What is it about McCain?: Fair Fighting

John McCain’s fairness is both what attracts and repels.

I’ve been mentally laboring to understand McCain, his supporters and opponents.

It’s easy enough explanation, and correct as far as it goes, to just point at the positions McCain has taken over the years.

But, that doesn’t explain, more predictively what positions McCain might take as president. Nor does it explain the many staunchly conservative luminaries who have endorsed McCain over another closer to their views.

McCain’s appeal to Republican-leaning independents and, even, to many Democrats isn’t just because he’s a maverick or appealing to some in the MSM, but that support for him is felt by some GOP grandees as reason enough to support McCain, due to presumed greater electability.

There’s another, deeper, dimension to McCain at work.

John McCain is staunchly committed to an overriding principle of fairness, or more precisely a fair fight.

McCain’s firmly entrenched fairness works for good and ill, attracts and repels, depending upon the particular application. However, fairness is the underlying essence of McCain’s character that is staunch, attractive across a wide spectrum, and most predictive of what one can expect from him.

In a field of Republican competitors with solid records but trimming sails to meet the winds of primaries, McCain is seen as least likely to waver his core. In a field of Democrat competitors, McCain’s character – together with his experience – stands in stark contrast to their pandering and poisonous campaigning.

McCain’s root in his conception of fair fighting is what led to McCain’s support for campaign finance regulation, for compromising the judicial “nuclear option,” for restrictive interrogation, even – initially – for Kerry’s presumed innocence against proof of his war record’s exaggerations and lies.

That rootedness in fair fighting is admirable and admired by many. What isn’t is that, together with McCain’s haste to take positions primarily due to it, McCain ignores the ramifications of its excesses and fails to take into account other, very important desiderata, like facts of the matters for example, or his posture being exploited by temporary allies with entirely different principles, actions and goals.

That’s what many believe makes McCain in power potentially dangerous to many core Republican constituencies.

Still, it’s what attracts many outside the core whose orientation is more usually labeled egalitarian, leaning independent or Democrat.

The key question for conservatives as we move through the primaries will be whether they believe McCain will be more considered in his snap dispositions, or whether McCain’s almost fixation of his conception of fair fighting will result in surrendering too many redoubts of freedoms and their defenses.