McCain, Noonanized For Your Safety

In her typical, airy and somewhat arch style (Phyllis Schlafly meets Faith Popcorn) - Peggy Noonan deconstructs the presidential potentiality of Senator John McCain, 2007 edition, in today's Journal. She is impressed by a fresh look at his biography, but frets a little about his mercurial temperament. Finally she concludes:

And there is Iraq. The war was generally popular from 2002 through roughly 2006, and Mr. McCain won broad credit from conservatives for standing with the president. But now that support, heightened by the surge debate, is costing him, not only with the general public but in a subtle way, I think, with Republicans.

Republicans don't abandon a Republican president in time of war, and they have a special relationship with this president, a simple admiration for who he is. At the same time, they don't precisely want another W. for president, another man who seems just as convinced, stubborn, single-minded, invested.

But there's two basic flavors of stubborn (although they can often intermingle) one which comes from an ornery sense of defiance for the hell of it - and another which is simply a matter of being unmoved because of foundational principles. Even honest haters concede that Bush is essentially acting according to his convictions, no matter how misbegotten and confused they might be. McCain sometimes seems to belong to the former group, getting all uppity and defiant on issues (such as McCain Feingold) that put the hammer on his own party supporters.

And he's doing little to dispel that fateful "Potomac Dinner Party" effect - the notion that he'll nod along with the Fourth Estate and their liberal convictions whenever it comes to blithe pronouncements about the war. Noonan doesn't mention the fact that he called American lives "wasted" on Letterman, then subsequently apologized - but unfortunately that's the only item that the conservative base will remember about the appearance.