Recently, an Obama ad has attacked McCain's claim to be a maverick, noting his strong record of support for George W. Bush. The premise of the Obama ad was that being a maverick was a good thing in the mind of the public.
That may an accurate premise, but I have never seen a national question on what people think about mavericks. Thirty-seven years ago, as a newly minted B.A. in political science from the University of Pennsylvania, I did see citywide Philadelphia Democratic Party data showing that people overwhelmingly did not want to vote for whomever they perceived to be a maverick.
I got this exclusive look at people's judgment about mavericks while doing a post mortem of my father David Cohen's unsuccessful 1971 mayoral campaign for the Democratic mayoral nomination, which culminated in his withdrawal for a rival Democratic mayoral candidate, Bill Green, who also lost to the eventual winner, Frank L. Rizzo.
I carefully examined a poll done by Joseph Napolitan, a political consulting whiz who had played a key role in Milton Shapp's upset victory for Governor of Pennylvania in 1970. I not only read and re-read the poll and the cross-tabs, but I got the individual questionnaires themselves so I could do my own correlations.
There had been numerous newspaper stories in the late 1960's and early 1970's referring to "maverick councilman David Cohen." So I was interested in seeing how many people viewed him as the "maverick" in the mayoral race. The answer to my surprise was very few.
And, to my further surprise, those who saw him as the "maverick" were overwhelmingly against his mayoral candidacy. (Napolitan had assumed without asking that the maverick label was a positive one: his poll asked who the maverick in the race was, not whether people wanted to vote for a maverick as mayor.)
I then started looking at how those who saw the other candidates as mavericks planned to vote. Those who saw Frank Rizzo as the maverick in the race were overwhelmingly going to vote against him. Those who saw Bill Green as the maverick were overwhelmingly going to vote against him. And those who saw the final major candidate in the race, Hardy Williams, as the maverick were also going to overwhlmingly vote against him.
My father, then a Councilman from Northwest Philadelphia, like John McCain, had sought mayoral office believing his labeling as maverick was a real positive. Perhaps it was among some of his activist supporters, but it was clearly a strong negative among ordinary 1971 Philadelphia Democrats. As the far as the voters seemed to be concerned, his best news in the maverick category was that the newpaper labeling of him as the "maverick councilman" had not stuck to him in the minds of all but a few Philadelphia voters.
Eight years later, he won citywide office for the first time as Councilman at Large, and a newspaper reporter again referred to him as a "maverick councilman." I reminded him of my poll analysis. He told the reporter he preferred to be referred to as a "Democratic councilman." This protest helped stop his further labeling as a maverick, and he won re-election citywide six times, more than any councilman at large in Philadelphia history.
And so my message to my fellow Obama campaigners is this: Don't assume that the maverick label is a positive one. Test it out. It may just be that people don't really want a maverick for President, and that those of who want Obama to win should let McCain have the maverick label.