The Real McCain

Last week, correspondent JB (no, not that one; not that one, either) wrote me about John McCain, reminding me about Paul Krugman's incisive assessment of him from March of this year (it's still available via truthout if you'd like to revisit it yourself). I wrote about it the time, and I still think it stands as an excellent one-stop shop for understanding that McCain is not the straight talker he portrays himself to be (helped along to a considerable degree by the mainstream media).

But in case you're looking for a little variety, Matt Welch wrote a great piece in Sunday's LA Times that focuses on McCain's core beliefs as expressed in his own writing.

You can read 1,000 profiles of GOP presidential front-runner John McCain without encountering a single paragraph examining his core ideological philosophy. His career is filled with such distracting drama — torture at the Hanoi Hilton, noisy conversion to the campaign-finance-reform faith, political suicide on the Straight Talk Express — that by the time you're done with the highlights, and perhaps a few "maverick" anecdotes, time's up.

People are forever filling in the blanks with their own political fantasies. Third party candidate! John Kerry running mate! Far-right warmonger! Republican In Name Only! But with the announcement that the popular Arizona senator has formed his presidential exploratory committee, it's time for our long national guessing game to end.

Sifting through McCain's four bestselling books and nearly three decades of work on Capitol Hill, a distinct approach toward governance begins to emerge. And it's one that the electorate ought to be particularly worried about right now. McCain, it turns out, wants to restore your faith in the U.S. government by any means necessary, even if that requires thousands of more military deaths, national service for civilians and federal micromanaging of innumerable private transactions. He'll kick down the doors of boardroom and bedroom, mixing Democrats' nanny-state regulations with the GOP's red-meat paternalism in a dangerous brew of government activism.

Welch expands on this argument with roughly another 1,000 words, so he'll satisfy any need you may have for details. You know what to do.