As the Rove crew has taken the reins of John McCain’s campaign over the past few weeks, one of their first orders of business has been to place a muzzle on their candidate. McCain’s press conferences are now strictly local and impromptu affairs for the most part, the better to assure that any gaffes tripping from his lips stay out of the national news cycle. Steve Schmidt et al. are likewise trying to curtail the back-of-the-bus bull sessions that made McCain the favorite uncle of every reporter detailed to his campaign back in 2000. And there are private expressions of amazement among McCain’s press entourage about the meager amount of campaigning he does day to day. (Rolling Stone recently ran a print-only story on the last score; Americablog posted an excerpt.)

The emerging subtext in more and more stories about McCain is whether he lacks the stamina, or the working synapses, or both, to spend a lot of time in uncontrolled settings. Today’s New York Times features a story by Adam Nagourney and Jim Rutenberg that opens in a fairly shocking manner, my emphasis added:

Senator John McCain is so quick to pick up his gold-colored cellphone to solicit advice — from senators, campaign consultants, even the stray former deputy press secretary — that aides, concerned about his tendency to adopt the last opinion he has heard, have tried to cut back on the time he has to make calls.

Mr. McCain is known to sign off on big campaign decisions and then to march off his own reservation. Two weeks ago, he publicly disagreed with his own spokeswoman, Jill Hazelbaker, after she used a line of attack against Senator Barack Obama that he had approved after careful strategizing within his campaign. Ms. Hazelbaker raced out of the Virginia campaign headquarters and refused to take Mr. McCain’s calls of apology, aides said, and a plan to have Republican members of Congress use the same critical line about Mr. Obama’s foreign trip fell apart.

The story then executes a neat pirouette and plays itself out with yammerings about tactical disagreements in the McCain camp, the implication being that McCain, like FDR before him, likes to maintain control by keeping his underlings bickering and uncertain of their own status.

But the most resonant image by far is that phrase in the lede about concerns over "his tendency to adopt the last opinion he has heard," which is dire enough in the view of his managers that they are trying to limit his outgoing phone calls. Couple that with the campaign’s clampdown on access, the paltry stump schedule, and McCain’s own comments to NYT reporter Elizabeth Bumiller the other day at the Iowa State Fair (“If I put in three or four 18-hour, 20-hour days in a row, then I’m not sharp. It’s just a fact.”), and it begins to seem that managing the 2008 version of McCain is a bit like sending Grandpa to the corner store for a quart of milk and finding him several hours later in a park half a mile away, chatting up passersby and watching squirrels at play.

To be fair, any speculation about McCain’s mental decline has to be weighed against his own political biography, which is not exactly marked by consistency. McCain’s values have always been defined by his ambitions. During his "maverick" years — from the late ’90s through about 2004 — McCain first tacked left for purposes of distinguishing himself from George W. Bush in 2000 and later, as Cliff Schecter writes in The Real McCain, to prepare his departure from the Republican party to run against Bush either as an independent or as John Kerry’s running mate in 2004. Malleable as his convictions have been, however, McCain has never had the sort of difficulty staying on his talking points — even staying on the same side of his talking points — he’s having now.

Last week Robert Kaiser of the Washington Post published a piece called "The Curious Mind of John McCain" that labored mightily to cast his increasing fecklessness as the sign of a vibrant, endlessly inquisitive mind. It’s worth reading mainly for the insights of a couple of Kaiser’s sources, starting with McCain’s bipartisan pal and former groomsman Gary Hart:

"I think his mind is visceral," Hart said, "driven less by thought and more by feelings. This doesn’t mean he’s totally reactive or without logic or thought processes; it just means he’s a fighter pilot. He reacts to circumstances."

A senior official in the Clinton administration who worked with McCain on Bosnia and Kosovo, where McCain defied most of his Republican colleagues to support strong U.S. action against Serbia, agreed. "In the many, many years that I’ve been in Washington," this former official said, insisting on anonymity to avoid upsetting McCain, "John McCain is far and away the most emotional politician I have ever met."

"McCain is all emotion," the former official continued. "People don’t understand that, so they keep talking about his temperament, his temper. He reacts emotionally, therefore unpredictably."