If you look only to John McCain’s record, it seems ironic that one of the great stumbling blocks in his campaign has been the opposition of prominent conservatives. Cliff Schecter says it’s not a matter of issues: “He hasn’t broken with [conservatives] any more than a whole host of people on the right who they still accept and like. In the end, it’s really the attitude. He’s such a pugilist that when he disagrees with you, he has to destroy you. That doesn’t play well, really, on any side.”

Schecter’s new book, The Real McCain: Why Conservatives Don’t Trust Him — And Why Independents Shouldn’t, is the best of the handful of books published so far that take a critical look at the Republican presidential nominee’s record of unbridled ambition and political flip-floppery. Also the best-selling: In the first weeks after its release, it spent a considerable amount of time as one of Amazon’s 150 top sellers.

The Real McCain parses its subject’s 26-year career in the House and Senate and finds a record that is mostly straight-line GOP conservatism interrupted by a tack to the center early in the GWB administration when steering to Bush’s left appeared to be McCain’s best shot at the White House.

I spoke to Schecter Wednesday afternoon in a 20-minute discussion that ranged from McCain’s hair-trigger temper and his love affair with the media to his career-calibrated reversals on the Iraq War, Bush tax cuts, and abortion.

Listen: Author Cliff Schecter on The Real McCain (22:19)

Below the jump, excerpts of Schecter’s remarks.

Continued: Click “Read More”Why conservatives dislike McCain:

“It’s his moralizing. Really, what it comes down to is that whatever side of an issue he happens to be on, if you disagree with him, you’re not only someone who needs to be convinced. You’re treacherous, you’re dishonest, your motives are questioned, you’re immoral. People on the right and the left have been on the other side of this. He’s called people who opposed his campaign finance bill, whether they were doing it for good reasons or not, he called them corrupt. Many of those people were on the right. Now, those people who disagree with his fantasy plan for Iraq are accused of being traitors and waving the white flag. Even though his record has been very conservative overall, although he’s gone through periods of moderation when it suited him politically, in the end that anger is all sides. You’re either with him or against him, to use an old phrase.”

“He hasn’t broken with [conservatives] any more than a whole host of people on the right who they still accept and like. In the end, it’s really the attitude. He’s such a pugilist that when he disagrees with you, he has to destroy you. That doesn’t play well, really, on any side.”

On McCain’s temper:

“No I don’t [think McCain can get through a general campaign without temper tantrums]. But we have this filter of the media. If he does it somewhere in a very public place, where enough people can see it, perhaps it will severely damage him. But I broke a story in my book that he had physically assaulted Rick Renzi, a congressman from Arizona, in 2006. The response to that story was that the McCain people called me a liar and he denied it when he was asked on Fox News if it ever occurred. Suddenly, a week later, when the Washington Post got more information on it and wrote a story on John McCain’s temper, now they’ve backed up a bit and admitted, ‘Oh, wait, it did happen, but it wasn’t as bad as Cliff said it was.’

“It’s an explosive temper that he cannot control. It’s also led him to try and in some cases succeed in getting numerous people who had the audacity to disagree with him fired from their jobs. For those of us who lived through the Bush years and saw the way that those who were ‘disloyal’ were purged and smeared and attacked, that’s what you’re looking at in John McCain. But I would say even worse. His temper seems to be much worse than the petulance we get from George W. Bush. That’s a long way of saying I think he’s going to blow up a number of times. He already did once with a reporter. The question is, will it be reported accurately?”

On McCain’s abortive efforts to leave the Republican party:

“The first major [overture to the Democrats] he made was in 2001, around the time that Jim Jeffords ended up switching, the senator from Vermont. In fact, it’s been reported now that John McCain approached the Democrats before Jeffords did. You had a tie in the Senate, so one vote was enough to change the balance of power. John McCain was still very angry at the way he’d been treated by George W. Bush and Karl Rove, and I would say rightfully so, during the primaries, when the smear campaign against him was quite unbelievable. He had serious thoughts at that time about switching to the Democratic party. The Democratic party was in a place where I think his views on some issues, like trade and others, wouldn’t be quite as unpopular as they are now, and he was trying to moderate them.

“But again, the question has to be asked, why was he trying to moderate them? I argue that he was doing it, and I’ve been told this by a number of top-level Republican officials, that it was all out of anger for Bush and out of political ambition. He thought he was going to switch to the Democratic party first. Then when Jim Jeffords did, there wasn’t as much motivation for him. But what he did was to spend three years — and anybody can observe his record and see this — where his record was much more moderate than it was before 2000 and after about 2003, when he veered back to the hard right. The reason why he did this was because he’d been thinking about running as an independent. He’d been talking to many people and thinking he might leave the Republican party and run as an independent against George Bush.

“The second [episode] with joining the Democratic party was when he himself approached John Kerry — again, not accurately reported at the time, when it was said that Kerry approached him; not true, according to John Kerry and others. John McCain approached Kerry and spoke to him about potentially being his vice-president and having there be a unity ticket against Bush. Nobody knows exactly what was said, but it scared the heck out of Karl Rove and others enough that they went and told him they would throw everything behind him in 2008 and much of the infrastructure would support him. Which they did in the end. He still found a way to almost lose.

“So there you go. Anybody can easily see that when he was pushing for things like a patients’ bill of rights, and closing the gun-show loophole, having CAFE standards, and a number of other issues where he moved decidedly over to the center, it was during a brief time when he was thinking about leaving the Republican party and either becoming an independent or becoming a Democrat.”