A Huffington Post headline over the weekend blared: “Dems Fed Up with McCain.” That’s true, for the moment. Democrats aren’t disguising their dislike for the Arizona senator in the wake of his vocal opposition to the Democratic stimulus bill. The former presidential candidate has blasted the legislation, saying that “to portray it as stimulus flies in the face of reality” and characterizing its massive spending as “generational theft.” “He is bitter and really angry,” Bob Shrum told the Huffington Post. “He is angry at the press, which he thinks is unfair. He is angry at Obama and angry at the voters. He has gone from being an angry old candidate to being an angry old defeated candidate.” As an adviser to eight losing presidential campaigns, Shrum might know a thing or two about being bitter in defeat, but it’s difficult to take his rant about McCain seriously. And it’s not just the netroots that are piling on McCain. Mainstream news outlets are pointing to his stimulus opposition as evidence that he’s no longer interested in bipartisanship. According to the Los Angeles Times, “Sen. John McCain is cutting a new profile — one that is far more partisan than when he became so familiar to Americans months ago as the Republican nominee for president.” Look at McCain’s behavior through the other end of the partisan telescope, however, and a different narrative emerges. First, his being so vocal on this issue may be partly a matter of filling a leadership vacuum in the GOP. As the Huffington Post article lambasting him acknowledges, “during the debate over the economic stimulus package it was McCain, as often as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who spearheaded the opposition.” But those close to McCain stress that his opposition to Democratic spending is primarily evidence of his core commitment to fiscal responsibility. “This is such a huge issue, one he feels strongly about – and always has. So yes, he wanted to stand up and show leadership,” Charlie Black, McCain confidant and former campaign strategist, told National Review Online. Mark Salter, McCain’s longtime speechwriter and co-author, concurs: “McCain’s always been an effective opponent of wasteful spending. He’s not just opposing typically extravagant spending, but exceptionally extravagant spending – as he has at every other point in his career.” Salter and Black each expressed skepticism about Democrats and the media using the stimulus debate to divine some shift in the Arizona maverick’s political priorities following his failed presidential bid. “What are we, three weeks into the administration?” Salter asked. “A few weeks ago a few senators were holding up Hillary [Clinton’s nomination as secretary of state] and McCain thought that was a waste of time – and said so. That begat a bunch of stories about, ‘Oh, the old McCain is back.’ ” Now Salter says that no one should be particularly surprised by the leading role he took in the stimulus debate. “He has a very high profile right now but he’s always had a high profile,” Salter says. “But there are a lot of other guys that have played a prominent role in this.” And to call McCain’s behavior inconsistent with his bipartisan instincts, Salter observes, you have to buy into a prepackaged Democratic version of events. “Everybody wants to make the narrative ’Oh well, Obama’s offers of bipartisanship have been spurned.’ But what he offered was something totally different,” Salter says of the bill, which reads like a Democratic Christmas list, “ — which is fine. Democrats own the White House and they own the Congress, so obviously they’re going to get more of what they want, but the disparity can’t be as great as it is. Obama’s a perfectly nice guy who’s friendly with Republicans — but that’s not the same thing as bipartisan legislating.” The fact that McCain, who has a well-established reputation for spearheading bipartisan compromise, won’t hop aboard the stimulus juggernaut is hardly evidence that the senator is “cutting a new profile,” but proof instead that Democrats were unwilling to compromise on their plans for exorbitant spending.

“I think McCain and others were perfectly agreeable to a real bipartisan product,” Salter says. “Obviously, he is instinctively opposed to deficit spending, but [he would have been amenable to] more spending on defense and other things that would have a more immediately stimulative effect, including bigger tax cuts — if they could have gotten there. But they didn’t.” Black also raises the possibility that those taken aback by McCain’s role in the stimulus debate could simply be missing the fact that he’s approaching his job as a senator with a renewed sense of purpose and enthusiasm following the campaign. “As soon as the election was over,” Black says, McCain said he was going back to the Senate and was energized about it and wanted to get engaged in a lot of issues, as many things as he could.” McCain has sought new committee assignments in order to “work on issues like energy, climate change, and health–care reform,” Black notes. While McCain has been a consistent fiscal hawk, his legislative efforts on these issues may soon put the lie to the new narrative of McCain as a strident conservative partisan. Given his record on global warming, immigration, and other issues, Democrats could well find themselves once again applauding McCain’s tendency to reach across the aisle while leaving members of his own party grinding their teeth. Then again, issues related to spending and fixing the troubled economy don’t seem likely to recede from the political debate anytime soon. Here McCain is as effective a champion for fiscal responsibility as the GOP could hope for. McCain’s policy positions may be ideologically diverse enough to have earned him a reputation as a maverick, but he’s not an unknown quantity in Washington, nor is he known for being cagey about what he believes. Suggesting that Senator Bipartisan isn’t living up to his reputation may in the end say more about the partisan tendencies of his accusers than about McCain himself.