I grew up with John McCain. His Arizona senate offices — and now, “Southwestern Campaign Headquarters” — are just blocks from my childhood home in Phoenix, Ariz. Located on the unassuming 16th St. in a short glass building across from an auto repair place, I passed these offices every day for nine years on the way to school. Further along this same route was John McCain’s church, North Phoenix Baptist Church. Then, just a few blocks north of my destination was one of his half-dozen houses. Finally, a few blocks south was the Catholic high school attended by some of my neighborhood friends and John McCain’s son, who is now serving in Iraq.

So as a native Arizonan, I have long lived with John McCain’s admirable ideals and frustrating contradictions. Growing up in a staunchly Republican family, we, like many others in Arizona, traced our political attitudes back to the days of Barry Goldwater. He held an iconoclastic libertarian outlook that likely grew out of Arizona’s hot and lonely frontier lifestyle. Nowadays, Goldwater is the political patron saint of the “leave-me-alone” philosophy. But McCain, much to Arizona Republicans’ chagrin, never subscribed to this philosophy. He does adhere selectively, most notably on economic issues. But while Goldwater’s primary unit of political thinking was the individual, McCain’s primary unit of political thinking is the nation.

This was always apparent in McCain’s relationship to Arizona. While he was physically a part of my life in Arizona, in most respects, McCain never really belonged to our state. It is not because he is not a native Arizonan — very few people of his generation are natives. Rather, McCain has always deliberately represented the United States of America above and beyond the state of Arizona.

Indeed, McCain is, as columnist David Brooks said, a “romantic nationalist” — a devotee of America and “a cause larger than one’s self.” Just look at this year’s Republican National Convention theme: “Country First.” The people of Arizona, in his thinking, are essentially another special interest looking out for its own narrow interests and not the interest of the nation-at-large. Of course, of anybody, John McCain has credibility to talk about national service — he has spent his life at the Naval Academy, in the Navy, in a POW camp and in Congress. Let’s just say that he is an authority on serving America. It is this overarching theme that binds together what is an otherwise erratic political outlook.

Indeed, McCain uses larger, romantic ideas like national duty, greater good and personal integrity to guide his decisions on smaller individual issues. His political thinking defies easy placement on the usual political spectrum and certainly party labels. Moreover, this outlook means he is far from a policy wonk. While policy wonks look at the painstaking details of individual bills and plans, McCain assumes that his sound ideals will guide the minutia. He finds romantic crusades, like fighting federal corruption or fighting terror, and then legislates accordingly. He is a man of principled ends, not detailed means.

While growing up in Arizona and still today, I appreciate and respect McCain’s romantic outlook. I think his heart is in the right place. (The national media, most of America and a vast majority of Arizona have, according to polls, long shared my affection for him.) But I’m not sure that this is McCain’s moment in history. I think the problems that we face today are more complex than he makes them out to be. While he wants to reduce our age to sweeping and stark battles, it seems to me that we’re really in an age of complexity. I just hope that he will begin to address these complexities — to channel his bigger ideas through good policy, particularly more reasonable foreign policy. Then I’d be proud to see his Arizona senate offices move from 16th St. to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

If you want some inside information on Senator McCain’s houses, church or children, please email Paul Craft at pcraft "at" stanford.edu.