McCain's 'Maverick' Myth Is the Media's Creation

By David Brock and Paul Waldman, Anchor Books. Posted March 31, 2008.

The following is an excerpt from "Free Ride: The Media and John McCain" (Anchor Books, 2008) by David Brock and Paul Waldman.

Perhaps no word better defines John McCain in the public imagination than "maverick." It's a word that, more than "straight talk" or "moderate" or "reformer," has come to occupy a seemingly permanent place next to the senator's name in the media. It is also distinct from those other modifiers that have come to identify McCain. As critical as the idea of ideological moderation is to the Myth of McCain, his status as a maverick is not about what he believes but about who he is-something far more important in the personality-driven world of today's politics.

In later years, when asked to name his proudest moment in Congress, John McCain would go all the way back to his first year in the House of Representatives to point to a case in which he stood against a Republican president. In 1983, McCain voted against Ronald Reagan's decision to deploy U.S. troops to Lebanon. "I do not see any obtainable objectives in Lebanon," he said at the time, "and the longer we stay there, the harder it will be to leave."43 McCain sees the act as a defining moment: the neophyte lawmaker breaking ranks with his party and his political hero. (The actual vote was 270-161 in favor of deployment; McCain was joined by twenty-seven Republicans in opposition.) The dissenters would later be vindicated when a truck bomber slammed into the Marine barracks in Lebanon, killing 241 U.S. servicemen and precipitating a U.S. withdrawal. "It demonstrated to me that you really have to do, at the end of the day, what you fundamentally know is right," McCain told the National Journal years later.

At the time, McCain's decision to object was barely noted (a New York Times story on the House vote buried a quote from him at the bottom of its story). McCain evidently sees his 1983 vote as the moment where his political identity as a maverick began to form, but that reputation did not really take hold until much later. In fact, McCain's early years in Congress did not attract much national attention, nor did they evince much evidence of what would become the Myth of McCain. It wasn't until the late 1980s that the press even began to take notice of his self-proclaimed penchant for breaking with party orthodoxy. Early in his career, McCain was seldom described as someone too principled to be bound by party loyalty or the momentary dictates of partisanship. The first time anyone referred to him as a "maverick" in the press appears to be a February 1989 States News Service story, which quoted Dan Casey, then-executive director of the American Conservative Union, saying about McCain, "He is a good conservative but somewhat of a maverick."There was no explanation of what made him a maverick, other than the fact that the group had given him a rating of merely 80 out of 100. Other such descriptions are few and far between. Another story from 1989, in Newsday, described him as a Republican expected to "break ranks" on Dick Cheney's proposed budget cuts to the F-14D aircraft program. But apart from these faint glimmers, there was little indication of the McCain image that would eventually form in the press.

In 1992, McCain was one of three Republican senators to vote for Democratic campaign finance reform legislation (all the Senate Democrats except two voted in favor). The bill called for the provision of taxpayer funds and other incentives to urge candidates to abide by voluntary spending limits; it was vetoed by then-president George H. W. Bush, a veto that the Senate failed to override. In 1993, McCain again cast himself in the role of party rebel in the campaign finance debate. In deliberations over an identical measure to the one Bush had vetoed in 1992, McCain proposed amendments that caught the attention of the media. McCain offered one amendment that barred candidates from using campaign money for personal expenses such as vacations, mortgage payments, and clothing purchases, among others. Another amendment pushed for the campaign reforms, if enacted, to go into effect in 1994 instead of 1996, as originally proposed. Little noted was that McCain's amendment was identical to one that his Arizona colleague, Senator Dennis DeConcini (D), was set to introduce to the Senate, before McCain beat him to the punch by a day-a move that won McCain credit for the amendment.

The early returns to these maneuvers were encouraging. In 1993, the Washington Post noted that McCain was one of five "maverick" Republicans for his work on campaign finance reform legislation. Another Post reference two months later offered a continuation of the theme, describing McCain as a "conservative with maverick instincts."But if the media had taken a closer look, talk of McCain as a maverick may have been a little premature. As news stories at the time made clear, the 1992 campaign finance bill was preordained to be vetoed by Bush, making it easier for McCain and his fellow Republican rebels to back it. That motive became starker in 1993 when the Clinton administration, pushing a nearly identical bill, was told by McCain and his fellow "renegades" that they would support a Republican filibuster of the legislation. Predictably, Clinton expressed his dismay at the "rebels" who changed their tune when faced with a bill that might actually become law. "The thing that particularly troubles me about this one is that several Republicans voted for a bill not unlike this last year which contained public financing," Clinton said. The Associated Press reported that Republican moderates admitted to voting for the original bill only because they knew it would be vetoed. Eventually, McCain and his band of mavericks broke with their GOP colleagues on the filibuster, but only after the bill was gutted to remove most of the public financing features of the measure. The compromise legislation "left almost no one happy" and was derided by advocacy groups like Public Citizen and US PIRG as watered down. The bill eventually died a quiet death in the House. McCain's maverick gestures, though revealed to be less than substantial under scrutiny, nonetheless left their imprint on the media.

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David Brock is the President and CEO of Media Matters for America. Paul Waldman is a Media Matters senior fellow.

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