Remember that, the next time you read that McCain has been “branded a maverick”. Samuel Maverick was a classic free-rider—he didn’t pay to get his cattle branded, but had his cattle distinguished anyway by their lack of a brand.

Wikipedia goes on to say that Samuel Maverick was “the grandfather of U.S. Congressman Maury Maverick, who coined the term gobbledygook (1944).” How this got shortened to “gook” and applied to people McCain bombed, it doesn’t say.

I don’t think that’s much of a riddle. One of the few symmetry-breaking characteristics of the American electorate is that conservatives value loyalty (vs. liberals who value voice). McCain’s carefully crafted maverick image has alienated him from the conservative base, aka the 27%-ers (or 24%-ers now as GWB’s approval ratings have broken the Keyes threshold and are headed to for the Nixon horizon), because of a perceived lack of loyalty. He could have tried to move closer to the center with a Lieberman VP nomination, but moderate votes are notoriously expensive and fickle. So he clearly made a pitch to bring the 24%-ers in the fold and simply underestimated how much that would alienate his core support, mostly the original Republican majority that has turned away from Bush over the last four years.

IMO Obama was quite beatable (Hillary had to stuff up big time in the primaries to lose to him). But McCain’s “honest, experienced and his own man” stance has been fatally undermined by his pandering to his party.

What the paper does is regress legislators’ proportion of votes with their party on their DW-NOMINATE score and then call the error term their “maverick score”, correct?

That’s interesting, but I’m not sure it can be interpretted as they do.

In effect, what they are doing is lining up legislators in order of their DW-NOMINATE (conventionally understood as left-right) scores and then in order of the proportion of votes thehy cast with Democrats and Republicans. The ones whose postions on thet wo lsits are farthest apart, they call mavericks.

A divergence between the two scores could indicate a maverick in the sense of someone less subject to party pressure. But it could just as easily indicate someone who places a particualrly high salience on issues that do not fall along left-right lines as captured in DW-NOMINATE. In fact, it looks to me like what they are calling the “maverick score” is largely just a relabelling of the second (or higher) dimension of DW-NOMINATE. They note in a footnote that “McCain is notable for being having a very high score on DW-NOMINATE’s second dimension” but fail to take the logical next step.

political scientists will spend years analyzing why a Republican senator with some genuine mavericky credentials….nevertheless decided to eschew capturing the center and instead ran to the right! It’s astonishing.

No it’s not. McCain was forced to the right in order to get the nomination, and then he was stuck with the Bush tax policy. Since the nomination he’s been trying as hard as he possibly can to separate himself from Bush and the right-wing legacy of the past eight years. Actually been running a pretty smart campaign that way. At the same time, he’s throwing everything at the wall and seeing if it will stick, including the old cutting-taxes appeals.

Well, you have to admit that’s some Maverick thinking, right there.