“That year and this year, reporters like John McCain about as much as they disliked Gore. It’s easy to see why. McCain is accessible to the press. He likes to schmooze with reporters, and in the process he pokes fun at himself. He comes across as less pre-fabricated than most candidates, a regular person not molded by his campaign consultants. Ergo: a straight shooter.

“But the record does not show that McCain shoots any straighter than the rest of them. His recent charge that Romney had proposed an Iraq withdrawal date was obviously bogus. His conversion from skepticism about the fiscal prudence of big tax cuts to his current conviction that cutting taxes will actually enhance government revenue (most dubious) and that “every time in history we have raised taxes it has cut revenues” (totally false) seems artful if not insincere. His explanations about his recent change of heart on immigration policy have been murky.

“But reporters like him, so he gets minimal criticism. He got almost none for laughing and not protesting when a woman at one of his events referred to Hillary Clinton as “the bitch.” At a Republican gathering in 1998, McCain told a truly tasteless, mean-spirited joke: “Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Because her father is Janet Reno.” (Tasteless and, for what it’s worth, inaccurate; Chelsea Clinton has become a rather attractive young woman.)”

I hope that if he is the nominee, as seems likely, that the media provide a thorough going over of his record, which as the above indicates, is not always pretty.