John S. McCain and George W. Bush: Not the Same

One of the most frequent charges against McCain is that he is a Bush clone. That electing John McCain would be another Bush term. Now ignoring that no two Presidents have ever governed exactly the same (due to philosophical differences to changing international issues to whatever else that may come up), this line of attack by the Democratic Party was a given. No matter who won the Republican primary (with the exception of Ron Paul), they would have painted them as another Bush clone. In other words, it's a very unoriginal strategy. Well, John R. Lott Jr., a senior research scientist at the University of Maryland, takes a look at this claim of McBush and finds it false.

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."

Sounds like the Democratic Party needs a new line of attack, because this one simply isn't true.

Yet let's dig into this even deeper. One common saying is that John McCain isn't the John McCain of 2000 (i.e. to say he was George W. Bush throughout the time afterward). Now ignoring that the John McCain of 2000 might not have been the John McCain of 1996 (or '92, or '89, or '86), this leaves out a little history. In 2004, it was pretty well known that Democratic Presidential nominee John Kerry was considering John McCain to be added to his ticket. It would have sent shock waves throughout the political world. Yet to go by the logic of “John McCain 2008 is not the John McCain of 2000”, John Kerry was considering George W. Bush as his running mate (or even better yet, an imposter McCain). I doubt you'll hear that one coming from Kerry's mouth anytime soon.

So let's flesh this out even more, since we can rule out 2000-2004 as years McCain was George W. Bush, let’s look at 2004 to 2008. Yet even between these years proves a difficult representation. John McCain throughout 2007 and in 2008 was running for President, giving him a large leave of absence in regular voting patterns. So that leaves early 2004 to early 2007, which is not a whole lot of time to paint someone as a “clone.” And even in that time, McCain fought against the White House on a number of issues (e.g. Iraq from 2004-2006, environmental issues, detainees). So really the claim that John McCain is George W. Bush is an absurd one. It leaves out a number of important periods in McCain’s Senate career (1986-2000) and glosses over the general friendliness that existed between the Democratic party and John McCain from 2000 to 2004. It leaves out everything that was explained by John R. Lott Jr. in the article above and overall is stupid line of attack. So when you hear someone making this claim of John McCain being another Bush term, you now know they are full of it.

McBush? Not so much.