In the wake of his New Hampshire and South Carolina victories, the once-and-future GOP frontrunner John McCain is enjoying a charmed life when it comes to the press. Just days after John King's puff piece on CNN, the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz offered a glowing review of McCain's accessibility to the press. But as he conveniently continues his retreat from his past positions on immigration and tax cuts as the Republican race heads to Florida, John McCain should be receiving more media scrutiny - not less.
Even before he exorcised his demons in South Carolina on Saturday, McCain claimed to have sworn off pandering to Republican primary voters. Back in April 2000, McCain admitted his flirtation with the Confederate flag-waving crowd in South Carolina was unprincipled - and a mistake:

"I feared that if I answered honestly, I could not win the South Carolina primary. So, I chose to compromise my principles. I broke my promise to always tell the truth."

Just last week, McCain repeated to Katie Couric of CBS News that his dishonesty over the Confederate flag 8 years ago was the exception to the rule:

"I knew it was a symbol that was offensive to so many people. And afterwards, I went back and apologized. But it was needless to say, by saying that I wouldn't have anything to do with an issue like that was an act of cowardice."

Triumphant on Saturday night, McCain proclaimed such cowardice was so eight years ago.

"In the course of this campaign, I have tried as best I could to tell people the truth -- to tell them the truth about the challenges facing our country and how I intend to address them.
As I have said before -- and you have heard me -- before I can win your vote, I must earn your respect. And the only way I know how to do that is by being honest with you."

Not, it would seem, on immigration and the Bush tax cuts. In each case, Mr. Straight Talk abandoned principled positions of the past as part of his just-in-time pandering process with conservative GOP primary voters.
Nowhere is McCain's turnabout more startling than on immigration. With Ted Kennedy, McCain was the face of the comprehensive immigration reform package that went down to defeat in Congress last year. But as the Washington Times and Tim Russert on Meet the Press detailed, McCain underwent a conversion on the road to the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis. As the ultra-right Times noted on January 14, 2008:

The Arizona Republican now says that, in the wake of last summer's defeat of "comprehensive immigration reform," he has "gotten the message" that the border must be secured before the status of illegals already in the United States can be dealt with.

The chilly reception McCain's immigration record received among Republican primary voters might just have something to do with his now-perpetual pledge to "secure the borders first." Just last Monday, a crowd in Michigan booed McCain as he spoke about his views on illegal immigration. It's no wonder he grew testy the previous week when Russert dredged up McCain's 2003 assessment that "I think we can set up a program where amnesty is extended to a certain number of people who are eligible." With illegal immigration at or near the top of the list of most important issues for GOP voters in Iowa, South Carolina and Nevada, neutralizing his exposure remains a priority for McCain.
So, too, on the Bush tax cuts. As McCain takes his Straight Talk Express to Florida, he faces the dual prospects of jitters on the economy and a desperate Rudy Giuliani making what could be his final stand in the Sunshine State. And that means fidelity to George W. Bush's tax cuts will be paramount. On Monday, Giuliani threw down the gauntlet, "John voted against the Bush tax cuts, I think on both occasions, and sided with the Democrats."
McCain's response is typical of his Republican primary tightrope walk. The Bush tax cuts he once labeled unfair to the middle class and fiscally irresponsible should now be made permanent.
As the laissez-faire fanatics at the Club for Growth detail, McCain is proof that evolution is reversing when it comes to the Bush tax gambit. In June 2001, McCain proclaimed his opposition to Round 1 of President Bush's treasury-financed redistribution of wealth:

"I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us at the expense of middle-class Americans who need tax relief."

By December 2007, however, that message sounded more like John Edwards than Ronald Reagan, so candidate John McCain needed a different rationale. As by the National Review's Rich Lowry on Fox News if he thought it had been a mistake to vote against the Bush tax cuts in 2001 and 2003, McCain claimed in the name of fiscal discipline he would do it all again:

"No, because I had significant tax cuts, and there was restraint of spending included in my proposal. I saw no restraint in spending. We presided over the greatest increase in the size of government since the Great Society. Spending went completely out of control. It's still out of control. Wasteful earmark spending is a disgrace, and it caused us to alienate our Republican base."

Of course, the spending cuts never came from the Bush White House or the Republican Congress. But with a presidential bid in the offing, McCain decided the third time was a charm. As Tim Russert noted on January 6th, McCain not only voted for the budget busting tax cuts the third time around, but now believes they should be made permanent:

SEN. McCAIN: ...unless we cut spending then, then we are going to end up in a - the serious situation we're in today. I will cut spending. And I will continue to support making the tax cuts permanent, which I've voted already twice.
MR. RUSSERT: But you voted the third time for the tax cuts, but there weren't spending cuts.
SEN. McCAIN: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. No, but I thought that we ought to keep the tax cuts permanent because if we had increased taxes, which that would have had the effect of, if I had voted in the other way...

John McCain's reversals, of course, are not limited to immigration and the Bush tax cuts. Going back to 2006, McCain courted the same Bush political machine that savaged him six years earlier. More comical, McCain had a born-again experience with the religious right, pursuing a rapprochement with Jerry Falwell and disavowing his 2000 labeling of him as an "agent of intolerance." McCain admitted as much as much ("I'm afraid so") when he acknowledged to the Daily Show's Jon Stewart that he was indeed traveling to "crazy base world."
But in the afterglow of McCain's New Hampshire triumph, the press seems content to level the flip-flopping charge against Hillary Clinton over driver's licenses for illegal immigrants and against Mitt Romney for, well, everything. As for John McCain, Time's Ana Marie Cox insists there won't be a repeat of the media infatuation from 2000, noting, "There's a sense that the first time was so fun and exciting, but this time we're really going to be sober and critical and the dispassionate observers we're supposed to be."
Just let us know when that starts.