The McCain Doctrines

The New York Times’ Matt Bai has a long piece on Senator John McCain that is scheduled to run in this Sunday’s Times’ Magazine.  The gist of it is summarized thusly:

…McCain is the outlier. Among his fellow combat veterans in the Senate, past and present, he is the only one who has continued to champion the war in Iraq; by contrast, Kerry, Webb and Hagel have emerged in the years since the invasion as unsparing critics of American involvement there. (In a new book, Hagel, who voiced deep concerns about Iraq even as he voted for the war resolution in 2002, predicts that the war will turn out to be “the most dangerous and costly foreign-policy debacle in our nation’s history.”) This divide among old allies may be the inevitable result of a protracted war that has cleaved plenty of American households and friendships. But it may also be that the war is revealing underlying fractures among the Senate’s Vietnam coalition.

In our opinion, it’s also one of the principal reasons why he is the GOP nominee today…

Read the advance version here.