McCain ascendant: as conservatism declines ...(2008)(John McCain)

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JOHN MCCAIN lost the fight for the Republican nomination in 2000 because he was too far left for his party. He's moved farther left since, yet this time he could very well win. It is a season of political instability in both parties.

Since his 2000 campaign, McCain has broken with conservatives on issue after issue. He cosponsored legislation with Ted Kennedy and John Edwards to regulate HMOs and with Joe Lieberman to cap greenhouse-gas emissions. He moved left on taxes, too, voting against Bush's tax cuts, although he later came back to the fold.

Immigration, stem cells, the treatment of detainees in the War on Terror, and a federal marriage amendment were not burning issues in 2000; McCain and most conservatives are on opposite sides of all of them. He is said to have flirted with switching parties.

New Hampshire has been turning more liberal in recent years, and McCain courted independent voters in its primary. So he highlighted, rather than downplayed, these heterodoxies. In town-hall meetings, he talked a lot about how he would fight global warming.

Not always terribly cogently. If global warming is a myth and we fight it, he says, we will still leave our kids a cleaner world. If it is real and we don't fight it, we risk catastrophe. This version of Pascal's Wager makes sense if the fight is cost-free, and that's how McCain presents it: "I will not ask you to shiver in the dark as president of the United States," he says. Fair enough. When I press him on the question later, though, he suggests that his plan will reduce both the consumption and the price of oil, which is nearly impossible.

For conservatives, meanwhile, his trump card is the war in Iraq. He says that he alone had the foresight, judgment, and independence to see that the Bush-Rumsfeld strategy was failing and call for the strategy that is working now. It's true, and it is a way of reaching conservatives while separating himself from Bush. Independent voters may not agree with McCain on the war, but they appreciate his willingness to speak his mind.