John McCain and the adjective "maverick" were once seemingly inseparable, and his quixotic attempt in 2000 to win the Republican presidential nomination helped weld that link.
But now that the Arizona senator is about to become his party's nominee, he finds himself in an uncomfortable spot: having to defend his reputation as a political independent.
McCain's campaign unveiled an ad last week that calls him "the original maverick," and he has retooled his stump speech to remind independent voters disenchanted with Republicans that he defied his party on campaign finance reform, tobacco regulation and the early Iraq strategy.
Democrats, sensing a weakness, have started to chant that this year's John McCain is not the voluble insurgent who terrorized his party's establishment eight years ago.
In Elkhart, Ind., last week, McCain's Democratic opponent hit this theme hard. "The price he paid for his party's nomination has been to reverse himself on position after position," Barack Obama told voters at a town hall meeting. "And now he embraces the failed Bush policies over the last eight years -- politics that helped break Washington in the first place. And that doesn't exactly meet my definition of a maverick."
This debate over McCain's maverick-ness reflects a new challenge in his second bid for the presidency: the dilution of the McCain brand. To win the GOP primary this year, McCain embraced party dogma in ways big and small, from switching his opposition to President Bush's tax cuts, which he had criticized as skewed to the rich, to making amends with religious leaders he once denounced as "agents of intolerance."
The campaign has also undercut McCain's image as a straight-talker by dramatically limiting the national media's access to the candidate, who once charmed reporters and voters alike with his easy, free-wheeling, common-man conversational style on his campaign bus.
And McCain, this time around, faces an opponent who can make a case that, as a 47-year-old black man and first-term senator, he is more of a political outsider with a fresh new voice than the 71-year-old veteran of a quarter-century in Congress.
McCain campaign officials said the increased focus on their candidate's maverick credentials was long planned. "It was always going to have to be a part of our campaign for the general election," top advisor Charles Black said.
