Top Repub told McCain 07 RW are Professional Whiners Never Satisfied

[RamboLiberal]

In early 2007, John McCain sat down to breakfast at a back table in the Senate Dining Room with Ken Duberstein, Ronald Reagan's last White House chief of staff and one of the few big-name Republicans to have supported McCain rather than George W. Bush in 2000. It stood to reason that the fabled Washington wise man would back McCain again. Instead, Duberstein said he was troubled by McCain's efforts to ingratiate himself with the conservative wing of their party. He cited a fence-mending commencement address McCain had given at the Rev. Jerry Falwell's Liberty University and his hawkish stand on the war in Iraq. "I told John the right wing never wants to be satisfied; they're professional whiners," Duberstein remembers now. "They are never happy. So don't kill yourself trying. They will never trust you, no matter what you do for them. John looked at me like I didn't understand. He said, 'Don't worry. People know who I am.'"

McCain can no longer make that claim. A politician who enjoyed a shiny reputation as a maverick with broad appeal has squandered it in the course of winning the nomination and then trying to hold together a Republican coalition that has been on life support for years. Because of the brutish tone of his campaign and the generally spiteful mood inside the Republican Party, McCain faces a period of uncertain length in the wilderness, abandoned by former admirers on the right and the left. And so his latest test of character awaits: How does he overcome this defeat and retake his place as one of his party's best legislators?

He'd do well to consider how he got here. When he set out to run for President a second time, McCain and his top advisers decided they had to gamble with his most precious political asset: his brand. Team McCain was convinced that to capture the gop nomination, its man had to prove himself a real Republican in every way. And so it made a bet: the McCain brand was so well established in the public's mind that he had plenty of latitude to woo suspicious conservatives without damaging his reputation as a straight-talking, independent maverick. Or so Team McCain believed. "Americans know John McCain," Mark Salter, the Senator's closest adviser, assured me back in the spring of 2007. "They know his record. They know he's not George Bush. That (charge) is just not gonna stick."

But stick it did, in part because McCain worked so hard initially to align himself with the White House. In order to win the GOP nomination, McCain embraced tax cuts he had once opposed, promised to appoint activist conservative jurists to the Supreme Court to advance social causes he had never cared much about and boasted of his support for the agenda of a President he had once famously loathed. McCain played down the risk he was running. "I've already been accused of changing," McCain told me at the start of his campaign. "I haven't. I'm the same. Everything will be the same."

http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1856613,00.html