THE MORE trouble John McCain's campaign encounters, the more it highlights the cultural divide between the "real America" the Republican candidate says he represents and the Washington "cocktail party circuit" that largely disdains it.
That circuit is swelling with disaffected Republicans who point to concerns about Mr McCain's allegedly impulsive temperament. Citing his story of how, as a child, his parents would put him in a bath full of iced water to calm his volcanic temper, Christopher Buckley, the novelist and son of the late conservative icon William Buckley, said Mr McCain continued to display the same traits at 72.
"I have known McCain since 1982 and what has always stood out is his temperament," said Mr Buckley, who endorsed Barack Obama last week. "Having observed him during the campaign and in the debates with Barack Obama, I think he needs to be doused in another bath of cold water."
Staunch Republican commentators, such as Charles Krauthammer and David Brooks, have come close to endorsing Mr McCain's rival by citing Mr Obama's "first-class temperament".
Others wonder if his experience as a prisoner of war in Vietnam burnished him with the credentials to be commander-in-chief - a central element of Mr McCain's "country first" rallying cry. They cite fellow PoWs, such as Phillip Butler, who was also a colleague of Mr McCain at the Naval Academy.
"Having been a PoW is no special qualification for being president of the US," Mr Butler wrote this year. "I can verify that John has a quick and explosive temper that many have experienced first-hand. Folks, quite honestly that is not the finger I want next to that red button."
Friends say the candidate's decision to go against his instincts and embrace the social conservative base of the Republican party has created an internal conflict that makes him irritable, impatient and less effective - particularly during the debates with Mr Obama. They contrast this with the failed "straight talk" campaign that Mr McCain ran in 2000.
A friend and adviser said: "One of John's deep regrets is that he gave into the advice of his council of political advisers who urged him to appeal to the base. He would dearly have loved to have selected Joe Lieberman as his running mate. It is eating him up."
Then there are the "realist" Republicans who worry that Mr McCain has been captured by neoconservative advisers, such as Randy Scheunemann, his chief foreign policy guru, who has helped shape his relatively hardline stance on Russia, Iran and other issues.
This has combined with Mr McCain's tendency to view foreign policy as a kind of "morality play" in which there are people who oppose America and people who do not, they say.
"I don't know of anybody, anywhere other than John McCain who thinks Mikheil Saakashvili is a 'great leader' of Georgia - it is an absurd evaluation," said Dimitri Simes, head of the Nixon Centre in Washington. "John tends to see the world emotionally through characters he knows and, once he has decided who the good guys are and the bad guys are, then facts and context won't affect him."
- (Financial Times service)