The translation for "maverick" is....

George Will continues his campaign against John McCain by arguing that the real definition of a "maverick" politician is a Republican who talks like a Democrat. Thus, McCain fits that definition perfectly. Will focuses on one of the strongest reasons I have heard not to vote for McCain - his answer in the ABC debate before Michigan about drug companies. When Mitt Romney chided him about talking about drug companies as if they were the bad guys, McCain responded, "They are the bad guys." He went down severely in my estimation with that remark. As Will writes,

In ABC's New Hampshire debate, McCain said: "Why shouldn't we be able to reimport drugs from Canada?" A conservative's answer is:

That amounts to importing Canada's price controls, a large step toward a system in which some medicines would be inexpensive but many others -- new pain-relieving, life-extending pharmaceuticals -- would be unavailable. Setting drug prices by government fiat rather than market forces results in huge reductions of funding for research and development of new drugs. McCain's evident aim is to reduce pharmaceutical companies' profits. But if all those profits were subtracted from the nation's health-care bill, the pharmaceutical component of that bill would be reduced only from 10 percent to 8 percent -- and innovation would stop, taking a terrible toll in unnecessary suffering and premature death. When McCain explains that trade-off to voters, he will actually have engaged in straight talk.

There are decent, intelligent people who believe that equity or efficiency or both are often served by government setting prices. In America, such people are called Democrats.

....In the New Hampshire debate, McCain asserted that corruption is the reason drugs cannot be reimported from Canada. The reason is "the power of the pharmaceutical companies." When Mitt Romney interjected, "Don't turn the pharmaceutical companies into the big bad guys," McCain replied, "Well, they are."

There is a place in American politics for moralizers who think in such Manichaean simplicities. That place is in the Democratic Party, where people who talk like McCain are considered not mavericks but mainstream.

Republicans are supposed to eschew demagogic aspersions concerning complicated economic matters. But applause greets faux "straight talk" that brands as "bad" the industry responsible for the facts that polio is no longer a scourge, that childhood leukemia is no longer a death sentence, that depression and other mental illnesses are treatable diseases, that the rate of heart attacks and heart failures has been cut by more than half in 50 years.

I can well envision a President McCain working with a Democratic congress to enact legislation to stifle innovation and research done by drug companies to treat terrible diseases. And it would all be done with that self-satisfied smirk of the self-righteous who believe that they have done something wonderful for the common man while they stifle one American industry that leads the world in helping the world - our pharmaceutical industry. And once they have killed off the goose, there will be many fewer golden eggs to use in fighting all sorts of dread diseases. There is a reason why countries that have drastically reduced the profit incentive for drug companies to do research into new drugs don't have that sort of industry anymore.

I was hoping for the sort of Republican candidate who could stand up to the populist rhetoric in such economic arguments. Mitt Romney can, but I doubt if he could win. Fred Thompson could, but he doesn't have the campaign organization to win. Perhaps Rudy Giuliani could but I fear it will be too late for him. When I think about the war against terrorism and the fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, I can get comfortable supporting McCain. Sure I'd vote for him against Clinton or Obama. But then I keep coming back to the depressing thought that a McCain presidency would mean the gradual end for research and development into new drugs in our country and historians would later write papers tracing its downfall to some law that the maverick McCain enacted with his buddies on the Democratic side of Congress.