He'll live to regret it. As sure as the GOP is a morally bankrupt refuge for the ideologically depraved, John McCain will just as surely rue the day that he made what the New York Times called [1] the "unusual suggestion" of "hold[ing] a series of joint town-hall-style campaign appearances this summer."

For anyone who's heard McCain torture a speech from the stump, or stops to consider that he hasn't two nickels to rub together in pursuit of a conventional media campaign, the alternative town-hall suggestion seems more perfectly understandable than "unusual." But still, he'll regret it.

Just wait till Barack Obama -- who has agreed to the idea in principle -- warms up. He may be a trifle rigid and unaware of his own abilities at first, but once this Harvard Law-trained cross-examiner starts dissecting the assorted buffooneries of McCain's contradictions, the latter will soon enough explode in mangled frustration.

And at that point the nation will know precisely why Republican Senator Thad Cochran once said that "the thought" of the "hotheaded" McCain "being president sends a cold chill down my spine."

Whether in formal primary debates or the comfortable town-hall meetings he has staged to date, McCain has had a rather easy time of it -- and it's made him cocky. He now fancies himself a master fielder of the difficult question. But time-restricted, televised debates with likeminded opponents and intimidated citizens in awe of a national "hero politician" have offered little in the way of aggressively exposing McCain's soft underbelly.

And how soft and assailable it is. Wednesday, for example, at the equally friendly news conference in which he proposed the town-hall get-togethers, McCain, as the NY Times further noted, "tried to proclaim his independence from President Bush. But then he pledged to continue some of the president’s signature policies on issues including the Iraq war and tax cuts."

Under Obama's sustained and withering fire, McCain's determined service to these wildly variant allegiances will become blisteringly apparent to even low-information voters. The exposure won't be pretty -- not for McCain, anyway -- and its ugly but unavoidable truth will soon reduce the Arizona senator to public displays of offended rage.

How dare a young and lanky upstart of no military service question the mighty McCain on matters of national security -- such as his recent suggestion that we cut and run like Democrats from Iraq by 2013 -- or demand, as a mere legislative amateur, fiscal accountability of a Bushian flavor from the nation's foremost fiscal hawk.

McCain's profound incompatibilities on public parade will leave him sputtering and spewing and seeing red. In time -- and that time will assuredly come -- he'll lose that famous temper of his and unleash the inner McCain through some famously stupid and instant reaction.

And, lucky for Obama, the Republican senator will continue heaving those incompatibilities, one atop the other.

Just this morning, for example, it is reported [2] that McCain does, after all, believe "that President Bush’s program of wiretapping without warrants was lawful" -- "despite a 1978 federal statute that required court oversight of surveillance" -- which is in direct contradiction to what he professed just six months ago: "I think that presidents have the obligation to obey and enforce laws that are passed by Congress and signed into law by the president, no matter what the situation is."

Oh, the sticky web he is weaving in his dancing appeals to disaffected Clintonites and thoughtful independents and hidebound conservatives. He's to the left, to the right, and square in the center of virtually every issue. And somebody, someday, let's say perhaps in a town hall meeting, will get around to pointing that out.

McCain's counteroffensive strategy is by now clear enough. He will, from now till November, just as he did earlier this week, pronounce every Obamian criticism of his welter of contradictions as symptomatic of "the same tired negative attacks that the American people are so sick and tired of."

By late fall, however, those "attacks" will seem to the American people less negative than logical. Or so one hopes, assuming they're still visible through the coming smoke of McCain-associated onslaughts from right-wing 527s.