Arizona Republic: McCain Not a Maverick
Posted by Matt Ortega on May 7, 2008 at 03:05 PM
The Arizona Republic, John McCain's hometown newspaper, examined the presumptive GOP nominee's voting record and found that "when it matters most, he seldom bucks the party" on Senate votes since 1999. It is more evidence that John McCain's rhetoric on the campaign trail just doesn't match his Bush-like record in Washington.
But an Arizona Republic analysis of his Senate votes on the most divided issues in the past decade shows that McCain almost never thwarted his party's objectives.The presumptive Republican nominee arguably cast the decisive vote 14 times since 1999 to ensure Republicans got their way, and he had five other close cases where his vote may have made a difference, Senate records show. By comparison, McCain effectively handed Democrats a win on roll-call votes four times in the same period. On one of those occasions, Republicans could still have won if Vice President Dick Cheney had cast a tie-breaking vote.
According to Congressional Quarterly, John McCain sided with President Bush's wishes more than 90 percent of the time in five of the last seven years. The study found that in 2007, John McCain sided with President Bush 95 percent of the time, and with the GOP 90 percent of the time.
The voting pattern seems at odds with the popular narrative that McCain's maverick tendencies make him an unreliable conservative."He is a conservative who votes conservative on most issues," said Keith Poole, a political scientist at the University of California-San Diego. "By no means is he a liberal or even a moderate."
John McCain: The Bush president Bush Republicans have been waiting for.
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