This New York Times piece is likely music to the McCain teams’ ears, but nails on the chalkboard to some in the conservative base who still are coming to grips with John McCain as the party’s leader. There is probably no paragraph which sums it up better:
To partisans on either side, Mr. McCain’s path could be puzzling, even infuriating. On the defining issue of the Iraq war, he hammered both sides: the White House for its execution of the conflict and the Democrats for their opposition. On immigration, he joined the Democrats and the White House to battle his own party. And to the Republican leaders, he was a serial turncoat on other domestic matters, marching at the head of a Democratic column into fights over tax cuts, campaign finance restrictions, Alaskan oil drilling, access to generic drugs, gun-show sales, pollution caps, the 9/11 commission and the use of torture.
The ins and outs, the battles, the hurt feelings and the LBJ analogy are all there. Love him or hate him, he’s made a mark, he’s done things, he’s tried to put his beliefs into practice and he didn’t place party loyalty above country when it came to a failing war effort. Certainly, the quirky, ad hoc ideology is not what movement conservatives wanted. But it’s who they’ve got, and that very profile may be the only shot the GOP has to retain the White House.
Other than dropping the article from airplanes all over the country, the McCain camp would do well to figure out how to explain the essence of the piece to those key swing voters–hopefully without infuriating the Right in his own party too badly. But the contrast in effort, vigor, accomplishment and results between him and his opponent is vast. He better be able to make that clear to voters who can easily be swayed by someone bemoaning how “Washington is where good ideas go to die.”