"FLIGHTY AS HELL."

But seriously, Matt, how do you really feel about John McCain?

He's flighty as hell. For years, he's an orthodox conservative. Then he's an orthodox conservative who also supports this one ill-conceived campaign finance restriction. Then he's running for president. Now suddenly Pat Roberston and Jerry Falwell are forces of evil. Then Bush beats him with some sleazy campaign stunts. Now he wants to regulate carbon emissions! And import drugs from Canada! Bush sucks, he's evil and corrupt and incompetent and wrecking the country and oh he's up for re-election well of course I'll strongly support him etc., etc,. etc. Then the establishment warms up to him so he warms up to the establishment. So now he supports the Bush tax cuts and the Bush plan for Iraq and the Bush immigration plan. Oh wait voters don't like the Bush immigration plan? Well then I've learned my lesson and I was never for amnesty and by the way I'm now against carbon curbs. But you know what's great? The surge. And Joe Lieberman in his crazy uncle phase. And David Petraeus. Petraeus is so great that I think civilian control of the military is obsolete and I won't say whether or not I think tax cuts increase revenue but let's cut spending a lot, eh?In other words, on eighty percent of issues McCain seems to me to be making it up as he goes along. At his best, he's cravenly flip-flopping according to the political headwinds. But other times, he just seems to be acting on whim or out of pique. Or he's coming to middle-ground positions that don't make sense, like "global warming is real and we should stop it, but only through measures that wouldn't actually stop it!" The rest of the time, he's just really, really, really committed to the military and to militarism. Worst of all, like all the other candidates for president, his personal level of experience with foreign policy issues is minimal, but unlike the other candidates he doesn't seem to realize this believing instead that his enthusiasm about the military and for soldiers and soldiering constitutes a close substitute for having real ideas about international relations. With McCain, it's possible that the chips will just all fall in the right place and he'll stumble upon some workable Teddy Roosevelt synthesis but we're just as likely to end up conscripting teenagers to build nuclear plants or bombing Iran or convincing ourselves that ranting and raving about the evils of earmarks is an adequate replacement for a grasp of fiscal policy.

This is one of McCain's great electoral strengths: There are a lot of subsegments of the electorate that can look to a certain period in his record -- 2001-2003, say, or 2005-2008 -- and be comforted. Democrats can look to his apparent absence of ideological convictions, pair that with his intense desire to make deals, and judge the guy a fairly benign, and even constructive, president if checked by a Democratic Congress. Republicans can look at his opposition to earmarks and adoration of war and realize that this is a man with unwaveringly crazy convictions. Etc, etc.This is also, oddly, a strength of Mitt Romney's. He's just somehow gotten the other side of the same coin. Where every subgroup could look into Romney's record and see support for their special snowflake of an agenda, they instead see deviations from it, and insincerity towards it. In noticing that the man contains multititudes, they see everyone else and not themselves. McCain, conversely, has managed to contain multitudes where most -- and, in particular, the elite media -- see only themselves, and no one else. It's a neat political trick, but one that will have to be exposed if he's the nominee.