St. John

Remember, as with Clinton/Lewinski, it isn't all about the sex, it's about the lying.

and the hypocrisy.

The gist of the Times Article was really that McCain can't get out of his own way when it comes to his sanctimonious position on lobbyists and special favors. He is surrounded by lobbyists in his campaign, takes corporate perks left and right, and then denies it. His friends are forced to intervene in a vain attempt to keep him from torpedoing his own reputation time and again. As Josh Marshall points out, he has an amazing propensity to deny and lie blatantly:

Let's step back for a moment from this particular 'misrecollection'. Watching McCain over the last couple days particularly and in general over many years, the guy really has a problem with making blanket and obviously false denials. In fact, the obviousness is often so extreme that it can't be a matter of strategy, at least not in a very thought out sense. In this case, he makes a blanket statement and there's a written record of McCain himself contradicting his statement. You'll notice also yesterday he grandly stated that he'd never spoken with the Times about the story. Then about 30 seconds later a reporter brought up the pretty obvious point that, well ... the article discusses McCain's talk with Bill Keller. And of course McCain quickly backtracks, since clearly what he had just said was completely ridiculous.

You'll also notice, though I'm not sure anyone has really made this point that clearly, that he also claimed that he and his office hadn't tried to prevent the Times from publishing the story. Well, pulling out all the stops and having all these conversations with the Times and hiring Bob Bennett to go toe to toe with them probably counts as trying to stop the story.

His self-destructive personality is more Clintonesque than Clinton's, in many ways. He's now on the record deliberately misrepresenting something that he admitted to in 2002, which is just the sort of stuff that gets magnified and played endlessly in an election cycle. He's boxed himself in with his own campaign finance law, and the loan that he took to resuscitate his campaign in November is being investigated by the FEC. He's going to be nearly out of money with seven months to go, and if I figure correctly, you are going to see some very unhinged behavior by this man by the time the summer rolls around.