Obviously, his political views have changed dramatically over time. On domestic policy, he was conservative in the 1990s, but then started voting with the Democrats on a whole host of issues in the early 2000s. It got to the point where, as Timothy Noah notes
in this 2002 column, he was siding more with Democrats than Republicans on high profile domestic issues (e.g., taxes, campaign finance reform, patient's bill of rights, environmental regulation). In Jonathan Chait's 2000 column, titled
"This Man is Not a Republican", he reminds us of the terms on which McCain attacked Bush's tax cut plan from the left, arguing against it not just on fiscal responsibility grounds, but also on economic redistributive grounds.
But then he shifted back to the right in the mid-2000s, in order to secure the 2008 GOP presidential nomination.
Even on foreign policy, he's changed quite a bit from the Congressman who criticized Reagan for basing troops in Lebanon in the 1980s. Back then, he was far more cautious about projecting US power abroad. But sometime in the 1990s, and especially post-9/11, he become the uber hawk among uber hawks.
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