Jonathan Chait has figured it out: McCain is a politician. He has flip-flopped quite a bit, and he doesn’t always give us the “straight talk” he promises. While following McCain around New Hampshire, I ran into many supporters who would say that what they liked about him is that he “never” pandered or lied. Chait’s article is a useful corrective to such mythologizing.

But McCain’s fans are picking up on something real even if they overstate it. He is different from other politicians. There are subjects on which he won’t pander. The war, for example. Chait tries too hard to make his case against McCain when he writes,

The fact that the war was increasingly unpopular with the public at large, paradoxically, made it all the more effective for McCain. His hawkish stance signaled to conservatives his willingness to buck public opinion. And reporters, bizarrely, interpreted his position as more evidence of McCain’s probity–here was a man, gushed a string of campaign reports, willing to lose the presidency for the sake of his beliefs. In fact, the war was an issue where McCain’s beliefs aligned perfectly with his self-interest, since the constituency he needed to woo, conservative stalwarts, supported Bush.

McCain has consistently supported the surge strategy more than he has supported Bush. He supported the surge when most conservatives bought the Bush stay-the-course strategy. And he took real risks in so doing. If the surge had failed, even conservatives who supported it in late 2006 and early 2007 might have decided to turn the page on Iraq–and on McCain. None of his opponents in the primary, presumably at least as adept as McCain at reading conservative voters, identified himself with the surge as much as McCain did. They kept their options open. That is part of why McCain lashed out at Romney in the days before the Florida primary.