Senator John McCain was one of the most interesting, puzzling, confounding politicians of our generation. I'm not going to go through all the details. That's what Wikipedia is for. But consider these facts. In 2004 McCain was talked about as a vice presidential candidate on the Democratic ticket with John Kerry. In 2008, McCain himself picked Sarah Palin for his own vice presidential candidate. How can the same politician be both of those things? Like I said, confounding.
This is the kind of politician that I'd like to hear off-the-record explaining what he was thinking. But that just doesn't happen. Politicians are never off-the-record, at least not when they are still in office. Because John McCain died in office, he'll never get to write his memoirs free from the obligations of future political campaigns. That's a shame. On the other hand, perhaps I hold out too much hope for learning what made him tick from his memoirs. A politician's memoirs may be written after he no longer needs to worry about facing the voters, but there's another judgment he's campaigning for at the end of his life: his legacy. I guess that's why political memoirs are so often disappointing. McCain's probably would have been, too. We'll probably never know how he himself balanced the puzzling contradictions in his political career. How much was principal? How much craven political opportunism? Which was which?
