Books That Really Needed Writing

Although I remain almost as confident that McCain’s primary campaign will remain a dead parrot as, er, I was sure that the Dems wouldn’t take over the Senate in 2006, this looks great:

At any rate, in the event that a McCain surge does materialize, the antidote is Matt Welch’s new book McCain: The Myth of a Maverick, a comprehensive dissection of the man who for a long time held the title of America’s most overrated politician and who still in many circles is viewed as something of a sympathetic, tragic figure.

In the book, Matt builds upon some earlier writing of his on McCain through the revolutionary (given the subject matter) method of actually examining McCain record and views than the more traditional approach of wishful thinking and ideological projection. In essence, it’s the story of a man who succeeded in turning his own life around through embracing hard-line American nationalism and then decided to adopt this as a governing philosophy before becoming a media darling in a way that left him simultaneously overexposed and underanalyzed.

Obviously, my favorite example remains people straining to find a pro-choicer beneath a 0% NARAL rating, but there’s plenty more where that came from. The movement in the early 2000s to pretend McCain was a liberal because he didn’t embrace (at the time) the very nuttiest supply-side policies remains utterly inexplicable.