NPR's host of Fresh Air, Terry Gross, interviewed New York Times reporter David Kirkpatrick yesterday.

Kirkpatrick has written a series of articles on McCain that are quite illuminating. We learn something about McCain and what kind of president he would make.

Kirkpatrick talks about the "maverick" image McCain has received. It is not an image his Republican peers see in him.

Essentially, Kirkpatrick says, McCain learned a technique of connecting with the public through a self-effacing admission of being wrong that dates back to the Keating years.

McCain learned that if he admitted being wrong and apologized before the public turned on him, it not only got him off the hook, but sort of brightened his otherwise stale Senate image.

Sometimes it would appear that McCain was going against the grain, but actually he would be in lockstep with his party.

The apologies work like Teflon, deflecting controversy from sticking to him.

The most recent example was his objection to a holiday dedicated to Dr. Martin Luther King. Whenever he addresses the subject to a largely black audience, the question invariably comes up, and true to form, he apologizes.

The "country first" image is also a cynical creation.

When McCain was released from captivity, he felt royally betrayed by an American public who had largely stopped supporting the war long before his release, Kirkpatrick says. (McCain still maintains the war was necessary, and that the US could have won it.)

The experience, Kirkpatrick says, deeply influenced McCain's view of war and his temperament.

In his speech last night at the GOP convention, McCain talked about history placing him in the position to once again to fight for his country.

Most of the speech was as dull as could be, but the self-anointed-savior reference was a glimpse at the McCain that Kirkpatrick talked about - someone who somewhere inside believes that the country owes him something.