"McCain’s influence in the Senate and his claim to significance in national life have always rested on his willingness to anger colleagues of both parties by paying attention to crucial issues that they would rather ignore, and on being a thoughtful contrarian on key party-line votes. He held out the promise that he could represent for a cynical and defeatist age something like what the Republican Arthur Vandenberg became to Harry Truman’s bipartisan postwar foreign policy, or what Everett Dirksen was to Lyndon B. Johnson on civil rights: the guy from the other side of the aisle who made all the difference. It is much harder now to sort out which instances of McCain’s inconvenient truth-telling were more a result of circumstance than they were a consequence of conviction. He has told friends he has no wish to be like his predecessor, Barry Goldwater, whose last election was a narrow victory. But the late-era Goldwater was a mellower, riper figure, whose live-and-let-live libertarian streak came increasingly to the fore. McCain seems to be on the reverse trajectory."