John McCain, meet John McCain

John McCain’s claims to be more in touch with the average American than Barack Obama dissolved into a pool of goo earlier this week. In an interview with The Washington Post’s Politico blog, McCain couldn’t remember how many houses he owned. Barack Obama seized on this in a speech and in an advertisement produced within 48 hours of McCain’s gaffe. Newly-unfurled vice presidential candidate Joe Biden wasted no time in similarly lambasting McCain. The seven houses incident is merely one more example of how John McCain is not the person he claims to be.

The media, thankfully, have abandoned the “maverick” narrative that has been attached to McCain since the 1990s. Back then, he may have been a “maverick” compared to the rest of the Republican party: he didn’t care that much for religion, for example. The “maverick” McCain of 2000 has morphed over the last eight years into a Republican-nomination-getting machine. McCain’s lust for the presidency is so gratuitous that he has all but forgotten what George W. Bush did to him in South Carolina in 2000. Back then, “someone” started rumors there that McCain had fathered a black baby (in fact, McCain and his wife adopted a baby from Bangladesh). McCain got over Karl Rove’s dirty tricks, as his mania for the presidency overpowered his sense of moral outrage: the Republican Party is a closed system, and to be nominated, McCain had to do its bidding.

Well into 2008, the media were still reporting that McCain was a “maverick” even though it was painfully obvious by then that McCain was modifying his beliefs in order to pander to particular groups. The old McCain had mysteriously morphed into an evangelical Christian, referring to himself as a Baptist (an evangelical branch of Protestantism) instead of Episcopalian, which is what he really is, according to him. Well, sometimes according to him. McCain is such a maverick that Congressional Quarterly reported that McCain voted with George W. Bush 95% of the time in 2007 and 100% of the time in 2008, as of June. He now claims that he supports the troops, even though he voted against new GI Bill-style legislation because he claimed it would encourage young people not to make a career out of the military.

Now we have a McCain campaign that employs sixty former telecom industry lobbyists, among other lobbyists. Here we have a Mccain who, despite enduring five years of torture in the Hanoi Hilton, voted against a bill that would prohibit the CIA from using interrogation methods prohibited by the Army Field Manual. As Andrew Sullivan points out, Bush’s use of and referral to “enhanced interrogation techniques” mean that, by the GOP’s definition of the word, John McCain wasn’t tortured.

McCain last week repeated an apocryphal story of religion on the part of his captors in Vietnam, even though the story has changed over the years. It may have even been taken from Solzhenitsen.

Whatever “straight talk” used to exist has since evaporated, as McCain has refused to acknowledge reality. The closest he has come to understanding the world around him was in January, when he told supporters in Michigan, “Some of the jobs that have left the state of Michigan are not coming back.” At the time, I found such a statement to be delightfully refreshing. Mitt Romney was, at the same time, insisting that he could bring jobs back to Michigan. (The reality, of course, is that the lost auto jobs are not coming back — at least, not unless NAFTA is repealed, tariffs are raised, and the United States experiences a resurgence in demand for inefficient cars.)

But we haven’t heard that straight talk since January. In 2007, McCain visited Baghdad and pronounced everything hunky-dory, even as two vests filled with explosives made it into the so-called Green Zone, the most secure place in the entire country. McCain entered the world of crooked talk last month in his advertisement comparing Barack Obama to Paris Hilton. The point of the ad was that Obama is as fawned over by international politicians as Paris Hilton is fawned over by celebrity-watchers, and that by virtue of the fact that they both have the same degree of fandom, Obama is as unqualified to be president as Paris Hilton is. The argument didn’t hold water and everyone roundly made fun of it.

Who is John McCain? It’s hard to say. According to him, he is a maverick politician who is in touch with the average American. According to every other piece of evidence, he is a pandering politician who is out of touch with the average American. He barely understands the Internet. He changes his mind — and even his religion — when it’s convenient. He left the Straight Talk Express abandoned by the highway eight years ago.