Andrew Sullivan on the Campaign

Andrew Sullivan offers thought-provoking commentary on the 2008 Presidential race in today's Sunday Times.

McCain is a far more mercurial, emotional and volatile character than Obama. Despite being a generation older - he will be 72 on Friday - he is temperamentally much younger than his rival. There is a lot of Churchill in McCain: the melodrama and the sanctimony, the mawkishness and the sincerity, the big heart and sometimes faulty judgment.

Obama is politically liberal and temperamentally conservative; McCain is temperamentally liberal and politically unpredictable. Obama is cerebral; McCain is emotional. Obama is reserved, sometimes aloof; McCain is a social gadfly and seemingly terrified of being left alone and silent. Obama wins press adoration but is not close to journalists; McCain is personal friends with hacks of all sorts. Obama makes plans and executes them with sometimes chilling discipline; McCain veers from one passion to another, winging it - and somehow pulling it off.

For the moment McCain has leveraged understandable hesitation about Obama among those who do not yet know him well and kept himself in the race. This week Obama will be forced to redraw the narrative, redescribe this moment in history and persuade Americans that he really is the one most suited to take the country and the world forward. He has his work cut out for him. And so does McCain. This is a Nadal-Federer, Borg-McEnroe affair. I predict five sets. And a great match.

--Ballard Burgher