Digby:

I don’t know if McCain is crooked. But you have to wonder, after his close call with the Keating Five and public association with campaign finance reform, how anyone could be so arrogant as to think he could get away with this stuff if he actually became the Republican nominee? After all we’ve seen of pages and blue dresses and wide stances, it’s nearly impossible to believe that candidates can think they’ll get away with hiding anything like this in this environment.

But apparently, he did. He has bought so fully into his media love that he seems to have believed that he wouldn’t be held to the same standards as other politicians. I guess he thought that nobody could ever believe he’d do anything dishonest. But now that another woman has been injected into this (by GOP operatives, I might add), his whole facade is in danger of crumbling. The press might have been willing to overlook the corruption angle, but the sex angle is just impossible for them to resist. [Emphasis added]

I think this is a spot-on analysis of McCain’s likely thought process, though I’d also add that there was a clear effort on his part to muscle this story out of printing press last year. The initial Times story included this line:

He made the statements in a call to Bill Keller, the executive editor of The New York Times, to complain about the paper’s inquiries.

So I think Digby’s right – he thought he could get away with it, but he was working to kill this story at the highest levels of the New York Times. As Digby says, he thought no one, including Bill Keller, would believe he would do anything dishonest. I suppose the inclusion of the section on the Keating Five scandal in the Times expose puts that lie to bed, separate from anything included in the Iseman scandal.