John McCain has been coasting by on an out-of-date perception of “John McCain, The Maverick” and the media has yet to bring into focus the John McCain of 2008, the Bush-loving, surge-endorsing, torture-permitting hard line Republican that the John McCain of 2000 would absolutely detest.

In reality, there is only one man, but there are multiple John McCains portrayed in the media.

There is the P.O.W. John McCain, widely revered as a celebrity, as if John McCain was the only man to ever endure that ordeal. Nevertheless, the Admiral’s son and well-known party-boy and skirt-chaser, was also the man who signed a confession to the North Vietnamese only four days after his capture.

In addition, John McCain made frequent radio and TV appearances for his Communist captors, including up to 30 different propaganda films. Fortunately, we are a nation that forgives a man for breaking under that type of pressure.

However, John McCain falls short of the movie hero image of a prisoner-of-war that could not be broken, an image that he frequently relies on for credibility about almost any issue that he is discussing.

In regard to his pro-family values, John McCain is familiar with these only as they are part of a marketing vehicle by the Republican party. John McCain had numerous affairs after returning home from Vietnam. He met Cindy McCain on one of his numerous trips away from home while at a reception in Honolulu.

Cindy McCain would be the vehicle that would launch McCain’s political career. Their affair, followed by a divorce from his wife, and marriage to Cindy only a few weeks later is described in the L.A. Times with emphasis on how much the Reagans were upset at John McCain for his infidelity and lack of scruples:

John McCain was 42; she was 24. During the next nine months, he would fly to Arizona or she would come to the Washington area, where McCain and Carol had a home.

Carol McCain later told friends, including Reynolds and Fitzwater, that she did not know he was seeing anyone else.

John McCain sued for divorce in Fort Walton Beach, Fla., where his friend and fellow former POW, George E. “Bud” Day, practiced law and could represent him.

In the petition, he stated that the couple had “cohabited as husband and wife” until Jan. 7, 1980.

His wife did not contest the divorce, and Day said that the couple had reached an agreement in advance on support and division of property. By then she was living in La Mesa, in San Diego County, with the family of Meese, a close Reagan aide and future attorney general.

“We knew John and Carol both since he came back from Hanoi in 1973,” Meese said recently. “They have been friends of ours ever since.

“She was with us for maybe four or five months. Their daughter and our daughter were friends, and they went to school together.”

Carol McCain was distraught at being blindsided by her husband’s intention to end their marriage, said her friends in the Reagan circle.

“They [the Reagans] weren’t happy with him,” Fitzwater said. Carol McCain “was this little, frail person. . . . She was broken-hearted.”

By that time, Nancy Reagan had come to Carol McCain’s aid, hiring her as a press assistant in the 1980 presidential campaign.

When the Reagans moved to Washington, she was named director of the White House Visitors Office.

“Nancy Reagan was crazy about her,” Reynolds said. “But everybody was crazy about Carol McCain. . . . And the Meeses were very generous and helpful and comforting to her.”

John McCain had the political savvy to provide his first wife with her house and to employ one of their son’s in Cindy’s beer empire. To this day, Carol understandably will not speak against John McCain. She would be foolish to jeapordize her financial stability.

Does anyone really know about Cindy McCain’s drug addiction and theft of pain-killers from a charity? Does anyone ever discuss the Keating 5 scandal, or how McCain is still interfering with regulatory agencies on behalf of loyal campaign contributors?

No, while McCain’s ads distort Barack Obama’s record, and Barack Obama’s ad tout his positive message of change, neither candidate is discussing the X Factor in the campaign. The John McCain no one seems to know.

Frank Rich comments on this John McCain, the unknown candidate, in the N.Y. Times:

The most revealing poll this month by far is the Pew Research Center survey finding that 48 percent of Americans feel they’re “hearing too much” about Obama. Pew found that only 26 percent feel that way about McCain, and that nearly 4 in 10 Americans feel they hear too little about him. It’s past time for that pressing educational need to be met.

What is widely known is the skin-deep, out-of-date McCain image. As this fairy tale has it, the hero who survived the Hanoi Hilton has stood up as rebelliously in Washington as he did to his Vietnamese captors. He strenuously opposed the execution of the Iraq war; he slammed the president’s response to Katrina; he fought the “agents of intolerance” of the religious right; he crusaded against the G.O.P. House leader Tom DeLay, the criminal lobbyist Jack Abramoff and their coterie of influence-peddlers.

With the exception of McCain’s imprisonment in Vietnam, every aspect of this profile in courage is inaccurate or defunct.

McCain never called for Donald Rumsfeld to be fired and didn’t start criticizing the war plan until late August 2003, nearly four months after “Mission Accomplished.” By then the growing insurgency was undeniable. On the day Hurricane Katrina hit, McCain laughed it up with the oblivious president at a birthday photo-op in Arizona. McCain didn’t get to New Orleans for another six months and didn’t sharply express public criticism of the Bush response to the calamity until this April, when he traveled to the Gulf Coast in desperate search of election-year pageantry surrounding him with black extras.

McCain long ago embraced the right’s agents of intolerance, even spending months courting the Rev. John Hagee, whose fringe views about Roman Catholics and the Holocaust were known to anyone who can use the Internet. (Once the McCain campaign discovered YouTube, it ditched Hagee.) On Monday McCain is scheduled to appear at an Atlanta fund-raiser being promoted by Ralph Reed, who is not only the former aide de camp to one of the agents of intolerance McCain once vilified (Pat Robertson) but is also the former Abramoff acolyte showcased in McCain’s own Senate investigation of Indian casino lobbying.

Though the McCain campaign announced a new no-lobbyists policy three months after The Washington Post’s February report that lobbyists were “essentially running” the whole operation, the fact remains that McCain’s top officials and fund-raisers have past financial ties to nearly every domestic and foreign flashpoint, from Fannie Mae to Blackwater to Ahmad Chalabi to the government of Georgia. No sooner does McCain flip-flop on oil drilling than a bevy of Hess Oil family members and executives, not to mention a lowly Hess office manager and his wife, each give a maximum $28,500 to the Republican Party.

Op-Ed Columnist - The Candidate We Still Don’t Know - Frank Rich - NYTimes.com.

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