The same year, he signed onto a bill to beef up regulation of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, three months after news reports that federal prosecutors had begun investigating accounting irregularities at Freddie Mac. McCain now points to the legislation, which didn't pass, as evidence he has advocated market reform.
McCain's Republican admirers say he remains a reluctant regulator, endorsing government intervention only when he feels industry won't act. "At the end of the day, he hopes the private sector will come up with something," said Ken Nahigian, a former commerce committee counsel.
But McCain's legislative record also reflects an activist streak that diverges significantly from mainstream conservative ideology.
In his books, McCain has written admiringly about Theodore Roosevelt, who split with the Republican Party a century ago to break up monopolies and to regulate railroads, food processing and the use of federal lands.
"Many contemporary conservatives have let their healthy skepticism about government sink into something unhealthy, an embittered loathing of the federal government," McCain wrote in his 2002 book "Worth the Fighting For."
In the last week, however, McCain seemed to do one more turnabout.
Facing Democrat Barack Obama in the first presidential debate Friday in Oxford, Miss., he trained his rhetoric on a familiar target. "We've let government get completely out of control," McCain said.
Then, on Wednesday, McCain left the campaign trail for Capitol Hill to vote for the largest federal intervention in the nation's financial markets since the Great Depression.
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noam.levey@latimes.com
Times staff writer Jim Puzzanghera contributed to this report.
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Debate coverage
Tonight's vice presidential debate between Democrat Joe Biden and Republican Sarah Palin will be broadcast live at 6 by ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, CNN, Fox, C-SPAN, PBS and BBC America. The 90-minute forum, at Washington University in St. Louis, also will be webcast at latimes.com and will air on some radio stations, including KPCC-FM (89.3), KNX-AM (1070) and KFWB-AM (980).
