George Will: McCain's "dismaying temperament" makes him "not suited to the presidency"?

Channeling his inner Queen of Hearts, John McCain furiously, and apparently without even looking around at facts, said Chris Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, should be decapitated. This childish reflex provoked the Wall Street Journal to editorialize that "McCain untethered" -- disconnected from knowledge and principle -- had made a "false and deeply unfair" attack on Cox that was "unpresidential" and demonstrated that McCain "doesn't understand what's happening on Wall Street any better than Barack Obama does."

Ouch. That's bad, but it actually gets worse. According to George Will, this isn't an isolated incident, but a sign of serious, fundamental flaws with John McCain's character, judgment, and temperament.

...McCain's smear -- that Cox "betrayed the public's trust" -- is a harbinger of a McCain presidency. For McCain, politics is always operatic, pitting people who agree with him against those who are "corrupt" or "betray the public's trust," two categories that seem to be exhaustive -- there are no other people. McCain's Manichaean worldview...

[...]

Conservatives who insist that electing McCain is crucial usually start, and increasingly end, by saying he would make excellent judicial selections. But the more one sees of his impulsive, intensely personal reactions to people and events, the less confidence one has that he would select judges by calm reflection and clear principles, having neither patience nor aptitude for either.

It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency. It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency. Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?

The short answer to that last question, of course, is "almost certainly not."  At 72 years old, barring intensive psychotherapy over several years, it is highly unlikely that one's fundamental personality is going to change in any significant way.  Unfortunately, according to George Will - and he's right about this - John McCain's personality is fundamentally flawed - "Manichean" (seeing everything in black and white, good and evil terms), "operatic" (I'd say "bad opera," maybe Wagner at his worst?), "impulsive" and "intensely personal" (both major flaws in a president, as we've seen, disastrously, with George W. Bush), "dismaying" overall.  

True, Barack Obama does not have the years of federal-level experience that John McCain has (although Obama has plenty of life experience and has added tremendous foreign and domestic policy expertise to his ticket with his selection of Joe Biden). What Barack Obama DOES have is a magnificent temperament - cool, smart, level, sane. In other words, Obama's temperament is not one that has to be "fixed" like John McCain's.  To make matters worse, although it's not surprising, McCain has "doubled down" on his worst traits by picking Sarah Palin as his running mate. Another one who's vindictive, small-minded, "disconnected from knowledge and principle" (except for far-right-wing wacko-land "principle," I suppose).

In sum, I agree with George Will; I'll take my chances on the sane, smart guy who "knows what he doesn't know" over the vindictive, melodramatic, impulsive, incurious (knows what he doesn't know but apparently doesn't care) hothead any day.

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