GAUGING THE ELECTORATE'S MOOD OVER BREAKFAST | April 21st 2008

At a diner in downtown Annapolis, Robert Guest ponders John McCain's popularity. The Republican frontrunner probably won't win Maryland, but even blue-state voters are suckers for stories of his hell-raising youth ...

From ECONOMIST.COM*

It's 7am and I'm waiting for John McCain. I'm at Chick and Ruth's Delly, a diner in downtown Annapolis. Every morning, they recite the pledge of allegiance here. Today, the presumptive Republican nominee is going to lead the pledge. He's not here yet, so I'm getting outside of a toothsome plate of bacon and grits.

Senator McCain probably won't win Maryland in November. Voters here are as blue as the crabs in Chesapeake Bay--they went for John Kerry by 56% to 43%, and for Al Gore by an even bigger margin.

Mr McCain is here to make one of a series of speeches about his life story. He spent four years at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, where he raised hell, failed to shine his boots properly and came within a whisker of being expelled.

He doesn't boast about his martial exploits as much as you'd expect. He lets the media do that for him. We're suckers for an exciting story, and it's not as if either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama has ever rolled though a fireball, broken three limbs ejecting from a plane or been beaten half to death in a North Vietnamese jail.

The Naval Academy evokes mixed memories for the Senator. He hated the discipline. By the end of his second year, he reckons, he had done enough punishment marches to take him to Baltimore and back 17 times (the two cities are about 30 miles apart).

Two aspects of Mr McCain's biography appeal immensely to voters. First, he is a hero. Second, he behaved disgracefully when he was young.

He caroused, dated strippers, crashed planes and got into fights. Once, when a girl invited him to meet her family, he arrived so drunk that he fell through the screen door of her parents' house. He comes from a long line of men with white uniforms but colourful characters. His father, a hard-drinking admiral whose beautiful wife had an identical twin sister, was sometimes asked how he could tell the two ladies apart. "That's their problem," he'd reply.

The diners at Chick and Ruth's are divided as to whether Mr McCain is an admirable warrior or a dangerous warmonger. A salesman sipping coffee thinks he'd make a good president. But a businessman chomping toast frets that he'd make Bush seem like a dove.

(*This is the first instalment of a diary on Maryland, published on Economist.com. Robert Guest is Washington correspondent for The Economist and the author of "The Shackled Continent".)