McCain watch

Updated.

When I first started thinking about John McCain, he had been the victim of some of Karl Rove's dirty tricks on behalf of George W. Bush in 2000 Republican primary. He was a sympathetic character for me then, a victim of the Rovians and a victim of torture as a prisoner in Vietnam. He is a media darling and has a reputation as a straight-talker. He is also seems to be the front-running GOP candidate for President in 2008.

However, the more I learn about him, the worse he seems. My biggest problem with him is his disingenuous and the fact that lots of so-called Bush-haters think that McCain differs significantly from Bush. Different package maybe, but same gunk inside. Distressingly, he seems to get a free ride from the press. This will become a really big problem if he becomes the GOP candidate. The last thing we need is another candidate who is popular with voters simply because they don't know what he's really like. What I would give for a real straight-talker, someone who told people what he really believed it and didn't pander to different audiences.

With McCain, what you see is not what you get. The so-called Maverick pretty consistently toes the party line and is just off-the-wall enough (but not on matters of substance) to maintain the rep as a maverick. But he has a record for being less than straight about lots of issues. Jane Hamsher, back at FDL, agrees that we need to watch out for him. In fact, she suggests that someone start a specialty blog devoted to "following McCain, digging into his history and covering what he does in depth on a day-to-day basis."

Witness this latest business at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference. Even Drudge was not impressed:

Instead of stopping the momentum of Majority Leader Bill Frist - widely anticipated to win the straw poll - the move seemed to expose the McCain camp's insincerity about its position with the base.

MyDD:

What's so interesting to me about these stories is the fact that the only two people openly trying to wreck the straw poll are McCain and one of his supporters. In urging attendees not to vote for him and instead write in Bush, McCain set himself up in a position where he can't lose. It's a total cop out in that, if he performs poorly, he can point to the fact that he wasn't trying to win anyway, going so far as to endorse someone else. And Lott calling the whole process "rigged" by Frist is the icing on that cake, stripping what remained of the poll's credibility. This is nothing but scorched earth. McCain obviously didn't feel he was strong enough to win the poll, so he had to tear it apart instead.

I'm sure that I'll have more on McCain later...

Update: The New York Times has an article about the Leadership Conference in which they report:

The extent of Mr. McCain's embrace of Mr. Bush was striking...

[...]

Mr. McCain went so far as to condemn the collapse of the port deal, saying that Congress had served Mr. Bush poorly by not permitting a 45-day review of security concerns, though he did not mention that the deal was sunk by fellow Republicans.

"The president deserved better," Mr. McCain said.

Mr. McCain praised the president for his failed effort to rewrite the Social Security system, said he supported the decision to go into Iraq and blistered at critics who suggested the White House had fabricated evidence of unconventional weapons in Iraq to justify the invasion.

"Anybody who says the president of the United States is lying about weapons of mass destruction is lying," Mr. McCain said.

What planet is this guy on? Praising Bush's attempt to destroy Social Security and defending the WMD lies? I tell you, under that charming good old boy facade is a real wing-nut!