No Clones And No Crazies

Mitt Romney did not expect the lush beauty of John and Cindy McCain’s Arizona ranch in the rust-colored high country near Sedona. He and his wife, Ann, were there recently for what was described as a “purely social” stay with some of McCain’s closest political advisers ( ü ber -operative Charlie Black, Sens. Joe Lieberman and Lindsay Graham) and a smattering of veep possibles: Govs. Bobby Jindal (Louisiana) and Charlie Crist (Florida) and Sen. Sam Brownback. “I expected an adobe home and clouds of dust in the yard,” Romney told me last week. Instead, he found a rambling wood-frame home on grassy bottomland dotted with orchards and a broad, fast-flowing stream framed by canyon walls. “It looked like Virginia down in there,” he said.

In McCain’s band-of-brothers world, it pays to know the turf. So if you are ...