By Dan Gardner

Reporters were told to expect an explosive speech and John McCain delivered. "I am a pro-life, pro-family, fiscal conservative," he thundered, "and yet Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and a few Washington leaders of the pro-life movement call me an unacceptable candidate."

"Why? Because I don't pander to them."

It was Feb. 28, 2000. Most evangelical leaders had put their political clout behind John McCain's rival for the Republican presidential nomination, George W. Bush. Some, including Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, were actively involved in the misleading and vicious attacks McCain suffered daily.

McCain fought back with a furious speech. "Division and slander are not our values. They are corrupting influences on religion and politics, and those who practise them in the name of religion or the name of the Republican Party or in the name of America shame our faith, our party, and our country. Neither party should be defined by pandering to the outer reaches of American politics and the agents of intolerance, whether they be Louis Farrakhan or Al Sharpton on the left, or Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell on the right."

It was a daring and noble counterattack but it was not enough. McCain lost South Carolina to Bush - a "Pat Robertson Republican," McCain called him - and the nomination slipped away. On Meet The Press, Tim Russert asked McCain, a war hero who often used the word "honour" to describe his highest value, if he believed "George W. Bush has run an honourable campaign."

"I can't say that," McCain replied bluntly. "I can't say that with the things that have happened."

Eight years later, John McCain is the Republican nominee and the latest polls show he has a good shot at winning the White House. And yet, no matter what happens in November, McCain will lose.

He will lose because his campaign is one that no honest observer would describe as honourable. He will lose because in order to win he has become what he once fought.

It's easy to forget just how much of a maverick John McCain was in the early years of the Bush presidency. He was enthusiastic about the invasion of Iraq but he very often led congressional opposition to other key items of the White House's agenda, including Bush's vaunted tax cuts. "I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us," he declared.

In 2003, there were even rumours he would leave the Republican Party when John Kerry, a friend and Senate colleague, had long discussions with McCain about joining the Democrats as the vice-presidential nominee.

Judging by the seriousness of the overtures, McCain was tempted. But he stayed put and, it appears, made up his mind to run for the 2008 Republican nomination.

In 2004, McCain embraced Bush's tax cuts and campaigned on behalf of the Republican president he had so relentlessly criticized. Later, he met with Jerry Falwell - one of the original "agents of intolerance" - and agreed to speak at Falwell's Liberty University.

Neither Bush nor Falwell had changed between 2000 and 2004. If anything, Bush had become even more a "Pat Robertson Republican" and Falwell revealed himself to be an even more despicable bigot when he blamed feminists and homosexuals for having brought down God's wrath in the form of the 9/11 attacks.

But if McCain were to win in 2008, he needed the Bush machine and its evangelical fuel. And so he pandered to the very people he had once denounced - the very people who opposed him because, he had once boasted, he wouldn't pander to them.

In 2006, McCain was again interviewed by Tim Russert. You have a reputation as a maverick and a straight-shooter, Russert observed. Won't people look at this and say, "it didn't work in 2000, so in 2008, he's going to become a conventional, typical politician, reaching out to people he called agents of intolerance, voting for tax cuts he opposed, to make himself more appealing to the Republican base?"

McCain insisted he was still his own man. "I think most people will judge my record exactly for what it is, where I take positions that I stand for and believe in. Whether it be climate change, whether it be torture, or whether it be immigration."

It was a strong response. McCain was at odds with the White House and much of the Republican party on all three issues at the time.

But McCain's defence looks considerably weaker today.

On climate change, McCain continued to insist the problem was real and urgent until this summer. Then he stopped talking about it. It went unmentioned at the Republican national convention. And McCain's choice of running mate is the governor of an oil-producing state who has said at least once she doesn't believe humans are responsible for climate change.

On torture, McCain sponsored important legislation but then allowed the White House to water it down. And when President Bush attached a signing statement that effectively gutted the legislation, McCain smiled politely and held his tongue.

And immigration? As John Kerry noted at the Democratic convention, "candidate McCain now says he would vote against the immigration bill that Senator McCain wrote."

On tactics, McCain's sell-out is even more complete.

At the beginning of July, McCain was going nowhere and so he handed his campaign to Steve Schmidt, a protégé of Bush's bare-knuckle campaign director Karl Rove. The tone of the campaign immediately turned nasty. Then, at the end of August, McCain hired Tucker Eskew - the very man responsible for the smear campaign that cost McCain South Carolina in the 2000 primary race.

Distortions, innuendoes, and flagrant lies are now the standard fare of the McCain campaign. Even veteran observers are shocked. Describing McCain's latest salvo, Time's Joe Klein wrote on Wednesday that it is "one of the sleaziest ads I've ever seen in presidential politics."

But the saddest sight is McCain's abject capitulation to the religious right.

Jerry Falwell was only the beginning. In 2007, when McCain's bid for the Republican nomination was failing, he strenuously sought the endorsement of several evangelical pastors. In February, after a year of courtship, he landed a big one: The Reverend John Hagee is the founder of a Texas megachurch with a broadcast network and flock in the millions.

"I'm very proud to have Pastor Hagee's support," McCain crowed.

But as anyone familiar with Google can easily discover, Pastor Hagee has a long record of expressing controversial views - such as calling Catholicism "a Godless theology of hate" and claiming the Koran gives Muslims "a scriptural mandate to kill Christians and Jews."

As these and other statements surfaced, McCain distanced himself from Hagee's words but refused to disavow the endorsement. For three humiliating months this dragged on. In May, it was revealed Hagee had once declared Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust to be part of God's divine plan to drive the Jews to Palestine and prepare the way for Armageddon and the return of Jesus. Finally, McCain cut Hagee loose.

At least he did so formally. In July, Senator Joe Lieberman - McCain's close friend, ally and campaign surrogate - addressed a group called "Christians United for Israel." Jewish groups had collected 40,000 signatures asking Lieberman - who is Jewish - not to go. But he was unmoved. "The bond that I feel with Pastor Hagee and each and every one of you tonight is much stronger than that," Lieberman told the evangelicals. "I am proud to stand with you tonight."

Still the religious right remained unenthusiastic about the McCain campaign and so McCain passed over the man most observers believe he wanted for the vice presidency - Lieberman - and choose as his running mate someone he had met only once before. Sarah Palin may have been unqualified and untested. But she is clearly and sincerely a woman of the religious right.

By choosing Palin, McCain finally got the Republican base excited and stole back the media spotlight. For the first time, he's got a slim lead. Victory in November is a real possibility.

Sadly, Tim Russert is dead and so we will not witness the poignant moment in which Russert asks John McCain if he can say he "ran an honourable campaign." But given the circumstances, perhaps someone else might ask the question in appropriately Biblical terms: "What does it profit a man, Mr. McCain, if he should gain the whole world and lose his soul?"

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