Long-headed.

Long-headed?! Meade questions my word use in a previous post. It came to mind because I was just law-professing the famous Supreme Court case Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, within which the long-headed lawprof-turned-justice Felix Frankfurter — explaining that the Constitution's Framers "were not inexperienced doctrinaires" — wrote:

These long-headed statesmen had no illusion that our people enjoyed biological or psychological or sociological immunities from the hazards of concentrated power. It is absurd to see a dictator in a representative product of the sturdy democratic traditions of the Mississippi Valley. The accretion of dangerous power does not come in a day. It does come, however slowly, from the generative force of unchecked disregard of the restrictions that fence in even the most disinterested assertion of authority.

The "representative product of the sturdy democratic traditions of the Mississippi Valley" was Harry Truman, who had accreted a little too much power.

The (unlinkable) OED defines "long-headed" — definition #2 — as "Of great discernment or foresight; discerning, shrewd, far-seeing." The historical examples include:

1711   R. Steele Spectator No. 52. ⁋3   Being a long-headed Gentlewoman, I am apt to imagine she has some further Design than you have yet penetrated....
1841   Dickens Old Curiosity Shop ii. lxvii. 178   Men of the world, long-headed customers, knowing dogs.
1864   J. R. Lowell McClellan or Lincoln? in Prose Wks. (1890) V. 173   Mr. Lincoln is a long-headed and long-purposed man.

Searching my own files, I see this in Henry David Thoreau's "Walden":

Or on a Sunday afternoon, if I chanced to be at home, I heard the cronching of the snow made by the step of a long-headed farmer, who from far through the woods sought my house, to have a social "crack"; one of the few of his vocation who are "men on their farms"; who donned a frock instead of a professor's gown, and is as ready to extract the moral out of church or state as to haul a load of manure from his barn-yard. We talked of rude and simple times, when men sat about large fires in cold, bracing weather, with clear heads; and when other dessert failed, we tried our teeth on many a nut which wise squirrels have long since abandoned, for those which have the thickest shells are commonly empty.

Now, don your frock, cronch on in to the comments section, and have a social crack with the long-headed squirrels of Althouse. Extract morals, haul a load of manure, talk of rude and simple times, or try your teeth on the toughest empty nuts. You know who they are!

"McCain jokingly wiped his face, pretending to wipe off moss."

Moss can't be wiped off, and it's not — like the metaphorical egg — only on the face.

In fact, the standard term is mossback:

A reactionary; one who furiously resists progress of any kind.

The word is derived from a sea creature so ancient that it has moss or seaweed growing on its back. During the Civil War it was used to describe those who fled to the swamps and forests to evade the draft; in the 1870s the word was given a political meaning as a Northern counterpart to a Southern "Bourbon (i.e., conservative) Democrat."

Emporia Gazette editor William Allen White, in his famed "What's the Matter with Kansas?" editorial in 1896, thundered: "We have an old moss-back Jacksonian who snorts and howls because there is a bathtub in the State House; we are running that old jay for Governor."

Old jay, eh? Was he wacko? Back to the discussion of mossback (which is from the greatly missed William Safire).

Pennsylvania Congressman J.C. Sibley drew a typical word picture in 1900: "Primitive man lived in caverns, clothed himself with skins, and ate his meat raw, sitting on his haunches, and there has never occurred a change for the higher and better forms of life without arousing the hostility of some old mossback, conservative hunker[s], who will prate of those fairer and better days of old, when their grandfathers swung by their tails from the limbs of the trees."

Wacko monkeys.

Will Rogers told defeated Democratic candidate Al Smith in 1929: "taken out from under the influence of a lot of these old Mossbacks, you are a pretty progressive fellow, Al, and with you and this fellow Roosevelt as a kind of nucleus, I think we can, with the help of some Progressive young Democratic governors and senators and congressmen, make this thing into a Party, instead of a Memory."

Make this thing into a Party, instead of a Memory... a good phrase for Republicans to think about today.

The word was relatively dormant during the thirties and early forties, but President Harry Truman gave it new life in the 1948 campaign. In the Far West he charged that the Republican party's domination by "eastern mossbacks" would stifle the economy of the West. Throughout the country, he denounced the Republican chairmen of the Senate and House committees as "a bunch of mossbacks."

One of the lines that best describes a mossback was leveled at House Speaker "Uncle Joe" Cannon: "If he had been present at Creation, he would have voted for Chaos."...

In 1992 President George H.W. Bush complained that he had extended a "hand of friendship" to Congress at the start of his presidency "and these old mossbacks bit it off." Long Island's Newsday reported a year later that "Clinton joined... Richard Nixon in toasting [Strom] Thurmond's inspiring 90-year journey from racist Democratic segregationist to mossback Republican obstructionist."

The Oxford English dictionary has the old Civil War meaning first, then "A slow, rustic, or old-fashioned person; one attached to antiquated ideas; (hence) an extreme conservative; a reactionary. In early use often denoting farmers of the southern and western States of the United States (see quot. 1888)." Examples:

[1850   H. C. Lewis Odd Leaves from Louisiana Swamp Doctor 181   Here you sit, like a knot in a tree, with the moss commencing to grow on your back.]...
1885   Boston (Mass.) Jrnl. 5 Mar. 2/3   Everybody rejoices over the passage of the bill... We say everybody—we except a few intense mossbacks, who were known during the war as copperheads.
1888   America 18 Oct. 16   Mossback..seems to have originated in the swamps of North Carolina, where a particular class of the poor whites were said to have lived among the cypress until the moss had grown on their backs.
1924   J. Buchan Three Hostages i. 10,   I was becoming such a mossback that I had almost stopped reading the papers.