The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg pries that window open much further with a terrific piece in the October edition of the magazine entitled: "The Wars of John McCain."

In it, Goldberg, a Fix friend, seeks to draw out the Arizona senator on his views of World War II, Vietnam, Korea and Iraq in hopes of shining a light on the way in which his experiences with each -- from his grandfather's service in WWII to his father's and his own involvement in Vietnam to his approach to the war in Iraq -- reveal the way in which McCain thinks about America's role in the world.

Writes Goldberg:

"In one area, though, he has been more or less constant: his belief in the power of war to solve otherwise insoluble problems. This ideology of action has not been undermined by his horrific experiences as a tortured POW during the Vietnam War, or by the Bush Administration's disastrous execution of the Iraq war."

And later he adds:

"[McCain's] willingness to speak frankly about the utility of military intervention sets him apart from his opponent. Senator Obama, though certainly no pacifist, envisions a world of cooperation and diplomacy; McCain sees a world of organic conflict and zero-sum competition."

Those paragraphs frame the choice in the coming election as starkly -- and effectively -- as any we've seen written in recent months. Unlike eight years ago when many people went to the ballot box believing that there was little difference in the directions that George W. Bush and Al Gore would move the country, the divisions between Barack Obama and McCain are real and impactful when it comes to defining (and re-defining) America's role in the world.

While that insight is critical to understanding McCain, it's a paragraph later in Goldberg's story that reveals a fundamental -- yet ill-understood -- truth about the Republican candidate.

"In my conversations with McCain, however, he never appeared greatly troubled by his shifts and reversals," writes Goldberg. "It's not difficult to understand why: tax policy, or health care, or even off-shore drilling are for him all matters of mere politics, and politics calls for ideological plasticity. It is only in the realm of national defense, and of American honor -- two notions that for McCain are thoroughly entwined -- that he becomes truly unbending." (Emphasis added by The Fix.)

Those lines are a perfect explication of John McCain the politician. He is a man for whom rigid adherence to ideology does not come naturally and, in fact, he tends to bridle at the idea that he must always come down on one side of an issue due to the "R" after his name. (David Brooks, as always, says it better than The Fix can: "The main axis in McCain's worldview is not left-right," Brooks wrote in recent column. "It's public service versus narrow self-interest.")

But, war -- and the politics surrounding it -- are outside the realm of McCain's tendency toward "ideological plasticity" (in the great phrase by Goldberg). The rules that govern other decisions in the campaign don't apply; it's why McCain stuck by his support for the surge despite its initial unpopularity even as he was abandoning his call for comprehensive immigration reform. The two issues simply aren't equivalent in McCain's mind. One is matter of life and death. The other is politics.

Goldberg's story is a remarkable -- and rare -- look at how McCain thinks about politics and policy; what he values, what he doesn't and why. Read the whole thing.


From "The Fix", washingtonpost.com's Politics Blog