… McCain’s record places him clearly on one side of a central divide in American political history. The historian John Milton Cooper, in his classic 1983 joint biography of Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, identified them as the archetypes of two breeds of reformer: the warrior (Roosevelt) who reveled in political combat, and the priest (Wilson) who found it vaguely distasteful, like raised voices at a faculty tea. …
Reformers with a touch of the warrior have been much more uncommon in American history; the few examples besides Theodore Roosevelt (one of McCain’s self-described heroes) could include President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and some of the great Progressive-era Republican insurgents like Wisconsin Gov. and US Sen. Robert M. La Follette.
But there was no question McCain belonged in this camp. CONT.
Ronald Brownstein, CNN