One of the common themes I’m hearing in the current race for the president is that we don’t know who the real Barack Obama is.  Is he really the post-racial, bipartisan, uniter that he claims to be now or is he really the typical politician of his early career in Chicago, and ultra-liberal to boot?  By contrast, at least McCain is a known commodity.  For example, see this post of the same title by Rod Dreher: Who’s the real Obama?

Dreher writes:

It is all but impossible to reconcile the Obama that emerges from [his days in the Illinois legislature] with the Obama we're presented with today. It suggests one of two things: either today's Obama is a fraud, an ultraliberal masquerading as a moderate, or he is a man of no fixed convictions, a Zelig-like chameleon able to be whatever he wants to be for the sake of advancing his own political career.

Again: who's the real Obama? With McCain, you may not much like what you get (I don't), but at least you know what you're getting. With Obama? He's a mystery. Brooks is right: a number of people can't commit to him because they aren't sure what they're committing to

I don’t get this.  Just look at all of the shifts McCain has been making to become more palatable to the Republican base (e.g., on torture, offshore drilling, Bush tax cuts, etc.).  Romney has done the same thing too on a variety of issues.  Of course, it makes sense to try to figure out who Obama really is…but I don’t see that McCain is really a known commodity either.