Brooks on McCain

David Brooks has a nice column today on how John McCain started off this campaign with romantic notions about running as a rebel against the system. That, however, didn't last long. Reality came crashing in on him, just as it is beginning to overwhelm Obama.

McCain and his advisers have been compelled to adjust to the hostile environment around them. They have been compelled, at least in their telling, to abandon the campaign they had hoped to run. Now they are running a much more conventional race, the kind McCain himself used to ridicule.

The man who lampooned the Message of the Week is now relentlessly on message (as observers of his fine performance at Saddleback Church can attest). The man who hopes to inspire a new generation of Americans now attacks Obama daily. It is the only way he can get the networks to pay attention.

Read it here.

As has happened so often in the past, candidates sincerely promising change wind up being subsumed within the system they hate. And that, I would argue, is for the good. For all its faults, and they are many, the system works pretty well and is far better for more people than anything either of the candidates proposes.