“Maverick”: The myth of McCain explained in one handy chart

Here’s a graph from David Brock and Paul Waldman’s book Free Ride: John McCain and the Media that renders visually the roots of John McCain’s storied rise to the title of maverick, moderate and anti-politician. Drawn from the liberal Americans for Democratic Action’s report card on the US Senate, it reveals that McCain was never so moderate or so forward-thinking as when he was trying to outflank George W. Bush en route to the White House.

You might remember that Cliff Schecter, author of The Real McCain: Why Conservatives Don’t Trust Him and Why Independents Shouldn’t, told MinMon in a recent interview that McCain spent a considerable amount of time scheming toward a break with the Republican party in the wake of his bitter 2000 primary defeat at the hands of Bush. As the chart indicates, the vast majority of McCain’s departures from  Republican orthodoxy — most memorably, on Bush’s 2001 tax cuts — came during GWB’s first term, while McCain pondered defecting from the GOP to join the Dems or to run for president as an independent in 2004.

Click on the image to see a larger version of the chart.

Brock and Waldman write:

The very word “maverick” implies not only independence but a willingness to take risks. But it is critical to understand the common thread running through McCain’s high-profile breaks with the GOP: In every case, McCain took a position that was overwhelmingly popular with the public. It was hardly a risk for a politician with national ambitions to embrace campaign finance reform or an effort to regulate tobacco, despite the displeasure it may have caused within the GOP caucus. The other issues on which he has broken with some or all Republicans — global warming, the gun show loophole — were also cases in which the prevailing Republican position was widely unpopular. However sincere he was in the positions he took, the result in every case was a double-victory for McCain: He could enhance his image as a moderate and a maverick, and do so with no risk to his national ambitions, since he was taking the popular position….

The only years in which McCain diverged significantly from the Republican party line in the last decades were 2001, when he voted with the party “only” 67 percent of the time, 2004, when he stuck to the party line 79 percent of the time, and 2006, when his unity score was 76. The rest of the time, throughout his 19-year Senate career, McCain has voted with his party more than 80 percent of the time in any given year.