Maligning McCain

John McCain has always gotten great press, especially since he started riding around New Hampshire in a bus in 1999 and conducting rolling news conferences with reporters that would last for hours.

McCain fell short in that election, of course, but he emerged as the media's favorite maverick. In the first Bush term, McCain won some battles in which he challenged his own party--on campaign finance reform and an anti-torture amendment--that further burnished his legend as an independent truth-teller. John Kerry, you may recall, even begged him to run on the Democratic ticket.

During that whole time, McCain never presented himself as anything other than a rock-ribbed conservative, albeit one who took moderate stances on a few issues. I lost track of the number of liberals who told me privately that they would vote for McCain, even though they disagreed with him on a whole bunch of things, because they viewed him as a leader, war hero and straight talker.

But now, in the early maneuvering for 2008, the Arizona senator (who has been going out of his way to back the battered Bush) is seen in many quarters as the front-runner. And, the ridiculously early CW goes, if he gets the GOP nomination, he would be a good bet to win the White House.

The result: The left is trying to rough him up a bit.

He is, some commentators are shocked to discover, not just a Republican but a conservative. Maybe it was easier to romanticize McCain when he was basically a protest candidate, but now that he's a potential president . . . well, I suspect that this is only the beginning.

One columnist who's gone hard after Johnny Mac is the NYT's Paul Krugman:

"It's time for some straight talk about John McCain. He isn't a moderate. He's much less of a maverick than you'd think. And he isn't the straight talker he claims to be. . . .

"But now -- at a time of huge budget deficits and an expensive war, when the case against tax cuts for the rich is even stronger -- Mr. McCain is happy to shower benefits on the most fortunate. He recently voted to extend tax cuts on dividends and capital gains, an action that will worsen the budget deficit while mainly benefiting people with very high incomes.

"When it comes to foreign policy, Mr. McCain was never moderate. . . . Mr. McCain still thinks the war was a good idea, and he rejects any attempt to extricate ourselves from the quagmire. . . .

"When it comes to social issues, Mr. McCain, who once called Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell 'agents of intolerance,' met with Mr. Falwell late last year. Perhaps as a result, he is now taking positions friendly to the religious right. Most notably, Mr. McCain's spokesperson says that he would have signed South Dakota's extremist new anti-abortion law."

In American Prospect, Mark Schmitt strikes the same theme, saying potential McCainiacs should "have no illusions: McCain is a very conservative Republican who has now embarked on the project of reaffirming his position as the rightful heir to Barry Goldwater's politics as well as his Senate seat. Last month, for example, McCain voted to extend the very tax cuts that he had once voted against, a move that tax-cut strategist Larry Hunter correctly described to The Washington Times as 'a further morphing of McCain into George W. Bush.'