Political Career of John McCain

McCain first found his way to Washington as a Representative for Arizona in 1982. He served in the House from 1983 to 1987, when he ran for and was elected to the Senate. There, he began to make a name for himself as a Republican unwilling to toe the party line. McCain "has never hesitated to go against the grain of party wisdom on subjects ranging from immigration, global warming, gay marriage and campaign funding," writes the British paper The Guardian.

Going it alone served him well when he went after campaign finance reform. He and Wisconsin Democrat Senator Russ Feingold worked jointly for seven years on the bill before the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act was signed into law in 2002. "Campaign contributions from a single source that run to hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars are not healthy for a democracy," McCain said the day the bill was passed by the Senate. "Is that not self-evident?" [source: Milwaukee Journal Sentinel].

Twelve years earlier, Senator McCain found himself embroiled in a campaign finance scandal personally. During McCain's first year in the Senate, he and three Democratic senators intervened on behalf of savings and loan bank owner Charles Keating, during an investigation by federal banking regulators. During Congressional hearings it came to light that Keating had been a fundraiser for the four senators ($300,000 in total; $112,000 for McCain). The investigating committee exonerated McCain, finding him guilty only of "poor judgment" [source: Slate].

McCain generally enjoys his state's perennial support. According to Republican polling expert Margaret Kenski, who has worked for McCain before, he generally gets a favorable rating from about 60 percent of the voters in Arizona most of the time [source: Salon]. In the 2004 Senate election, he garnered 77 percent of his state's votes [source: PBS].

McCain's Straight Talk Express
Don Emmert/AFP/Getty Images
McCain stands before the Straight Talk Express in Phoenix in February 2008. He used the same campaign nickname during his 2000 campaign.­

Senator McCain made his first run for the White House in the 2000 campaign. He established the "Straight Talk Express," the official nickname for his campaign during the 2000 primaries [source: CNN]. He faltered during the 2000 race, however, when he failed to come up with the Republican Party's support and enough money to compete nationally [source: BBC]. He also lost the support of the Christian right when he referred to Christian leaders Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell as "agents of intolerance" [source: International Herald Tribune].

Since 1997, McCain has missed 584 of the 3,710 votes cast in the Senate (16 percent) [source: GovTrack], earning him an "Extremely Poor" rating in comparison to his peers. On the campaign trail for the 2008 primaries, McCain missed 247 of the 442 votes cast by the Senate in 2007 (55.8 percent) [source: GovTrack]. In the votes that he did cast, he agreed with Republican consensus 87 percent of the time [source: Washington Post].

McCain has co-sponsored 869 bills since 1997, earning him an "Average" rating relative to his peers in the Senate; he's sponsored 403 bills during that same period, with 263 not making it out of committee ("Extremely Poor"); 12 were signed into law ("Very Good") [source: GovTrack].

In the Senate, McCain has served on the Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation; as chair of the Committee on Indian Affairs; and a member of the Armed Services Committee [source: Project Vote Smart].

Find out how some special interest groups have rated McCain's voting in Congress on the next page.