Until recently, no one thought of John McCain as a culture warrior. Distrusted by the religious right, he seemed annoyed even to have to address issues like gay marriage. In February, a political lifetime ago, a poll commissioned by the Planned Parenthood Action Fund found sizeable support for McCain among pro-choice women, and revealed that seven in 10 of these women didn't know the candidate's actual anti-abortion views (pdf). By many accounts, his first choice for a running mate was the pro-choice Independent Joe Lieberman. As recently as May, he told Glamour Magazine that he would encourage the Republican party to include exemptions to the anti-abortion plank of its platform for cases of rape, incest and threats to the mother's life.

How odd, then, that in these final weeks, McCain's rhetoric on women has reached a pitch of febrile wingnuttery not heard from a presidential candidate in decades. The first clues came with the Sarah Palin pick, as well as with his ultimate failure to even try to moderate the party platform's abortion language, which emerged as absolutist as ever. Both those things, though, could have been taken as more evidence of disinterest toward women's issues, rather than active extremism. Not so his recent fulminations.

First there was the final presidential debate, where McCain attacked Obama for his insistence that any ban on late-term abortions have an exception when a woman's health is at risk. Using sarcastic air quotes, McCain treated such concerns as risible, saying: "That's the extreme pro-abortion position, quote, 'health'." He used the phrase "pro-abortion", a locution favoured by the hard right, three times, and clearly stated his desire to see Roe v Wade overturned.

Then, speaking on Fox News on Sunday, McCain celebrated Palin as "a direct counterpoint to the liberal feminist agenda for America" who has a "wonderful family". (The implication, perhaps, being that feminists do not have wonderful families, which someone should tell to grandmother-of-six Nancy Pelosi, among many, many others).

To some observers, this might all this might seem quite standard. There's nothing new, after all, about the Republican party opposing abortion or lambasting feminism. In recent elections, however, GOP presidential candidates have generally tried to soften their message for mass consumption. In 1992, after George HW Bush lost to Bill Clinton, the chastened Republican party vowed to remake their image as angry plutocratic puritans. Reporting on the 1992 meeting of the Republican Governor's Association, held just after the election, the New York Times described a party desperate to start promoting an image of "diversity" and "tolerance". It quoted Haley Barbour, currently the governor of Mississippi, saying: "We need our heads examined if we let abortion be the threshold issue of Republicanism."

To be sure, Republicans since then haven't changed their position on reproductive rights. They have, however, changed their language. In 1996, Bob Dole tried to reach out to pro-choice voters and infuriated the right by failing to bring up late-term abortion while debating Clinton. Even the resolutely anti-abortion George W Bush mostly signalled his position with allusions and dog-whistles heard only by the already committed. Rather than declare his desire to see Roe v Wade swept away, he spoke of his opposition to the US supreme court's infamous pro-slavery Dred Scott decision, baffling those who didn't know that in the anti-abortion movement, Dred Scott is constantly invoked as a Roe analogy.

Republicans even stopped bashing the women's movement, trying instead to co-opt it. Hence all the recent crowing that Palin, presented as half Arctic Annie Oakley, half supermom, represents real, you-can-have-it-all feminism, the kind that might even appeal to disaffected Hillary Clinton supporters.

But now, losing, frustrated and discombobulated, McCain has dropped the pretence. The surprise is not his contempt for feminism, but his willingness to express it so baldly. Ironically, it's precisely the fact that he hasn't spent his career in the Elmer Gantry wing of the party that now makes him sound so unhinged. He's not fluent in the codes and dodges more practiced Republicans use to lull moderates while signalling their faith to the true believers. As a spokesman for reaction, he's unvarnished. His blunt anti-feminism is slightly shocking, but, given the party he's now leading, at least it's honest.