George Will Raises The Temperament Question About John McCain

In a brutally-frank Washington Post column carried also in today's Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, conservative pundit George Will, hardly an intemperate guy, raises the temperament issue that has smoldered beneath the surface about John McCain during the campaign, and in Washington, for years.

Will also repeats some of the stunning condemnation published a few days ago against McCain by the editors of The Wall Street Journal, so McCain's rocky relationship with some leading conservatives and his short-fuse superficiality is beginning to pour into the political mainstream.

Here are the first two paragraphs of Will's column, which ran in the Post under the headline, "McCain Loses His Head:"

"Under the pressure of the financial crisis, one presidential candidate is behaving like a flustered rookie playing in a league too high. It is not Barack Obama.

"Channeling his inner Queen of Hearts, John McCain furiously, and apparently without even looking around at facts, said Chris Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, should be decapitated. This childish reflex provoked the Wall Street Journal to editorialize that "McCain untethered" -- disconnected from knowledge and principle -- had made a "false and deeply unfair" attack on Cox that was "unpresidential" and demonstrated that McCain "doesn't understand what's happening on Wall Street any better than Barack Obama does.'"

Democrats know that McCain is unsuitable to lead the country in an economic crisis; if conservative Republicans feel the same way, McCain has definitely got more than a temperament problem.

He's got an electability problem.