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Haraz N. Ghanbari / AP Photo Sen. John McCain is more visible than Kerry and Gore were after their losses but he doesn’t represent today’s GOP—and he knows it. Reihan Salam on why his “honor politics” make him a party of one.

This past week, the straight-talking John McCain the media knows and loves made a conspicuous comeback. On Face the Nation, McCain struck a decidedly post-partisan note, praising the late Senator Kennedy before sharply contradicting fellow Republican Dick Cheney on torture. After a punishing defeat at the hands of Barack Obama, McCain seems to have regained his stature and his reputation for independence. He's had more media exposure than any other leading Republican, certainly far more than John Kerry in 2005 or Al Gore in 2001. His views on a wide range of issues, from health-care reform to the war in Afghanistan, are thus given far more weight than any other distinguished elder statesman. But despite all that, McCain does not represent the angrier, more combative Republican Party of the Obama era, and he knows it. If McCain is once again the darling of the Sunday talk show circuit, it is for many of the same reasons he couldn't defeat Obama in 2008.

The upshot of McCain's honor politics is that his policy views represent an unstable and confusing brew.

When Bob Schieffer asked McCain about Ted Kennedy, he was quick to cite Kennedy's loyalty: "One of the fundamental reasons for his success was, once he gave his word it was never broken." This was a telling remark, as this kind of loyalty is a virtue that McCain prizes above all others. In February of last year, Yuval Levin, a veteran of the Bush White House and a conservative critic of McCain, wrote a tremendously insightful essay for National Review on what he called McCain's "honor politics." For McCain, politics is not about a positive ideology, like opposition to big government or a commitment to eradicating poverty; rather, it is about love of country and an ideal of honor. When he makes a promise, he fully intends to keep it.

So when constituents demanded that he pass a patients' bill of rights in the early 2000s, he fought hard for it. When he was accused of campaign finance irregularities, he dedicated several years of his life to passing campaign finance reform legislation. And when the United States makes a commitment to the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, he believes that the nation is honor-bound to keep it, almost regardless of the costs involved.

Throughout the presidential campaign, McCain tried to reconcile his sense of honor with the demands of serving as the standard-bearer of a political party with a very different set of concerns. Many observers noted that McCain would have been very much at home in the GOP of the Nixon-Ford era, when his anti-ideological sensibility was dominant. In 2008, however, McCain had to appeal to a shrunken Republican base that genuinely feared Obama as a dangerous leftist with questionable allegiances. On more than one occasion, McCain forcefully defended Obama's patriotic bona fides, most memorably during his concession speech, when he seemed to connect far less well with his audience than his decidedly more red-meat running mate Sarah Palin. McCain's sense of fair play led him to attack Obama for his not-so-close relationship with Bill Ayers, but not for his decades-long membership in Jeremiah Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ. For McCain the logic was entirely clear; to outsiders, including diehard conservatives, it was completely baffling.

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