Who is the "real" John McCain

Excellent question.

The juxtaposition of a hands-off approach to governing with an embrace of intervention — albeit intervention at a moment of national crisis — was hardly unusual for Mr. McCain. Throughout his run for the presidency, he has often proposed policies that appear to be incompatible with one another, if not contradictory.

His foreign policy, for example, calls for ostracizing Russia for its undemocratic ways by expelling it from the Group of Eight industrialized powers, a hard-line position that he took long before Russia’s war with Georgia this summer. But Mr. McCain also calls for fostering closer ties with Russia to negotiate a new nuclear disarmament agreement.

Mr. McCain’s economic policy centers on extending President Bush’s deficit-swelling tax cuts and on cutting even more corporate taxes. But at the same time, Mr. McCain has vowed to balance the federal budget by the end of his term, a pledge he has reiterated even with the fiscal crisis threatening to throw the budget even deeper into the red.

His energy policy is built in part on curbing the use of fossil fuels to reduce global warming, and he was an early Republican supporter of the cap-and-trade approach. But as gas prices shot up he made a series of proposals aimed at making gasoline cheaper and more available, from his call for a gas-tax holiday last summer to his new support for drilling for oil offshore (but still not in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge).

Supporters of Mr. McCain cite his varying positions as evidence of his call-it-like-you-see-it independence from dogma, and maintain that it shows the kind of pragmatism and flexibility that has allowed him to reach across the aisle in the Senate to forge compromises on thorny issues like campaign finance reform and immigration.

But Mr. McCain’s detractors see his contradictory proposals as a cynical effort to be all things to all people, and as evidence that policy proposals often seem to take a back seat in his campaign to less tangible things like biography and character.

“He has the same set of must-solve-problem approaches to policy and politics as newspaper editorial boards tend to — he kind of careens from crisis to crisis saying ‘we’ve got to Do Something,’ with a capital D and a capital S,” said Matt Welch, the editor in chief of Reason magazine, who traced Mr. McCain’s evolving ideology in his book “McCain: The Myth of a Maverick” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

Now some might say that McCain is simply erratic, and they'd basically be correct. But see, the real problem for McCain is that at his core he just doesn't give much of a fuck. To put another way, he has no defined core principles to contradict.

And do you think Joe Lieberman whispered something in McCain's ear following a rare moment of clarity in which Lieberman remembered that, throughout western history, angry mobs have not been good things for the local Jews?