washingtonpost.com
John McCain is no silver-tongued orator, as he proved in St. Paul, but it's hard not to be stirred when he speaks of wanting only to serve a cause greater than himself -- until you take a closer look and see that he's running
one of the most egocentric presidential campaigns in memory.
Not that Barack Obama
lacks a healthy opinion of himself, mind you. And no one wants the next president to be paralyzed with insecurity, or to doubt, even for a minute, that he's the right man for the job. But after ridiculing Obama as a preening celebrity, if not a self-proclaimed messiah,
McCain is campaigning on a platform that can be summed up in three words: me, me, me.
Much has been made of the fact that he's a Republican running on a pledge to clean up the intolerable, unforgivable mess created over the past eight years by a Republican president -- and, for much of that time, a Republican-controlled Congress in which McCain himself had great power and influence.
It's amusing to listen to a man in his fourth term in the Senate (after two terms in the House) rail against evil "Washington," as if he weren't one of this modern-day Sodom's most prominent denizens.
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