It's time for some straight talk about John McCain. He isn't a moderate.
He's much less of a maverick than you'd think. And he isn't the straight talker
he claims to be.

Mr. McCain's reputation as a moderate may be based on his former opposition
to the Bush tax cuts. In 2001 he declared, "I cannot in good conscience support
a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among
us."

But now — at a time of huge budget deficits and an expensive war, when the
case against tax cuts for the rich is even stronger — Mr. McCain is happy to
shower benefits on the most fortunate. He recently voted to extend tax cuts on
dividends and capital gains, an action that will worsen the budget deficit while
mainly benefiting people with very high incomes.

When it comes to foreign policy, Mr. McCain was never moderate. During the
2000 campaign he called for a policy of "rogue state rollback," anticipating the
"Bush doctrine" of pre-emptive war unveiled two years later. Mr. McCain called
for a systematic effort to overthrow nasty regimes even if they posed no
imminent threat to the United States; he singled out Iraq, Libya and North
Korea. Mr. McCain's aggressive views on foreign policy, and his expressed
willingness, almost eagerness, to commit U.S. ground forces overseas, explain
why he, not George W. Bush, was the favored candidate of neoconservative pundits
such as William Kristol of The Weekly Standard.

Would Mr. McCain, like Mr. Bush, have found some pretext for invading Iraq?
We'll never know. But Mr. McCain still thinks the war was a good idea, and he
rejects any attempt to extricate ourselves from the quagmire. "If success
requires an increase in American troop levels in 2006," he wrote last year,
"then we must increase our numbers there." He didn't explain where the
overstretched U.S. military is supposed to find these troops.

When it comes to social issues, Mr. McCain, who once called Pat Robertson
and Jerry Falwell "agents of intolerance," met with Mr. Falwell late last year.
Perhaps as a result, he is now taking positions friendly to the religious right.
Most notably, Mr. McCain's spokesperson says that he would have signed South
Dakota's extremist new anti-abortion law.

The spokesperson went on to say that the senator would have taken "the
appropriate steps under state law" to ensure that cases of rape and incest were
excluded. But that attempt at qualification makes no sense: the South Dakota law
has produced national shockwaves precisely because it prohibits abortions even
for victims of rape or incest.

The bottom line is that Mr. McCain isn't a moderate; he's a man of the hard
right. How far right? A statistical analysis of Mr. McCain's recent voting
record, available at www.voteview.com, ranks him as the Senate's third most conservative member.

What about Mr. McCain's reputation as a maverick? This comes from the fact
that every now and then he seems to declare his independence from the Bush
administration, as he did in pushing through his anti-torture bill.

But a funny thing happened on the way to Guantánamo. President Bush, when
signing the bill, appended a statement that in effect said that he was free to
disregard the law whenever he chose. Mr. McCain protested, but there are
apparently no hard feelings: at the recent Southern Republican Leadership
Conference he effusively praised Mr. Bush.

And I'm sorry to say that this is typical of Mr. McCain. Every once in a
while he makes headlines by apparently defying Mr. Bush, but he always returns
to the fold, even if the abuses he railed against continue unabated.