Some people have noticed John McCain isn't quite the maverick he used to be.
"That had a real appeal, the maverick thing," said [Mike] Moffett, a college professor from Concord and a Marine reservist. "He wasn't tied in, necessarily, with any conventional way of thinking. . . . His decades in Washington don't help him right now, with me or with many others."
[Stuart] Hume, a retired investor from New Castle, agrees: "I don't think people have the same impression of him now that they did then."
Politics so often is the careful crafting of illusion. McCain still has the reputation of a maverick, at least to McCain supporters.
McCain's supporters say his reputation as a maverick is alive and well, sustained by his confrontations with Bush over torture policy, judges and campaign finance issues. They also say that he has made progress in courting the conservatives he angered with intemperate language during the 2000 campaign and with votes that often set him at odds with his party in the Senate.
Even as McCain's reputation is deemed alive and well, the man seems dead in the water, maybe because he made his peace with all those he warred with previously. The man who claims to have stood apart now stands for nothing. The question really should be was John McCain ever a maverick at all? McCain stopped being a maverick the moment he started running for president the first time around. His stand on torture? He got played by Bush. And we get played if we let either of them get away with that.
