The Bromance of Mac & Graham

“While most politicians collect allies, McCain collects followers,” Eve Fairbanks writes in the New Republic, and there’s no better example than Sen. Lindsey Graham, McCain’s “sidekick” and foil in the nation's most prominent “bromance.” McCain’s top stump surrogate is no stranger to the costs of McCain’s friendship: non-stop travel and speaking schedules, being the butt of fraternal jibing, and tolerating his idiosyncratic obsessions ... like, er, birdwatching.

“Like Dean Martin's Jerry Lewis,” Fairbanks writes, “Graham is not a mere foil or fall guy but McCain's ride-along id,” the alter-ego the candidate would like to be if his campaign wasn’t urging him to dial down the antics, the wisecracks and the sometimes-unpresidential jestering. But Graham goes on in spite of campaign aides’ pleas, “still playing an unreconstructed, freewheeling McCainiac.” (More John McCain stories.)