The Washington Post's new "Moments of Truth" series took two very different turns on the presidential candidates. On October 9, Eli Saslow's story on Obama in Springfield sympathetically focused on the front page on how he was surrounded by hostility, a "biracial progressive" and "sophisticated urbanite" all alone "like a misfit alone in a new school." But four days later, Michael Leahy’s treatment of McCain on the front page was entirely different. It focused on how even as a prisoner of war, McCain was talking big about becoming president, which was weird considering what a young loser he had been. But then the McCain family has always had power lust, claimed Leahy, an "ethos bordering on obsession," always yearning to command things:

McCain had the most audacious dream of all, and he shared his vision one day with a group of fellow POWs. "He was talking about his father to us and then he said: 'I want to be president of the United States. Someday I'm going to be president,' " Stratton recalls. "If the cell wasn't so small, we'd have been rolling around laughing."

His friend, thought Stratton, ought to be concentrating far less on his fantasy and more on how to redirect a naval career that had been adrift before he was shot down over Hanoi. "We reminded him that he had dug himself a big hole with his demerits in the past and nearly being the bottom man of his class at the Naval Academy," Stratton recalls. "And now he was talking about being president? 'Come on, John. Get your career straightened out.' "

Not at all dissuaded, McCain offered his view on the meaning of real command, shaped in part by his father's perspective on genuine power. He wanted to be the one who made the decisions, McCain said, and his father had taught him that even such impressive-sounding jobs as chief of naval operations, the service's highest uniformed position, didn't always provide that opportunity. The only job that guaranteed it was that of president, McCain believed.

"Pursuit of command," as McCain often referred to it, was an ethos bordering on obsession in his family, and it was in Vietnam that he embraced it. But though McCain was the son and grandson of admirals, he decided his pursuit would be in another arena -- politics, where he would come to define success not in terms of ideas or legislation but in fulfilling his family's ideals of leadership and character.

It's not too hard from this contrast to see how the editors and reporters of the Post are having trouble disguising their preference for Obama.

—Tim Graham is Director of Media Analysis at the Media Research Center