Joe Klein is smoking hot on a current McCain strategy in this important Time post, oddly headlined "Angry Amateurs." It's really about Vicious Professionals--McCain's. You know the old advice to lawyers: When you don't have the facts, cite the law; when you don't have the law, cite the facts. The McCain campaign's corollary: When you don't have either, bash the press. Let's call this Schmidting, after McCain's Rove-apprentice chief strategist, Steve Schmidt.

During the years--years--when McCain was holding reporters enthralled, the right-wing crusade against the "liberal media" was muted (with respect to him), and for good reason: the sweet talk was mutual. (Recall McCain's affectionate-sardonic gag about the press: "my base.") Now, either because McCain's campaign is thrashing, or because some reporters have had enough and jumped off the Straight Talk Express, or because the pack got bored with the old reverence, or for whatever combination of reasons, the Rovian Steve Schmidt has decided to call up the press-bashing drums.

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McCain's choice of Sarah Palin is not a weird anomaly. It's of a piece with his standard modus operandi. He's impulsive, erratic. Put him in a jam, he leaps from petulance to exuberant nose-thumbing. He may be old, but he's unseasoned--he's childish. He jumps outside the box and takes pleasure in his insouciance. Faced with a foreign policy problem, he thinks: Bomb. (Sometimes he blurts it out, as in: Bomb bomb Iran.) Faced with energy crisis, he thinks: Drill. Faced with Russia-Georgia-Ossetia, he thinks: Let's get the Cold War on. Bomb and drill, drill and bomb--this is not a steady hand at the wheel; this is a go-for-broke gambler playing the game as he loves to play it.

It would seem that there's also an element of this in his personal life. Matt Welch's book, McCain: The Myth of a Maverick, gives many examples of his flaming temper. He leaves his first wife and jumps straight into not only a second marriage but a political constituency. Famously (but not famously enough ) he blows up.

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