The audience is just the kind that makes John McCain feel most alive: a
couple of thousand fresh-faced, corn-fed college kids still idealistic enough to
believe an Honest-to-God American Hero who tells them that they can, and should,
strive to serve a cause greater than their own self-interest. The setting is the
Stephens Auditorium at Iowa State University, in Ames, and the questioner is
Chris Matthews of MSNBC's Hardball, who is pitching an hour's worth of
interrogatories to the American media's favorite politician.

It is three weeks before midterm elections that will prove to be a
decidedly mixed bag for McCain. His party will experience the electorate's
repudiation of the war in Iraq, which McCain has always supported, and at the
same time the voters will repudiate the cozy and corrupt Washington culture as a
whole, which McCain has always loathed. Matthews wants to know McCain's views on the prevalence of gay people in all walks of life, a subject whose predicate is
the scandal involving Representative Mark Foley and his come-hither
instant-messaging with congressional pages. "Should gay marriage be allowed?,"
Matthews asks.

"I think that gay marriage should be allowed, if there's a ceremony kind of
thing, if you want to call it that," McCain answers, searching in vain for the
less loaded phrases he knows are out there somewhere, such as "commitment
ceremony" or "civil union." "I don't have any problem with that, but I do
believe in preserving the sanctity of the union between man and woman." It may
not be clear just what McCain is trying to say, but it's easy to see how his
words could be skewed in a direction that the Republican right might not like at
all.

Fast-forward to the next commercial break, during which McCain and Matthews
reposition themselves from the stage to the auditorium floor to take questions
from the students. McCain's longtime political strategist, John Weaver, a lanky,
laconic Texan, moves in to whisper some advice. The next question is about the
pending federal farm bill, and McCain repeats his long-standing opposition to
certain agricultural subsidies.

But then, out of nowhere, he adds, "Could I just mention one other thing?
On the issue of the gay marriage, I believe if people want to have private
ceremonies, that's fine. I do not believe that gay marriages should be legal."
There: he said it, the right words for his right flank. It might seem that this
audience, the sons and daughters of a socially conservative and culturally
traditional bellwether state, would accept, if not approve of, what McCain has
just declared. But they are the Wi-Fi wave of the future, and they can smell a
pander bear as surely as they can a hog lot. They erupt in a chorus of deafening
boos. "Obviously some disagreement with that last comment," McCain says tightly.
"Thank you. It's nice to see you."

Moments later, McCain remounts the stage for the program's final segment,
and he bores into Weaver, standing quietly in the wings, with a cold look that
seems to mingle irritation at Weaver's whispered advice with regret that he took
it, and demands, almost hisses, "Did I fix it? Did I fix it?"

John McCain has spent this whole day, this whole year, these whole last six
years, trying to "fix it," trying to square the circle: that is, trying to make
the maverick, freethinking impulses that first made him into a political star
somehow compatible with the suck-it-up adherence to the orthodoxies required of
a Republican presidential front-runner. McCain opposes a constitutional
amendment to ban gay marriage, but supports a ballot measure that would do just
that in his home state of Arizona. (It would fail in the midterm elections.) His
short-term reward for the Hardball bunt on gay marriage? Boos from the audience
and a headline on the Drudge Report, the right wing's favorite screechy
early-warning system, reading, McCain: Gay Marriage Should Be Allowed? McCain
needs to square that circle, and the hell of it is, he just can't.

At the freshman convocation at Boston College this fall, McCain concluded
his talk with a powerful warning about the costs of compromising one's highest
ideals.

"Very far from here and long ago, I served with men of extraordinary
character, honorable men, strong, principled, wise, compassionate, and loving
men," McCain told the students. "Better men than I, in more ways than I can
number.… Some of them were beaten terribly, and worse. Some were killed.… Most
often, they were tortured to compel them to make statements criticizing our
country and the cause we had been asked to serve. Many times, their captors
would briefly suspend the torture and try to persuade them to make a statement
by promising that no one would hear what they said, or know that they had
sacrificed their convictions. Just say it and we will spare you any more pain,
they promised, and no one, no one, will know. But the men I had the honor of
serving with always had the same response, 'I will know. I will know.'
"I wish that you always hear the voice in your own heart, when you face hard
decisions in your life, to hear it say to you, again and again, until it drowns
out every other thought: 'I will know. I will know. I will know.'"

McCain's own compromises in pursuit of the presidency may be necessary,
even justified. And they may, in fact, pave his way to victory in the Republican
primaries, and perhaps to the White House itself. But even if no one calls him
out, and the public plays along, McCain may pay an awful price. Because,
whatever happens, he will know. He will know. He will know.