A GOP rebel in Dixie

But despite the frenetic pace of his campaign, and the media access that no other top-tier candidate even remotely provides, McCain is in danger of leaning too much on the three bullet points of his campaign strategy -- POW, campaign-finance reform, free media.

As evidenced by the health-care address he delivered before a group of Rotarians on Tuesday in Charleston, McCain is getting a little intellectually lazy -- even for a senator, let alone a man trying to stake a claim on the toughest job in the world.

McCain's health-care plan aims to provide coverage for the 44 million uninsured Americans by chipping around the edges of existing plans, rather than initiating sweeping reform. The McCain plan focuses on seniors, children and veterans. He would provide a block grant to states to help seniors pay for prescription drugs and begin a five-state demonstration program to help seniors fund catastrophic-illness drug expenses.

Millions of kids are eligible for health-care coverage, he said, under Medicaid and the Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP), so parents need to be made aware of these programs. Small businesses need to form purchasing pools with other small businesses so they can all afford health care for their employees. He pledged to overhaul the veterans health-care system.

"Our men and women who actively served in uniform were pledged quality health care for themselves and their families, in return for their pledge of duty to the country," McCain intoned to affirming applause.

But McCain doesn't like to give long speeches, so in this "major address" he cut out sentences, paragraphs and even pages from his speech. It was no big deal -- reporters had copies of the text in its entirety and the TV cameras had their multisecond sound bites. And McCain can read a crowd pretty well, and he was probably accurate when he guessed that there were more than a few restless Rotarians. After his speech, he opened the floor to questions and brought the Rotarians back to life.

But when I asked him why he cut out all the substance in his speech, he said that he hated to bore the audience. McCain's one of the most courageous men in the Senate today, but he's going to have to learn to be brave enough to be boring.

In his post-speech press conference, McCain seemed unsure of the costs of the points of his plan, and sketchy on some of its details. "We'll get those numbers to you," he told reporters -- someone had misplaced the sheet on which the cost breakdowns were listed.

He's also going to have to learn the ins and outs of issues he is less passionate about. When pressed for details on his plan, like why pharmaceuticals cost less in Canada and Mexico than in the United States, he was hardly as well-versed on the subject as he is on other matters, like national security and governmental reform. He just kept repeating -- to himself maybe more than us -- how "very important" the subject at hand is.

While the media gave him a pass on Tuesday, as they did when Bradley decided to wing his foreign policy address at Tufts University a few weeks ago, McCain should not rely on his ability to coast on his charm.

His lightness on health-care policy is certainly no lighter than the front-runner who has clearly begun hearing his footsteps. But the candidate who delivered his policy address that day was not the John McCain who seems eager to learn as he goes along, and has been known to recite poetry off the cuff. It was the one who graduated fifth from the bottom of his class at Annapolis.

After all, Bush can smirk and call McCain "a good man" before the cameras all he wants, but his team is still playing to win. And that means defeating McCain. After Elizabeth Dole dropped out, when Bush and McCain staffers were cruising South Carolina trying to pick up homeless Dole supporters, someone had gotten to many of them and dished about McCain's messy first marriage.

And, in the smoker's paradise of the South, McCain's support for a tobacco tax is going to be shoved down the lungs of every smoker from Richmond to New Orleans. McCain will argue that the tax on cigarettes will actually save taxpayers the $60 billion they lose in Medicare and Medicaid-funded treatment for tobacco-related illnesses, but by the time the Bushies have finished dressing up McCain, he'll be a gun-hating liberal and the word "tobacco" will be long gone from the word "tax." It's unclear if his bio and charm will be enough.

McCain's inability to sell his health-care plan may actually stem from a lesson he learned from Dole's '96 travesty about the importance of being genuine.

"You can't espouse a view or a policy that you don't believe in," McCain said on the bus, "because the audience won't believe it. The people you're trying to sell it to won't believe it. [Dole's 1996 proposal for a] 15-percent tax cut in and of itself was a great idea. But no one believed that Bob Dole felt that was a viable option. So I think you've got to keep away from people saying, 'Gee, this resonates in the poll,' 'This is your chance to catch up,' 'Take this position.'

"If you don't believe it," McCain said, "don't do it."

When it comes to believing in things, McCain may soon need to look to more than just campaign finance, military preparedness and himself. He is a passionate man, but his lack of passion for health care was obvious. His candidacy may soon need to develop passion for other issues -- ones in which he won't be able to stride around like a maverick. Either that, or he may need to look to Bush and Clinton for lessons on how to fake it.

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