More on McCain

From the same blog mentioned below, a well-reasoned critique I'd half-formed in my own brain on McCain's self-identification as a maverick:

The idea that I think McCain was reaching for in all of this was to contrast the idea of a person of principle with the idea of unprincipled partisanship. That could have been a powerful argument, but McCain seemed not to understand the essence of it. He wasn't presenting himself as a man of principles and deep convictions who stood by those principles and convictions even when doing so put him at odds with his own party. Instead he seemed to be arguing that being at odds with one's own party was somehow, in itself, a virtuous position. He wasn't arguing that he was a maverick in service of some larger set of principles -- to McCain, being a maverick was the larger principle.