The Obama campaign has been steadily hammering home the “McCain Has Voted With Bush 90 Percent Of The Time” meme, in press releases, candidate statements, etc. And that is in fact true; McCain has voted in accordance with the President’s desires 90% of the time since Bush took office in 2000, according to the Congressional Quarterly, which collects and publishes statistical measures of Congressional votes.

The CQ site presents other interesting statistics concerning the ways the candidates have voted, however. For example, while McCain has voted with Bush 90% of the time, Obama has voted with Bush 40% of the time, a significant difference; Obama only agrees with Bush about half the time, whereas McCain usually agrees with Bush. That is a change, although given the Democratic rhetoric surrounding Bush, one would think that a 40% rate of agreement is still too high. Surely George Bush cannot be right on about half the issues facing the Senate! Yet that is how Senator Obama has voted.

Many voters find it useful to know where each candidate stands in their party, in terms of being on the far left or far right. For example, a candidate such as McCain who votes with Bush 90% of the time, surely must be one of the staunchest Republican supporters of Bush? Actually, no. Of the 49 Republicans in the Senate, there are 17 who voted more often with the President, 25 who voted less often, and 6 Senators who voted with the President the same percentage of the time as McCain. About half of the Senate votes with the President the same amount as McCain or more, and about half vote with the President less, placing McCain around the middle of the Republicans in the Senate. Rather than being an exceptionally Bush-loyal Republican (or a huge maverick, for that matter), McCain has voted with the President about as often as other moderate Republicans.

Obama’s votes with the President, relative to the rest of his party, have a different tendency. Of the 49 Democratic Senators, only 6 have voted with the President less than Senator Obama. 42 have voted with the President more often than Senator Obama, who is at the far left edge of his party in terms of agreement with the President.

In the Senate as a whole, the median Senators in terms for support for Bush are Mel Martinez (R-FL) and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), who supported Bush 84% of the time. In the Senate as a whole, then, Senator John McCain supported the President slightly more than the median Senator, and Senator Barack Obama supported the President much less than the median Senator.

Overall, these Congressional votes seem to indicate that the conventional wisdom on the relative political positions of the two men is an accurate one. Senator McCain is a moderate Republican around the midpoint of his party’s ideological spectrum, while Senator Obama is a very liberal Democrat on the hard left side of his party’s ideological spectrum. This would seem to be confirmed by the feelings in each party for their respective candidates, with the hard conservative base of the Republicans somewhat uneasy about McCain’s moderate right stances, and the hard liberal base of the Democrats very enthused for their candidate’s left-wing positions.