the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill. Liberals and Bill Maher, meanwhile, wonder what happened to the old McCain. And Rudy Giuliani leads in most of the polls. This is a trip to win back, as they say, hearts and minds.

On the bus, McCain is the McCain of memory - accessible, if not quite as eager as he was in 1999. He's always been on the record, but in the YouTube era, there's on the record and there's on the record.He starts out with a story, of course, about Three Rivers Farm, and about the shipyard that used to be on the river and the brothel that served it. "Until," he says cheerfully, "the good ladies of Dover burned it down."

We go over the reading list - Fiasco, Cobra II, Looming Tower - and, of course, why this year seems so different."Things are different now," he says. "Everything changed after 9/11."

The flags are at half staff as McCain heads to Lebanon for a town hall meeting. Just down the road there is a memorial for Spc. Justin Rollins, 22, who was killed by an IED in Iraq near Samarra.When McCain asks for a moment of silence, the audience knows he's earned that much.

I talk to McCain supporter and nearby resident Jack Tarlin, who says the war is costing McCain.

"What he's basically saying is that doing the right thing on Iraq is more important than winning the presidency, which is a remarkable thing to do.

"There's so much anger in the country right now about Iraq. People seem to think that everything will change once we get a new president - no matter who the president is."

It's easy enough to find an opposing opinion. It's a big crowd at Lebanon High School. In New Hampshire, they shop candidates. At Dover, one guy even told me he was voting for Hillary Clinton. Marjie Bish, who is there with her husband, Eric, says of McCain, "I'm not saying he's pro-war. I just think he's a little more aggressive than I'd want him to be. The climate has changed since 2000. We weren't at war then."

It's about the war. The topic is as painfully close as Justin Rollins' nearby memorial service.

"When we lost in Vietnam," McCain says of his war, "we just came home. The war was over, and we just had to heal the wounds."He acts as if that was easy. He knows better, of course. And when the speech is finished and McCain climbs back onto the bus, heading off to yet one more town, I'm thinking how hard it will be for McCain to get through this war.

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