Yesterday, in a tight 51-45 vote:

...the Senate passed legislation Wednesday that would impose sweeping new restrictions on interrogation methods used by the CIA and ban a widely condemned technique known as waterboarding, in which a prisoner is made to feel he is drowning.

Unsurprisingly, Bush has promised to veto the legislation. What has come as a surprise to some, particularly Andrew Sullivan who admits to being "heartbroken" by the vote, John McCain, principled opponent of torture that he is, voted against the bill.

McCain reiterated his opposition to torture in his floor speech announcing his intention to vote against the bill and justified this seeming contradiction by essentially saying that actually voting for the bill with the ban in place would be the contradiction.

Throughout these debates, I have said that it was not my intent to eliminate the CIA interrogation program, but rather to ensure that the techniques it employs are humane and do not include such extreme techniques as waterboarding. I said on the Senate floor during the debate over the Military Commissions Act, "Let me state this flatly: it was never our purpose to prevent the CIA from detaining and interrogating terrorists. On the contrary, it is important to the war on terror that the CIA have the ability to do so. At the same time, the CIA's interrogation program has to abide by the rules, including the standards of the Detainee Treatment Act." This remains my view today. [...]

The conference report would go beyond any of the recent laws that I just mentioned - laws that were extensively debated and considered - by bringing the CIA under the Army Field Manual, extinguishing thereby the ability of that agency to employ any interrogation technique beyond those publicly listed and formulated for military use. I cannot support such a step because I have not been convinced that the Congress erred by deliberately excluding the CIA.

A bit strained, no? So what could possibly be the reason for McCain's cave-in on an issue that seemed so near and dear to his heart? I mean, McCain's a maverick, so certainly it couldn't be politics, could it? Say it isn't so, LA Times...

Underscoring the complexity of the political currents, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the presumed GOP nominee for president and a former prisoner of war in Vietnam, voted against the measure. McCain led earlier efforts in the Senate to ban cruel treatment of prisoners, and has denounced waterboarding in presidential debates. But preserving the CIA's ability to employ so-called enhanced interrogation methods has broad support in the party's conservative base.

Andrew Sullivan, who apparently held out some hope that McCain was as principled as his reputation would suggest, states it even more plainly:

I simply cannot see any explanation for this except politics - that McCain feels the need to appease the Republican far right at this point in time, and, tragically, the right to torture has now become a litmus test of "conservative" orthodoxy. It's a Karl Rove wedge issue of a classic kind: using the crudest of emotional appeals to gin up populist authoritarianism for the sake of Republican partisan advantage in wartime. There is nothing conservative about torture, of course. But the authoritarians of the far right are hardly conservatives in the traditional sense either.

So McCain reveals himself as a positioner even on the subject on which he has gained a reputation for unimpeachable integrity.

This is not a time where it behooves John McCain to take a position counter to that of the president, when he is still trying to convince many in the party that he is one of them. McCain is clearly making the calculation that the support he will win by aligning with Bush on national security will more than make up for the loss in support he may suffer by those who still somehow think him a man of principle over politics. This tightrope he has to walk over the coming months will be McCain's downfall, just as his nomination was almost doomed by his strained fealty to the religious right early last year. It's becoming pretty clear that McCain intends to run a Bush '04 fear-based national security campaign against whichever Democrat he goes up against in November, which is so predictable yet so seemingly out of step with the national mood; does anyone think that really works anymore?

In January I wrote that what I feared most about John McCain is that his relatively sane positions on certain issues (i.e. torture, immigration, global warming) would make it harder for the Democrat to brand him or herself and the Democratic Party for that matter, as the candidate and party of mainstream American values. Doesn't look like we'll have that problem after all.