With due respect to Jim Geraghty, whose coverage is great, I’m content — as Kathryn suggests — to rely on Senator McCain’s own words. That would include this, from 2000, recounted in a recent New York Sun news article by Josh Gerstein:

In earlier years, Mr. McCain publicly trumpeted the eclecticism of his foreign policy views. As a candidate in the Republican presidential primary contest in 2000, the senator was asked what he would do first if elected. “The first thing that I would do is call in John Kerry, Bob Kerrey, Joe Biden, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Henry Kissinger, Dick Lugar, Chuck Hagel, and several others and say, ‘We’ve got to get foreign policy, national security issues back on track,’” Mr. McCain told the Detroit News.

That aside, even if what Jim suggested were true and we had only Sen. Kerry’s word to go on, what would be the problem with pointing that out? First of all, it is relevant that Kerry, not at all irrationally, perceived enough common ground between himself and McCain that extending a fusion-ticket offer to McCain made sense. Second, is there anyone on the planet who doesn’t think McCain would be hammering Romney if, say, Sen. Clinton had once proposed asking Romney to join her on a fusion ticket (something far more unlikely than the Kerry offer)? And finally, no one, as Jim seems to intimate, is suggesting that Kerry’s word on the proposal “is good enough to settle the issue.”

We’re picking a candidate. Why should something like this not be part of that mix? No one thought Giuliani’s or Romney’s embrace of Leftist positions was out of bounds — they were and are absolutely pertinent. But what’s the problem with showing that McCain and the Left frequently bat their eyes at each other?