agricola
a genuine importer of owls
Its worth pointing out a couple of things:
i) that Obama has voted with Bush around 40% of the time, and that Senate Democrats vote around 50% with Bush;
ii) the image of McCain as a "maverick" has two main sources.
The first is, as DM notes, a history of opposing the stock Republican position on several issues, starting with Beirut, then anti-smoking legislation, the whole POW-MIA thing with Kerry, but especially the campaign finance reform with Feingold, the conduct of the war in Iraq, immigration reform and climate change. He has a lot of legislative history that could lend weight to the argument that he is not the same as Bush - indeed, if you take this campaign (and the position changes that have been forced on him in order to get the Republican nomination) out of the equation its blatantly obvious he is not Bush.
The second is that the media and some Democrats (including Biden, interestingly enough) saw him as an anti-Bush candidate at both the 2000 (when he came closer than anyone to beating Bush during the primaries) and 2004 campaigns (when Biden and numerous others called for him to be John Kerry's running-mate). Pretty much from 2000 until he looked like he would win the Republican nomination, he had an amazingly (for a Republican) positive media image (indeed, the NYT actually endorsed him for the 08 Repub ticket), largely because of the percieved opposition to Bush.
je ne comprend pas
