Well, a certain research scientist from the university of maryland wrote an article with the title of this diary on the webpage of the philadelphia inquirer. I have extracted some nuggets in his article ...
Does John McCain represent a third Bush term? The Obama campaign claims the two are almost indistinguishable. It was the mantra during the Democratic convention, and it is the theme of new ads Barack Obama is running. The ads claim that McCain is "no maverick when he votes with Bush 90 percent of the time."
This week Obama has begun a constant refrain that there is "not a dime worth of difference" between Bush's and McCain's views. It is a consistent theme of Democratic pundits on talk shows.
Is this the same McCain who drove Republicans nuts on campaign finance, the environment, taxes, torture, immigration and more? Where has McCain not crossed swords with his own party?
As it's being used, the 90 percent figure, from Congressional Quarterly, is nonsensical. As Washington Post congressional reporter Jonathan Weisman explained, "The vast majority of those votes are procedural, and virtually every member of Congress votes with his or her leadership on procedural motions."
So I decided to write him a letter. My response is below:
Dear Mr Lott:
I read your well-researched article on the Philadelphia Inquirer website about John McCain's voting record and while you made very salient points, I think there are some valid bases for the assertion that he is a Bush clone that you are ignoring.
Unlike in most cases where opponents miscounts a politician's votes to bend him into whatever shape they want, this is one of the first times in modern politics that they are directly quoting a politician's own claim of allegiance against him and it's all John McCain's doing. It would have been fatuous to tar McCain circa 2000 with the same brush and rightly, no one would have believed it. But in trying to snag his party's nomination he repudiated every principle for which he had hitherto been respected. He did this knowing that President Bush was still popular in his party and realized that he could not get the nomination without sounding supportive of the President.
please see
http://www.youtube.com/...
Note : I am sending this not for you to watch an ad you might not want to see but I couldn't find the same clip anywhere else. Please look around 0:08 in the clip and then fast forward to about 0:41.
This has been the problem.The same sacrifice he made to win the nomination seems to be dragging him down now. He probably didn't mean it but it would have been malpractice for his opponent not to use that against him. So in my opinion, it's probably true that there are some differences between John McCain and President Bush which then elicits the question of whether he is a fair-weather friend and merely expressed support when he needed to appear like a faithful party-man. I am certain that for a man who claims to do things with honor, this latter interpretation is even more damaging should he own up to it.
Enough with all these revisionist crap they are trying to pull ! YES.WE.CAN !
UPDATE: He replied my e-mail with the following:
Thanks, but as you undoubtedly know those quotes were taken out of context. Take the access is influence quote. As you probably know it is from him defending passage of the campaign finance bill. He was explaining why the bill needed to be passed. It is used now to say the exact opposite of what he was saying at the time. The quote on him agreeing on the most important issues comes after him confirming that he had many disagreements where he listed five of them (global warming, ANWAR drilling, inheritance taxes, tobacco regulation, and campaign finance reform), but that first part of his statement was cut out for the ad.
The voting records for these two candidates (McCain from 2001 through 2007 and Obama 2005 to 2007) show two things: McCain is right in the middle of the Senate and Obama is consistently among the 6 most liberal Senators, with some measures showing that he is the either the most liberal (National Journal) or tied for the most liberal (League of Conservation Voters). I have no idea whether you think that is good or bad, but it is a huge difference.
So I replied back with the following:
Thanks for your very quick response. I appreciate your readiness to talk about this. Unfortunately, the video I sent might have been confusing in terms of what I wanted you to actually see. it was not about the part about access. it was about "on the transcendental issue of ..." you get the idea. The second was when he was talking to Bill O'reilly. The other parts of the video, i do not believe are important to my arguments and we should discount that for this purpose.
My thesis is that John McCain himself actively encouraged the notion during the primaries and he should be proud now of those statements he made then. Please ignore the extraneous parts of the ad I sent and focus only on his statements of support for President Bush.
I appreciate your response again and I am encouraged that there could be some mellow back and forth amidst all this din.
About the 5 issues you noted, I don't think as you would acknowledge, that those are issues the American people consider transcendental at this time- Tobacco regulation, Campaign finance reform etc. The issues as we both can agree as seen from polls after polls are the Economy and War to the larger electorate. My point is not about their records (afterall John McCain once said Obama's record was to the far left of the only Socialist Senator with all the implications of such a claim, which I consider fair for him to make)
The issue I think you should address is "Did John McCain mean it, when he said himself, that he voted with President Bush 90% of the time" ? He said it himself ! Senator Obama probably knows it's suicidal to go claiming that he's liberal even if the records say that. So if during the democratic primaries, Senator Obama had said, "Look I am the most liberal Senator" then that would be 10000 % fair game to use against him and we both know the McCain campaign would have used this endlessly. This, I contend is my larger point which I think your article did not address.
If the democrats this year had pulled this quote about 90% from thin air, I would totally have agreed with you but they didn't. They are using Senator's McCain exact words about percentage of votes he cast which agrees with President Bush.