Sure, November 2008 is nearly two years away, but it’s apparently never too early to declare one’s intention to run for president, and thus it’s never too early to get to know the people who might be the next leader of the free world. This month we’ll be taking a brief look at them.

John McCain

Party: Republican

Age: 70

Status: Exploratory committee formed November 2006

http://mccain.senate.gov

John McCain is a war hero, a media darling, a bit of an iconoclast, and, for a Republican, a relative liberal on social issues. He’s the senior Senator from Arizona and a former presidential candidate who in 2000 famously lost a nasty race for the Republican nomination to George W. Bush.

McCain has a storied record of military service, but his most well-known experience is as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. He was held for nearly six years and tortured repeatedly, an experience that shaped his opposition last year to some parts of the Bush administration’s policy on detainees and unlawful combatants in the “War on Terror.”

The most interesting part of McCain’s second run for the presidency is his attempt, over the last year, to convince the hard-right of the Republican base that he’s their man. In this month’s Vanity Fair, Todd S. Purdum takes a long look at the painful ideological and moral contortions that McCain is going through to sell himself to people like Reverend Jerry Falwell (whom McCain once described as one of America’s “agents of intolerance” before, last spring, accepting an invitation to give the commencement speech at Falwell’s Liberty University). Purdum asks, essentially, whether McCain is jettisoning a key, compelling aspect of his persona—his professed moral and ideological rigor—in order to take what may be his last and best shot at the presidency. (If McCain wins this time, he would be, at 72, the oldest president ever sworn in.) Purdum’s final answer is yes, McCain is forgetting what he told Boston College students in a commencement address last fall: Follow your inner beliefs and don’t compromise them just because it’s more expedient in the short term, or because a lot of other people might not even realize you’re compromising.

I wish that you always hear the voice in your own heart, when you face hard decisions in your life, to hear it say to you, again and again, until it drowns out every other thought: ‘I will know. I will know. I will know.’

McCain has been a leader on campaign finance reform; a hawk on the Iraq War (he’s recently spoken favorably about a troop surge to combat the civil war); a promoter of the idea that life begins at conception; and has been all over the map on gay marriage, voting against the Federal Marriage Amendment but supporting a failed initiative to ban gay marriage in his home state, and then giving this confusing statement on Hardball…

…which he then clarified, to boos, this way:

McCain is married to Cindy Hensley McCain, who heads a large beer distribution company and is his second wife. He has admitted to having affairs while married to his first wife, Carol Shepp, who had been severely injured in a car accident while he was serving in Vietnam and who looked much different upon his return from the war. They apparently remain on good terms.

McCain has seven children, including a Bangladeshi orphan adopted with his second wife. In the nasty 2000 Republican primary in South Carolina, the Bangladeshi orphan was falsely cast by the Bush campaign as McCain’s illegitimate interracial daughter. Bush won the primary, and McCain was furious and never recovered his momentum. But since then he’s apparently gotten over it.

Yesterday: John Edwards.