HBOToday is publication day for John McCain’s career-capping book, The Restless Wave: Good Times, Just Causes, Great Fights, and Other Appreciations, co-written with longtime speechwriter Mark Salter. I have written here previously about the book’s surprising (though unsurprisingly unreflective) admission that the Iraq War was a “mistake,” and also its unrepentance about accusing Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) last year of “working for Vladimir Putin.”

The combination of the book, the forthcoming Memorial Day HBO documentary John McCain: For Whom the Bell Tolls, and the busy end-of-life arrangements are producing what Politico media columnist Jack Shafer calls “the last McCain swoon” from America’s political journalists. “Not even Derek Jeter and David Ortiz were flurried with as much confetti when they departed,” Shafer acidly observes.

There are many causes for the liberal media’s long and only briefly interrupted (in 2008) love affair with this Republican politician, many of which I get into my 2007 book, as well as posts here from 2008. But key among them is that like many elitists, McCain shares with the national political media an unconcealed disdain for swaths of the GOP grassroots, particularly as amplified by the conservative media.