What do you suppose would happen if Richard Quinn told John McCain to wear brown?

Perhaps it would provoke the unmitigated fury of the national media, as New Age feminist Naomi Wolf did when she got caught giving the vice president wardrobe tips and advice on how to morph from loyal underling to Alpha Male.

Wolf was featured in no fewer than 53 stories in less than two weeks last fall, most served up with a sneer. They focused on Wolf's brand of feminism (too weird), her $15,000 monthly fee from the Gore campaign (too high) and her hair (too big).

We await a similar reaction to word that Quinn, a leader among South Carolina neo-Confederates, is a $20,000-a-month consultant to McCain's presidential campaign.

No doubt you haven't heard of him, since most national media outlets have ignored this detail except to note that Quinn is involved in the cause of keeping the Confederate battle flag unfurled over the statehouse. The McCain campaign issued a laudatory press release when it hired Quinn, long a power in conservative circles in South Carolina.

In January, the New Republic published an article with excerpts from Southern Partisan, the neo-Confederate magazine of which Quinn is editor-in-chief. Among them were apologia for the Ku Klux Klan, a denial that slave owners broke up slave families and screeds against Jews, Puerto Ricans, Italians and Eastern Europeans.

Quinn himself didn't write any of them. He said in an interview that he does not agree with every view expressed by writers in his magazine, that his role as editor-in-chief does not give him day-to-day control over content. Besides, some of the handful of media reports on Quinn have noted, the magazine is not as inflammatory now as it was before Quinn took the helm.

This is roughly akin to applauding the wolf for having the good sense to don sheepskin.

Recent issues of Southern Partisan make no overt racial appeals. But there is little doubt about where it stands. It creates a portrait of the Civil War in which slavery is airbrushed out, with the conflict seen instead as a power grab by the federal government seeking hegemony over states. It is anti-immigrant, saying "new waves of immigration have brought nothing but trouble and divisiveness." It is anti-gay, excoriating George W. Bush because he has "signaled to the Log Cabin Club (of gay Republicans) that he is their boy."

As for women, it said Elizabeth Dole was unqualified to hold Cabinet positions in the Reagan and Bush administrations and got the jobs because it was necessary to play "footsie-wootsie" with her husband, former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole of Kansas. That meant "giving his bedmate Cabinet posts."

Quinn's writing is limited to short pieces promoting the magazine's content. In one, he praised a black conservative writer who, Quinn said, refuted "the Honest Abe myth." He called "one of the most important interviews we've ever published," a piece last year featuring historian Clyde Wilson, an expert on states-rights advocate John C. Calhoun. In the interview, Wilson looked forward to "some kind of devolution of power so that the healthier parts of American society can defend and preserve themselves."

McCain says he has not read the magazine and does not agree with the sentiments of its writers. Even Quinn admits the thinking in Southern Partisan "can seem a bit eccentric" to those outside the South. So why doesn't the media think so?

The future of Al Gore's candidacy, if not the republic itself, was deemed in jeopardy because of occasional memos from Wolf, whose gravest sin seems to have been that she once suggested teen-agers might avoid intercourse by substituting it with sexual fondling.

Now there is a collective wink at a political consultant whose magazine promotes a world view that abhors just about everyone, and rewrites history to boot. Now what will the biased left-wing media think of next?

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