Too Principled to Be President?

John McCain is the Anti-Giuliani of the Republican field. He doesn't equivocate, exaggerate or evade, qualities that might make a good President but a terrible candidate, particularly in a party whose leaders haven't told the truth since Bob Dole.

Now McCain is speaking out against soft-money ads in South Carolina ostensibly pushing for passage of Wounded Warriors legislation to improve veterans' health care, which has widespread bipartisan support, but are really a back-door pitch for his candidacy, among others.

The Senator who championed the McCain-Feingold bill to reform campaign finance is having none of it. “I have condemned those ads,” he said on Fox News yesterday.

His opponents insist McCain is demurring with a wink and a nod, but that has never been his style. If anything, he has hurt himself with an abundance of bluntness.

As a result of a recent Supreme Court decision, soft-money groups will be operating in this election with even less disclosure than in 2004, the glory days of the Swift Boat ads, which McCain criticized back then.

Both parties are gearing up for record amounts of this kind of public deception, a way for candidates to save their halos and their money by letting anonymous backers spend unlimited money to lie for them.

It may be a little complicated for sound bites but the candidates of both parties should be pressed about their positions on all this in the upcoming debates.