Well I guess we Arizonans are stuck with John McCain as our U.S. senator for another two years. Will he be the McCain we elected four, 10, 16 and 22 years ago? Or has he really turned in to that person who was the Republican nominee for president this year?

Judging by his concession speech the night of Nov. 4, there’s at least the glimmer of hope we might be getting back the earlier version. The guy that was the maverick.

That would be better than the presidential candidate who pandered so much to the far right, he became a pathetic lapdog. He certainly didn’t look comfortable in that role.

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Amazingly, McCain’s rightward shift came after he got the Republican nomination. The conventional wisdom is that candidates are supposed to drift more toward the center once they get the nomination. But not McCain. For the most part he maintained his maverick stance through the primaries, knocking off the far right’s candidates by maintaining his stances. He believes in the war in Iraq and advocated for the surge. He didn’t support President Bush’s tax cuts and  instead supported reduced government spending. If anybody could be considered an American hero, it would be McCain.

But something happened to McCain. I suspect it goes back to the smear campaign in the 2000 South Carolina primary election in which, among other things, McCain was supposed to have fathered an illegitimate black child, wife Cindy was hooked on drugs and that he was mentally unstable as a result of his days as a Vietnam prisoner of war. It was also in South Carolina where McCain crossed paths with the religious right’ leaders and their insistence on adhering to their agenda on social issues.

The Bush campaign denied involvement in the smear campaign but made no secret of buddying up to the likes of Pat Robertson and the late Jerry Falwell. In the end Bush won the South Carolina primary and McCain, who up to that point had been the front-runner, never recovered.

That experience should have made McCain want to distance himself as much as he could from Bush. But no, instead in this year’s campaign he got more like George Bush.

Now the question facing the Republican party is where do you go from here? Is it a party of smaller government? Is it the party of capitalism and self-reliance? Or is it a party out to make everyone toe the line of socially conservative agenda?

About switching party affiliations in 1962 Ronald Reagan was famously saying “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party. The party left me.”

There were probably many Republicans who voted for Barack Obama this year. Republican party officials would do well to ask themselves if they haven’t taken the party away from many of their constituents. McCain tried to please you and his campaign failed.

I suspect as a nation we would be better off now if the original John McCain Arizonans knew had been elected president in 2000 and 2004. And so would the Republican party.

E-mail comments for publication to editor@azbiz.com. Contact David Hatfield at dhatfield@azbiz.com or (520) 295-4237.