Wall Street Journal: McCains assault on Cox 'un-presidential'

The figures being used by Democrats are presidential support scores computed by CQ Weekly, a leading weekly magazine monitoring events in Washington. The score is based entirely on recorded roll-call votes in Congress. CQ identifies those votes where the president has taken a clear stand and then records whether a senator or representative voted in the president's preferred direction. The votes need not be key on the president's agenda or be anything the president encouraged Congress to do--they are simply cases where CQ has determined a clear presidential position. In the Senate, the president's nominations, which are usually noncontroversial, are a sizable portion of the votes used by CQ to compile its support score. In 2007, nominations were 30% of the votes used by CQ to calculate presidential support in the Senate.

McCain's presidential support level was 95% in 2007, but this is somewhat misleading. Because he was running for president, McCain was present for only 38 of the 97 roll calls CQ used to calculate the presidential support score. There were 442 roll-call votes in total in the Senate in 2007. Looking at only those votes for which both McCain and Obama were present that year--33 votes--McCain's support score was 94% while Obama's was 48%. CQ also noted in a recent post that McCain, Obama, and Biden voted on less than half the presidential support votes from January through August 2008.

Using the same figures the Obama campaign has used to tie John McCain to President Bush, Biden was a 77% supporter of President Bush's positions in 2002, 70% in 2004, and over a 50% supporter of Bush in 4 of the president's 7 full years in office. Up through the August 2008 congressional recess, Biden had supported Bush's positions 52% of the time since January 2001. Obama himself supported the president's positions just under 50% in 2006 and 40% since he joined the Senate in January 2005.

Would be more telling and I'd be much more inclined to your position if we knew the 38 specific issues that McCain voted with Bush. If many were nominations as pollster implies, then much of the wind comes out of the sails of this Democratic talking point.

John McCain has had an uneven record of support for conservative priorities in his 21 years in the Senate. In many years, he voted the way the American Conservative Union and the Chamber of Commerce wanted him to less than three-quarters of the time. During the Bush administration, he has backed the causes of organized labor and the liberal Americans for Democratic action more than a quarter of the time in three separate years.

In nine of the past 11 years, he joined fellow Republicans in mostly party-line votes less often than the Senate GOP average. And in eight years he’s voted either against President Bush’s wishes, or for President Bill Clinton’s priorities, more often than most in his caucus.

It is true that last year both his unity and presidential support scores shot up as he began his quest for the White House. But he missed more than half the Senate roll call votes in 2007 " and many of the ones he attended were about the war and immigration, both issues on which he shared Bush’s views.

Bull! Bush is a Republican....so is McCain. What is so remarkable that of almost 1000 votes (and about 100 that were evaluated by CQ) taken in the last Congress, McCain and Bush would agree on 38? As I said before, I expect a large number of those shared votes were war and immigration issues, where both McCain and Bush shared views. Many more were non-controversial nominations.

Democrats are simply grasping at straws trying to divert attention from the fact that McCain is the most bipartisan Senator out there (with possible exception of Lieberman). They're pushing this because they know that if bipartisanship is really measured, then their candidate will be proven to be an old school, out-of-the-main-stream liberal and unmistakeably highly partisan politician.

Cyclo, But that's politics! Even Bill Clinton did the same thing to win.

Cyclo,
Your conclusion just doesn't fit McCain's history. The CQ article I quoted earlier clearly demonstrates that throughout his career, McCain has voted differently than the stated Republican Party line more often than the usual Senator ( I daresay more often than any other Senator of either party).

Richard Cizik is one of the country’s most powerful and outspoken Christian evangelical leaders. He happens to be a Republican, and he has known the GOP’s presidential nominee for many years. “I thought John McCain was a principled person,” Cizik says. “But John McCain has backed off, not just on climate change but on torture and a sensible tax policy " in other words, he’s not the John McCain of 2000. … He seems to be waffling on issue after issue.

It’s not illogical for someone to conclude that John McCain is going to be more like George Bush than John McCain is going to be like John McCain in 2000.”

Characterizing the GOP’s presidential nominee as an unprincipled waffler is strong stuff from the man who oversees governmental affairs and is the chief lobbyist of the 30-million-member Washington, D.C.-based National Association of Evangelicals. But Cizik " named this year by TIME magazine one of the world’s 100 most influential people " is no stranger to controversies that come from strong convictions...