John McCain has always gotten great press, especially since he started riding around New Hampshire in a bus in 1999 and conducting rolling news conferences with reporters that would last for hours. McCain fell short in that election, of course, but he emerged as the media's favorite maverick. In the first Bush term, McCain won some battles in which he challenged his own party--on campaign finance reform and an anti-torture amendment--that further burnished his legend as an independent truth-teller. John Kerry, you may recall, even begged him to run on the Democratic ticket. During that whole time, McCain never presented...