National Bloggers & Senator McCain

I’ve been taking a closer look recently at a number of national conservative bloggers, and where they stand on 2008 presidential contenders. Today, I’d like to feature Michelle Malkin. Over the past two years, I have come to see Malkin as a firebrand. She follows in the Ann Coulter tradition of conservative pundits — often very humorous, but also prone to excess. I don’t mean that as an insult, but only to suggest she plays a role of attack dog. She is eloquent, but also gritty. As the NYT quote she proudly displays on her website suggests, in a word she is a, “firecracker.”

So where does she stand on the “Maverick”? Well, it turns out she doesn’t think he’s very Maverick-like. In fact, she’s on record at her blog criticizing several of Senator McCain’s recent moves. In this post, she bemoans the fact he didn’t show up at CPAC. But as Michelle found out personally, CPAC wasn’t such a glamorous affair this year.

In another, she picks up the mainstream media’s cherry-picked quote from McCain’s Seattle talk last month. That was an easy enough trap to fall into, afterall, it was low fruit ripe for the picking. But I’ve come to know Malkin as a blogger who is always on top of breaking news. In fact, she’s covered a ton of issues and stories that were passed up by the MSM and other national bloggers alike. Thus for her to take the MSM quote to heart kind of surprised me.

Will she eventually come over to McCain, as I’ve predicted a number of other pundits will? I think there’s some possibility of that happening. Malkin strikes me as open-minded, and doesn’t seem to be too invested in any of the frontrunners. But like a handful of national conservative pundits, she is somewhat hostile to McCain for his positions on certain issues. Whether these continue to make his candidacy a non-starter for her, and other pundits, is something I’ll be taking a closer look at in the coming months. Stay tuned.