He may or may not still be a maverick. However, constantly referring to yourself as a maverick makes you look like a bit of a douchebag.

While it is fine for McCain to refer to himself as a "maverick", he made the mistake of assuming that the voters will remember specific instances where McCain stood up to his party or to the establishment. People generally have a very short attention span--it is easy to believe that McCain will just be 4 more years of George W. Bush. The Democrats keep driving that point home because they know that it is easier to put the Bush "millstone" around McCain's neck rather than to run against the Senator's record.

The McCain campaign should have stressed the points where he and the Bush administration disagreed on. He should have talked about his opposition to how the war was being conducted in Iraq, his subsequent 2004 demand to fire Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, his opposition to the Bush policy on torturing POW's, and his efforts at cutting billions of dollars in wasteful defense spending. Most importantly, he needed to contrast that record to Obama's, which included multi-billion dollar subsidies to the big agricultural companies and the big energy companies, both of which McCain opposed. Obama is a rubber stamp, while McCain is independent.

In short, McCain didn't make the most of his natural political strengths. Obama on the other hand was able to take advantage of McCain's political weaknesses, which included having George W. Bush (with his 25% approval rating) in his party, along with the weak economy.

McCain III never "stopped being a maverick."  The fact is he was never one to begin with.  He's voted a straight party line except for a tiny handful of issues for his whole career.  That's not a maverick, it's a sidekick.

Its almost like people try to represent themselves as centrist and safe when they run for president...

I'll translate this for the myspace crowd : LOL THAT  I AINT NEVER HERD UF WHOOS RUNNING FOR HEAD MOVIE USHAR HAS GOTTEN TRADED FROM THE DALLUS MAVRIX.

Maybe its just me or did McCain stop being a Maverick about the same time Obama stopped being a Liberal? Dumb America, there's an election coming up very soon, and we have two goons who will do whatever it takes to get elected, wise up!

As Howard Dean recently said, "The McCain of 2000 wouldn't have anything to do with the McCain of 2008."

Coming into this election, I was a big McCain fan. I admired how he stood up to the loonier wing in his party in everything from torture, to immigration, to the environment, and tax cuts without spending cuts. When you combine his courage in standing up for these sorts of unpopular causes within his party with his support for free trade (which matches my own thinking), I was pretty torn on who to vote for, despite the fact that I want to punish the GOP for the last 8 years of mismanagement. Unfortunately, McCain has now changed his mind on most of these issues in a dramatic lurch to the right. He no longer wants to rule out torture, he has said he would vote against his own immigration bill, and he has made numerous overtures to the evangelical wing of the GOP. In fairness to McCain, his party has gotten flat out nuts over the last couple of years. If he's going to have any chance of getting the social conservatives to turn out for him like they did for Bush, he needed to sell out on some of the issues that defined him. I guess it's a political reality. I guess it's McCain playing politics and doing what he thinks he has to do to win the election. Unfortunately, the title of Maverick just no longer applies, and he appears to have made a conscious decision to cede the vote of people like me (social liberals, fiscal conservatives) to Obama, while hoping that his reputation as a maverick lasts long enough to win a few moderate votes.