9-09-08, 9:42 am

John McCain has launched a campaign against his own record and George W. Bush in his bid to become the next president. The latest McCain campaign ad pushes the idea that McCain is a 'maverick' who once criticized George W. Bush. In just 30 seconds, however, the commercial advances a number of untruths.

First of all, to be a maverick means to be independent and non-conformist. John McCain has voted for the George W. Bush agenda 90 percent of the time. On the June 19, 2005 episode of NBC's Meet the Press, in fact, McCain himself told the late Tim Russert that 'on the transcendent issues, the most important issues of our day, I have been totally in agreement and support of President Bush.” Even his home state newspaper, the Arizona Republic, reported last May that a study of McCain's Senate votes 'on the most divided issues in the past decade shows that McCain almost never thwarted his party's objectives.”

McCain's own words and his political record prove that he is nothing like a maverick.

The ad further claims that McCain took on the drug industry. The record shows, however, that McCain refused to vote in favor of a Democratic measure that would have allowed the re-importation of FDA approved drugs from Canada – a position the drug industry wanted him to take. Further, McCain opposed advertising regulations for drug ads that the drug industry and George W. Bush also opposed. The new regulations would have imposed strict penalties on drug companies that placed misleading ads.

McCain is a reformer, the his ad insists, because he doesn't like earmarks and pork barrel spending. But, in fact, McCain has voted for pork barrel spending and bills with earmarks repeatedly. Data provided by the Congressional Research Service, a non-partisan congressional office, showed that McCain has voted for 12,673 earmarks totaling $144 billion in just six of the 26 years he's been in Congress. In fact, McCain has also requested and helped secure earmarks for bills he has supported.

In addition to this, the McCain campaign ad says 'he battled Republicans and reformed Washington.' But when it came to scrutinizing the involvement of some members of Congress involved in the Abramoff scandal during his investigations as the chair of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs in 2006, McCain refused to examine the legislative actions they may have taken on Abramoff's behalf. And his home state newspaper, the Arizona Republic, noted, that McCain ruled that 'no new lobbying restrictions are needed to prevent schemes like those used by former lobbyist Jack Abramoff.'

In other words, instead of reforming Washington and exposing serious corruption, McCain played footsies with a number of Republican colleagues whom he sought support from for his personal ambition for the White House, despite their known ties to Abramoff. When the moment for real reform came, and he was in a position to pursue it, John McCain offered no change.

In the ongoing effort to defend his failure to fully vet Sarah Palin as his running mate, the ad claims that Palin too is a reformer who 'stopped the bridge to nowhere,' a reference to wasteful spending inserted as an earmark into legislation by Alaska's Republican congressional delegation to build the Gravina Island bridge.

The truth is, however, that while running for governor, Sarah Palin was for the bridge and has not told the truth about her position on it. As the Anchorage Daily News reported just last week, 'The Alaska governor campaigned in 2006 on a build-the-bridge platform, telling Ketchikan residents she felt their pain when politicians called them ‘nowhere.’' She promised to 'go to bat' to have the bridge built, the Ketchikan Daily News reported in August 2006. When the plans to build the bridge were exposed and the project fell through, Palin never returned the money allocated for it to the US taxpayers, spending the money instead on pet projects.

But Palin also knows how to play Abramoff's game. Her close ties to indicted Republican Senator Ted Stevens and her own demand for earmarks for her state, running into the hundreds of millions of dollars, suggest she offers more of the same politics McCain now seems to be campaigning against.

Why does John McCain expect Americans to vote for the same politicians from the same party with the same policies as George W. Bush and expect something different? He must have a low opinion of our intelligence.