We're Off To See The Wizard

The dilemma of the modern American voter is dramatized in the 1939 film in which a lion, a scarecrow, a tin man and Judy Garland follow a yellow brick road. They seek a wizard, great and powerful, who can provide courage, heart, mind and home to the wanderers. Only he can't, because he is just an ordinary man, with ordinary abilities and flaws, hiding behind larger-than-life pyrotechnics until the moment when a little dog reveals the trick and the wizard thunders, "Pay no attention to the man behind that curtain!"

This year's winner of the Wizard of Oz sweepstakes is Sen. John McCain, who in the course of the last few months has managed to convince voters that he is many things that he is not: a moderate, a centrist, perhaps even a closet liberal, a maverick who is working outside the system for a new kind of American politics, a populist Emerald City.

In fact the senator is a cookie-cutter conservative who has opposed abortion rights and gun control, affirmative-action legislation and environmental initiatives. In recent years he has voted largely in harmony with the Associated Builders and Contractors and the American Conservative Union and largely in opposition to the League of Conservation Voters and Handgun Control Inc. His Web site insists that he supports "effective, common-sense measures that help keep firearms out of the hands of criminals." But he voted against the Brady bill, the most effective common-sense measure to help keep firearms out of the hands of criminals to come before the Senate in his 14 years in that body.

On Larry King's show not long ago the senator said almost gleefully that groups of all stripes were out to get him, adding, "Look, they have got the National Right to Life people attacking me." This may have suggested McCain is pro-choice, although his legislative rating this year from the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League is 0 percent. He voted against three of the five pieces of legislation the group thought were key in 1999, and was the only senator who was absent for both of the other two. On a 1998 vote to create a reserve fund to improve child care, McCain voted no; on a 1993 prohibition on the permanent immigration of people infected with the AIDS virus, he voted yes. And although he said in an interview that he would not discriminate against gay men and lesbians in his presidential appointments, as a senator he voted against prohibiting job discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.

Pay no attention to the man behind that curtain.

Last week McCain was endorsed by former right-wing presidential candidate Gary Bauer, a man best known for trying to build a bridge to the 19th century. So how in the world has the senator managed to charm Republicans, independents, even Democrats who believe in centrist positions and personal freedom? Partly it is because his much-ballyhooed embrace of campaign-finance reform has been a convenient cloak of progressive politics. Partly it is because of his life story. During the Vietnam War McCain was a prisoner for five years, an ordeal that is especially compelling for middle-aged men who went to college instead of to Southeast Asia and who still privately suspect they lack the right stuff.