McCain Myth Buster: John McCain and the Republican Party

On the campaign trail John McCain likes to call himself a maverick Republican who bucks the Party line whenever possible. But the fact is, McCain is far from a moderate. In the same week that we found out that McCain has never voted against a Republican judicial nominee during his entire time in the Senate, the Arizona Republic reported that he rarely bucks his party on close votes. According to the paper's analysis of his Senate votes, McCain's "voting pattern seems at odds with the popular narrative that McCain's maverick tendencies make him an unreliable conservative" and a political scientist who analyzes Senate votes said "He is a conservative who votes conservative on most issues…[b]y no means is he a liberal or even a moderate." [Arizona Republic, 5/7/08]

Looks like when it comes to his own record John McCain hasn't been giving the voters straight talk.

Arizona Republic Says McCain Not a Moderate. According to an analysis of McCain's record, "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." [Arizona Republic, 5/7/08]

After casting himself as a "Maverick" in 2000, the new John McCain is walking in lockstep with President Bush, pandering to the right wing of the Republican Party, and embracing the ideology he once denounced. On the campaign trail McCain has callously abandoned many of his previously held positions, even contradicted himself, in a blatant attempt to remake himself into a candidate Republicans can accept in 2008. So just who is the real John McCain? The Democratic National Committee will present a daily fact aimed at exposing the man behind the myth.