t's a puzzle for issue-oriented voters: Why has a broad swath of the moderate American middle fallen for a presidential candidate whose congressional record on matters like gun control, abortion, and the environment should put him far to the right of mainstream opinion?
And fallen it has. Arizona Senator John McCain is more than simply the favorite of anti-Bush Republicans. As Tuesday's Michigan primary results showed, the McCain magnetism is more mesmerizing to independents and Democrats than to Republicans.
A new CNN/USA Today national poll, taken even before the Michigan results rolled in, gave McCain a staggering 24-point lead - 59 to 35 percent - over Vice President Al Gore in a head-to-head matchup, with McCain winning 60 percent of independents and 27 percent of Democrats surveyed.
So what's the key to the puzzle? The ascendancy of character in voters' minds, something that comes in no small part as a reaction to Bill Clinton's presidency.
Elections usually take shape either as character contests or issue tussles, with one dynamic generally trumping the other. Remember the rise and fall of Jimmy Carter? Pledging never to lie and to lead a government as good and decent as the American people, Carter won the presidency in a character election in 1976 - only to surrender it on issues in recession-bogged 1980.
So far, the McCain phenomenon, so strong that it's reordering party registrations, is all about biography and personal qualities and almost completely divorced from ideology. For proof, one need look no further than the flow of the daily news narrative, which speaks of endorsements and momentum and money, strategy and tactics, but says little or nothing of record or policy.
Even the one issue the candidates have jousted on in the last few weeks - who is the real reformer? - is really a proxy for character. The heart of the dispute is not specifics, but rather which man displays the qualities of iconoclasm and independence.
All that's fine by McCain's camp. ''These races should be about character,'' San Diego Mayor Susan Golding, who endorsed McCain on Thursday, told the press. Certainly Michigan was. Exit polls showed that Texas Governor George W. Bush won narrowly among voters who cared most about issues, only to have McCain swamp him among those who said personal qualities should be paramount.
Such a campaign plays to McCain's strengths, and to Al Gore's weaknesses - a difference that will be cast in sharp relief if McCain and Gore become their parties' nominees. And if in the wee existential hours of the night, Gore curses the new poll and wonders whom to blame for this troubling state of affairs, he need look no farther than the man he considers one of the nation's great presidents.
Although he won the presidency in an issues campaign, Clinton's legacy to his successor is a political environment where character is once again ascendant. That environment has proved a political hothouse for the McCain candidacy.
''The reason people find McCain so attractive is that he seems in fact to be the anti-Clinton,'' avers Peggy Noonan, the well-known Republican speechwriter and author.
Democratic pollster Peter Hart agrees.
''I think voters are looking for a way to change the moral tone of this country, the sense of values and character,'' he says. ''That is what was working for Bill Bradley and it is what is working for John McCain.''
Why is McCain the anti-Clinton? Start with biography.
Clinton managed to avoid the draft. McCain fought in Vietnam, and spent 51/2 years in a prisoner of war camp for his efforts. If his combat record itself isn't heroic, his prison years tell a tale of courage, grit, and character.
On to integrity. Clinton is a skillful practitioner of the art of, ahem, linguistic misdirection, whereas McCain has become famous as a straight shooter.
Or personal responsibility. Even testimony sworn under the pain and penalties of perjury couldn't get the president to own up to his own conduct. McCain, by contrast, strews mea culpas like Johnny Appleseed sowing new McIntosh trees.
Or even raison d'etre. Clinton took fund-raising to such extremes the 1996 presidential campaign became a national scandal that is still playing out in the court system. McCain has made campaign-finance reform - particularly the elimination of soft money - such a rallying cry that it has become virtually his unified-field theory for remedying nearly every problem.
But Clinton hasn't simply elevated the importance of character through his own well-illumined personal failings. He has also done that by reducing the importance of ideology.
After the failure of his universal health care proposal in 1994, Clinton tacked steadily toward the center, abandoning ambitious progressive goals and embracing the end of welfare as an entitlement, value-neutral trade deals, spending levels that shrink the budget in proportion to the overall economy, and the notion that a president's primary role is to safeguard the economic boom.
That's been a successful centrist course for the party Clinton leads, but it's a political path that has diminished the role of ideology in the race to succeed him. And as issues have shrunk, character, naturally enough, has become more important.
Which is bad news for Gore. As has become apparent in this campaign, the vice president suffers from a Clintonesque tendency to wander off truth's trail in search of a shortcut to political advantage; less nimble than his mentor, Gore then tends to blunder about in the tangled jungle of evasion, sometimes wounding himself with his own machete.
Lou DiNatale, director of the University of Massachusetts Poll, says that disparity in motivation shows up in his latest poll of Massachusetts voters.
''The number one reason people are voting for Gore is his policies,'' DiNatale said. ''The number one reason people are voting for McCain is honesty and integrity.''
Oddly, there's some good news there for the vice president, because that conclusion suggests McCain's appeal to moderates would fade if the campaign template were to shift from character to issues. Although the Arizonan's signature issue - campaign-finance reform - is broadly popular with the American people, his record in the House and Senate is a very conservative one.
As a candidate McCain has managed to persuade many abortion rights supporters that outlawing abortion isn't a priority for him. But actually he has actively and steadfastly opposed abortion rights. According to the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, McCain has voted an antichoice position 94 out of 103 times since entering Congress in 1983.
One measure of McCain's commitment: He not only backed the Bush-era ''gag rule'' that prohibited publicly funded health-care clinics from even discussing abortion as an option, last year he led efforts in the Senate to reintroduce that gag rule, which Clinton repealed in the first days of his presidency.
''He has a starkly antichoice record, and he has not been passive in his opposition to a woman's right to choose,'' says Kate Michelman, president of NARAL. ''He has at times taken the lead in moving legislation that is extremely harmful to reproductive rights.''
McCain's record is almost as conservative on gun control. According to the Handgun Control Inc., the country's largest gun-control lobbying organization, he has frequently opposed gun-control measures, including the Brady Bill in 1991 and 1993 and the assault-weapons ban in 1990 and 1993.
In the wake of the Columbine High School killings, McCain twice voted against a provision to require criminal background checks at gun shows. ''He is a conservative, pro-gun senator who traditionally votes with the NRA,'' says Joe Sudbay, the group's political director.
Skeptical of unions and reliably pro-business, McCain has repeatedly opposed efforts to raise the minimum wage. He has also voted against antidiscrimination job protection for gays.
Although Arizona environmentalists give him solid marks on issue like protecting the Grand Canyon and preserving wilderness areas in his home state, his national environmental voting record is poor. According to Deb Callahan, president of the League of Conservation Voters, during his 17-year career in the House and the Senate, McCain has voted the pro-environmental position only 19 percent of the time.
Rob Smith, Arizona-based Southwest staff director for the Sierra Club, puts it this way: ''His Arizona record is respectable, with real accomplishments, but when it comes to action on the national scene, he has typically voted with the anti-environmental forces of his party.''
And though McCain has been something of a maverick in the Senate, that shouldn't be confused with being a moderate. Not, at least, in the New England understanding of the term: On social and economic issues he votes the conservative position 70 to 80 percent of the time. A supporter of Newt Gingrich's Contract with America, he was one of the Republican senators who voted to impeach Bill Clinton.
None of that suggests McCain's issue positions put him beyond the political pale. Rather, the point is this: If voters come to assess him ideologically rather than characterologically, much of the bloom - and perhaps even some of the petals - would quickly come off the reformer's rose.
Former US Representative Chester Atkins, a Democrat who served with McCain in Congress and got to know him well when the two served as election observers in Central America together, puts it this way: ''He is a terrific guy, he is a wonderful person. But he is not even a moderate Republican. He is a very conservative, pro-gun, antichoice Republican.''
That's why the task for Gore, should he face McCain, would be clear. ''If McCain's hope is to make people focus on his personal history, Gore's job will be to make people look at McCain's Senate record,'' says Democratic consultant Dan Payne.
That won't necessarily be easy. Sometimes the thirst for heroism and the impact of biography is so powerful that issues just don't count. Among presidential historians, the ''Tippecanoe and Tyler Too'' campaign of 1840 still stands as an example of that. The Whig Party took William Henry Harrison, a well-born, college-schooled former military man whose lackluster record included driving off the Shawnees at Tippecanoe, and sold him as a plainspoken, rustic military hero. Meanwhile, incumbent Martin Van Buren was portrayed as a guileful, effete aristocrat.
But it's hard to see that kind of campaign happening again. Here at the cusp of the new century, we're not quite so easily distracted ... are we?
