On Wednesday, John McCain's home state Arizona Republic did some good excavation work in the ongoing demolition of the GOP nominee's maverick myth. Analyzing his Senate voting record since 1999, the paper found McCain rarely strayed from the Republican Party line. But that's only a small part of the unraveling of the McCain maverick fable. As I previously detailed, John McCain in his eternal quest for the GOP nomination has repeatedly reversed long-held positions and compromised core principles to curry favor with right-wing Republican primary voters.
As the Republic details, when the going got tough, McCain got in line. When it mattered most in the closest votes, Senator McCain since 1999 sided with his GOP colleagues. As it turns out, 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.

That voting record is just another feather in John McCain's conservative cap. Congressional Quarterly gave McCain a 90% score for "party unity," making him an even more reliable GOP water-carrier than fellow Arizonan John Kyl, the #2 ranking Republican in the Senate. The Washington Post similarly gave him a score of 88.3%, tying him with South Carolina's Lindsey Graham ahead of 29 other Senate Republicans. It is for good reason that Keith Poole, a political scientist at the University of California-San Diego, concluded:

"He is a conservative who votes conservative on most issues. By no means is he a liberal or even a moderate."

The Arizona Republic also unearthed more evidence for McCain's iron law of right-wing pandering. That is, McCain's closeness to the GOP party line is directly proportional to the proximity of Republican presidential primaries:

During the 10 years The Republic examined, McCain crossed over to vote with Democrats 19 times in 82 close votes. He did so just once in the four years he was running for president: 1999, 2000, 2007 and 2008. All 12 of the close votes he missed happened in those years, too.
Even so, in 59 of the 82 close votes, Republicans got what they wanted regardless of McCain's position. In those 59 cases, McCain broke with his party 16 times.

But what the Republic's analysis didn't address is John McCain's litany of gymnastic contortions and just-in-time flip-flops during his run for the Republican nomination. As his quest for the GOP nomination heated up, McCain veered hard to the right in an effort to appease his party's conservative base. As I noted last month, McCain changed positions on:

The Bush tax cuts, Jerry Falwell and the Christian right, immigration reform, overturning Roe v. Wade, whether Justice Samuel Alito is a model for the Supreme Court, and France-bashing, just to name a few.

The Arizona Republic piece is a hopeful sign that perhaps, at long last, the American media will reconsider the crown of maverick wrongly placed on John McCain's head. (The story comes just a day after MSNBC's Tim Russert agreed with a recent New York Times survey showing that Americans believe the press has been too easy on McCain.) Perhaps the untold story of campaign 2008 - John McCain's transformation from maverick to political prostitute - will now be told.