The Devolution of McCain

Bob Woodward has written thoughtfully about the changes in McCain evident in this campaign. It is hard to give the full flavor of this article by just an excerpt because what's good about it is the full, detailed picture it gives of someone who inexplicably has gone against everything he has claimed to believe and lived by. It's not a snarky or even ourely partisan statement of flip-flops - it's an honest, almost anguished dismay.

Here's just a small part:

Above all, the John McCain I covered in 1999-2000 was -- he said -- convinced that two factors were undermining the interests of the United States: its cultural wars, causing political gridlock in Washington and civic discontent across the land; and the unbending agenda of the right-wing of the Republican party that, in his view, had been captured by the Christian conservative movement and bore disproportionate responsibility for the poisonous state of American politics. Exhibit One: the scorched-earth campaign that George W. Bush was then waging against McCain's insurgent run for the Republican presidential nomination.

Yet, McCain, is, in fact, running the kind of campaign against Barack Obama that George Bush ran against him in 2000, which he regarded rightly as dishonest, dishonorable and diversionary in terms of the truth about him and about the nation's problems.

Bob Woodward, The Palin Pick - The Devolution of McCain, Huffington Post.