What you see instead is that the rest of McCain’s advisers, and you named several of them—James Woolsey, the former CIA director, who has been traveling and campaigning with McCain and who I interviewed for this piece; Bill Kristol, who’s very close to McCain for probably a decade and has been kind of an angel sitting on his shoulder and whispering in his ear all that time; people like Scheunemann; people like Max Boot; Ralph Peters; there’s a long list of people who have joined the McCain advisory team—and it’s these people whom McCain listens to when it comes to foreign policy. He certainly hasn’t expressed anything in any foreign policy area that you would identify with the Republican realist camp. He’s much closer to the neocons.

And he seems to be, as I said earlier, the true neocon himself, someone who, after early in his career in the ’80s being kind of suspicious about some foreign interventions that happened at that time, at the end of the Cold War, when the Soviet Union collapsed, McCain seemed to have felt unburdened, like now American power can express itself. And that’s when he attached himself to the neoconservative vision that America, as the sole superpower, could throw its weight around, could remake the world in its own image and that there would be no effective opposition to it

The election of 2008 might not be rigged, except for the structural bias towards candidates favored by big money and one of the only two parties allowed to win. But McCain will continue an already well underway change of the US society and role in the world.

If McCain does not win, the financial and political interests and backers who made Bush president and handled him through his presidency might have enough patience to sit through a Democratic presidency with less aggressive (but not halted) implementation of their plans. However, I fear that they might not have that patience and that we will see an expansion of the Iraq war into Iran or Syria before the Bush presidency is over should McCain not emerge as his successor.

What I would like you to take with you is this fact: the US President elected this year will have powers and opportunities unprecedented. More than ever it will matter what interests he or she will truly represent in the use of these powers.

Take that into consideration when you evaluate the candidates of 2008.