Voting with the President Explained

The recent presidential campaign had media of all types making the statement ” McCain voted with President Bush 90% of the time.” I would like to take the time to clarify, regardless of candidate, what a misleading statistic this truly is. Any bill that is approved by congress and that is not vetoed by the President would be considered to have the President’s approval. Thus, anyone in congress, regardless of party affiliation, who voted yes on the piece of legislation would indeed be “voting” with the President. My guess is that since I am unaware of a significant amount of vetoes being cast by the President, that most politicians “voted” with the President a significant amount of the time. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the politician agreed with the President but that the President didn’t object enough to what was being proposed to use his power of veto. That in itself would be enough of a misleading statistic but consider the following scenario: What if a member of Congress or the Senate wasn’t in attendance to vote on a multitude amount of legislative proposals. To me that would mean that the person in question wasn’t available to do their job or perform their duties to the full extent of what I would expect them to do. If we look at the original media example however, we could conclude that said person in question is someone who ” Voted with the President only 50% (as an example) of the time.” That could be interpreted that this person is an independent maverick who deserves our attention. For the reason explained above, I feel that this is a useless statistic.

-Mike Cavin