My "take" on John McCain is this--although I'm not sure if he's doing it consciously, or subconsciously:
A lot of people have complained that John McCain "didn't do anything all summer," but--
(a) John McCain was a prisoner of war, and undoubtedly that experience has affected his conduct and expectations. One of those things he perhaps learned was to never jump the gun; to wait until all is in place, and ready.
This ties in, sort of, with
(b) John McCain is a traditionalist. Political campaigns used to start after Labor Day, and not a year or two ahead of the election. Short campaigns worked well in the past, and there's no reason to believe they won't still work; it's just that they haven't been done lately.
We can of course blame George McGovern for this, who announced his candidacy for the 1972 Democrat nomination in January 1971, starting this stupid trend.
And
(c) John McCain shares many personality characteristics with the late Marshall Zhukov of the Soviet Union.
Zhukov was the Russian general who went through western Russia and all of Poland like a hot knife through butter, getting rid of the Germans. But once he reached the German border, 60 miles from Berlin, he abruptly stopped. Didn't do a thing; just sat there for a whole month.
This of course perplexed the western allies, who were racing through western Germany.
Zhukov had apparently figured the Germans would fight harder on their own soil, than they had on Russian and Polish soil, and so it might prove a rough 60 miles to Berlin. So he brought the thing to a screeching halt, and just sat there for a whole month.
Actually, what he was doing was commandeering all artillery armaments possibly available to him, getting them to the front, lining them up.
When they were all in place, there was unleashed perhaps one of the greatest artillery bombardments in the history of war; possibly the first such thing that one could actually see from the moon.
The rest is history, and quite possibly history is about to repeat.
