The senator had subtitled a memoir ‘The Education of an American Maverick’ – so denying he was one was in fact a pretty maverick thing to do

One word will forever be associated with John McCain: “maverick”. Few terms have ever clung to a politician so tenaciously, from the time he became a national political figure in the 1990s through the eulogies in Arizona and Washington this week. But everyone seems to have forgotten the time when McCain insisted he wasn’t then and had never been a maverick, and the furor that ensued.

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I remember it well, because it was to me that he made that the claim. Not since Richard Nixon said “I am not a crook” had such a declaration – not about what a politician was, but about what he was not – made a similar fuss. To friends and foes alike, what McCain said seemed preposterous.

It was 2010, and McCain was running for re-election. He’d always been vilified in rightwing circles there for his deviations from conservative Republican orthodoxy. A stalwart from that community named JD Hayworth, taking on McCain, charged that every six years he’d waltz home pretending to be one of them, only to revert to his old and compromising ways once he’d secured another six-year term. The “Johnny McShuffle”, Hayworth called it.

McCain was running scared, or at least taking no chances. He needed to shed the raiment of moderation and don the Republican conservative cloth coat. And he needed a mouthpiece. That turned out to be me, who was writing about him for Newsweek. He’d been ducking me – something in the magazine had upset him – but I apprehended him in one of those subterranean passageways beneath Capitol Hill.

I found him out of sorts, unhappy about, among other things, stories that two years after Barack Obama had beaten him, the joyful, irreverent McCain of yore had curdled into a bitter, angry man.

I never considered myself a maverick. I consider myself a person who serves the people of Arizona John McCain

“That’s not exactly fair and balanced, as we say,” he told me. “The fact is that Lindsey Graham and Mitch McConnell and Tom Coburn and John Kyl and John Thune and Lamar Alexander are saying that ‘McCain never had a better time’. I’m the luckiest guy in the world. I have never been happier. I have a joyous life.”

It sure didn’t appear that way. This Lou Gehrig spoke through clenched teeth.

Only then did the topic turn to mavericks, and then, only very briefly.

“I never considered myself a maverick,” he volunteered. “I consider myself a person who serves the people of Arizona to the best of his abilities.”

To me it was typical election-year trimming – what former senator Alan Simpson was referring to when I asked him about McCain’s campaign: “Politics in the United States Senate is statesmanship for four years and scratching for your life for two.” Still, I thought McCain’s comment sufficiently surprising to revisit it the next day, when he’d agreed to speak by phone. By then, he’d calmed down, and denied any exasperation with the press.

“There’s no reason for me to complain about media coverage,” he said. “It’s just a kind of form of self-pity that is a waste of time.”

But on his new role as a never-maverick, he only doubled down.

“It’s a label that other people have given me,” he stressed. “So I just say, ‘Fine, whatever they want to say.’”

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Was it something he’d ever embraced, or shunned?

“Not particularly either way,” he said.

And so I wrote, though – with my unerring news judgment – I omitted the direct quote. My editor was smarter. John McCain saying he’d never been a maverick? That was news! In went McCain’s comment and, in early April, out came my story.

Instantly, McCain became the butt of late-night jokes. It was “like Rudy Giuliani coming out and going, ‘Hey, I never mentioned 9/11! What are you talking about?’” said Jon Stewart. “It’s like ‘I Can’t Believe it’s Not Butter’ saying ‘I never believed I was butter! Why would I believe that? I never believed!” A Politico cartoonist rendered McCain as a gravedigger, with a headstone – “Maverick RIP” – nearby. Dan Wasserman of the Boston Globe diagrammed McCain’s brain, including a cobwebbed corner over his left ear labeled “SPACE FORMERLY OCCUPIED BY ‘MAVERICK’.”

Obama also got in the act, explaining at the White House correspondents dinner why McCain hadn’t shown. “Recently, he claimed that he never identified himself as a maverick,” he said. “And we all know what happens in Arizona when you don’t have ID: Adios, amigos.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest McCain runs for president, South Carolina 2000. Photograph: Stephan Savoia/Associated Press

More conscientious scribes documented how absurd McCain’s claim was. “Debunking this one wasn’t a question of ‘if’ but rather ‘how can we avoid piling on?’” wrote Louis Jacobson of PolitiFact.com. Like many others, he noted the subtitle of McCain’s 2002 memoir: “The Education of an American Maverick, and the Heroes Who Inspired Him.” “It’s the rare politician who will try to disavow the title of his own autobiography, but John McCain is up to the task,” Rachel Maddow declared.

The liberal punditocracy was most exercised.

“It’s an old story by now – John McCain saying or doing something that thoroughly undercuts the image that first made him a national political star 10 years ago,” Steve Kornacki wrote in Salon. “Believe it or not, though, McCain does – sort of – have a point. For all of his boasts over the last decade, he hasn’t been a classic maverick nearly as much as he’s been an opportunist.”

Jonathan Chait of the New Republic called McCain’s statement “one of the most embarrassing things I’ve ever heard a politician say”.

“I’m proud to say that I was screaming to all who would listen that McCain wasn’t a maverick, long before it was cool,” wrote Paul Waldman of The American Prospect.

Paul Begala was a bit more generous, calculating that McCain was a maverick “precisely 9% to 10% of the time”. Doctors David Corn, of Mother Jones, and Alex Pareene of Gawker diagnosed, respectively, amnesia and insipient dementia.

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All savored how often, when they shared the GOP ticket, Sarah Palin had called McCain a maverick and McCain had called her one right back, though descendants of Sam Maverick, the 19th-century Texas cattleman who made his proper name a common noun by refusing to brand his cattle like everyone else, insisted neither fit the bill. Stumping for him in 2010, Palin was back at it, reportedly calling McCain a maverick 15 times in a single speech in Tucson, just about when McCain told me he wasn’t one.

There was criticism from the right as well, but it was much more scarce. My theory is that conservatives, for whom “maverick” was a leftwing coinage anyway, had long-since excommunicated McCain – and that contempt can be much more terse than outrage or disappointment. In the National Review, Michelle Malkin wrote that McCain’s contortions left her so dizzy that she needed a Dramamine to cover him. The liberals who felt so disillusioned and betrayed gave McCain far too much credit, wrote Daniel Larison in the American Conservative: someone with no integrity for starters could hardly be faulted for expediency.

Yet another form of bipartisanship that has disappeared in Washington is being loathed on both sides of the aisle. But after he was liberated from the Hanoi Hilton, McCain was more free to inspire, or disappoint, or piss off than any other politician of this generation or probably the next. If, as he insisted to me that day in Washington, he really wasn’t a maverick, it should have been because the term didn’t do him justice. Mavericks can come in clusters. He was one of a kind.