PHOENIX - “He’s a maverick.” “He’s the consummate maverick.” “We’re a team of mavericks.” - You’ve all heard it time and again in recent weeks as Republican John McCain and fresh-faced running mate Gov. Sarah Palin slap on the maverick label to differentiate themselves from the GOP herd corralled inside the beltway in Washington.

But the New York Times reported on Sunday that the real Mavericks - a storied south Texas family with a long tradition in progressive politics - are not too happy about what they say is the misappropriation of their family name.

“I’m just enraged that McCain calls himself a maverick,” the Times reported Terrellita Maverick, 82, saying. The San Antonio resident is the scion of a family which has been outspoken about liberal causes for generations, and has otherwise bucked conventions.

The family’s name crept into the language for Samuel Augustus Maverick, a rancher who became known for not branding his cattle in the 1800s. Any unbranded cows found out on the range were simply known as “Maverick’s.”

Ranching aside, the Times reported that members of the Maverick family also have a long history championing often unpopular civil libertarian causes — from the rights of indentured servants in long ago New England to defending the cause of “draft resisters, atheists and others scorned by society” more recently in Texas. 

Aside from an unbranded calf, the word maverick has come to mean a lone dissenter who takes an independent stand from his or her associates - a label handy for McCain, who has tried to distance his campaign from eight years of rule by the increasingly unpopular President George W. Bush. Nevertheless, the veteran Republican Arizona senator’s appropriation of the word still grates on the original Mavericks.

He “is in no way a maverick, in uppercase or lowercase,” the Times reported Terrellitta, 82, as saying.

“It’s just incredible - the nerve! - to suggest that he’s not part of that Republican herd. Every time we hear it, all my children and I and all my family shrink a little and say, ‘Oh, my God, he said it again.’ ”

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage

Photo credit: REUTERS/Brian Snyder (McCain greets people in Sedona, Arizona)

WASHINGTON - Barack Obama thinks John McCain is losing his credibility as a maverick.
 
Sure, the Arizona Republican has sometimes refused to go along with his party. Sure, he has occasionally cussed out Senate colleagues. And, yes, the word “maverick” is regularly attached to his name in the media.
 
But that was before McCain became the Republican presidential candidate. Now, Obama says, he has started changing his positions to please the party.
 
“That doesn’t exactly meet my definition of a maverick,” the Democratic presidential candidate told supporters in Indiana this week.
 
“You can’t be a maverick when politically it’s working for you and not a maverick when it doesn’t work for you,” Obama said.
 
The Illinois senator began taking jabs at McCain’s maverick image after suffering a week of taunts and insults from the Arizona senator’s campaign. McCain’s aides ridiculed Obama as a celebrity and accused of him injecting race into the campaign.
 
With some polls showing McCain gaining ground and the two candidates in a virtual tie, Obama is fighting back with his own negative attacks.
 
He has rolled out speeches and an ad challenging McCain’s maverick image, ridiculing a recent TV spot that touted the Arizona senator as “the original maverick.”
 

“Really?” Obama’s ad questions before cutting to a 5-year-old clip of McCain saying he had voted to back President George W. Bush 90 percent of the time.
 
“Maverick, or just more of the same?” the ad asks as the image on screen expands to show McCain posed in a photo with Bush.
 
The Democratic National Committee rolled out its own ad saying much the same thing: “Maverick No More.”
 
Ridicule or not, McCain is embracing the maverick moniker.
 
“You may have noticed that I have been called a maverick,” he told an Ohio crowd Thursday. “Sometimes it’s meant as a compliment. Sometimes it’s meant as a criticism, sometimes worse.
 
“But what it really means is that I understand who I work for. I don’t work for a party. I don’t work for a president. I don’t work for a special interest and I don’t work for myself. I work for you and the country we love.”

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage.

 Photo credit: Reuters/Brian Snyder (McCain greets a veteran in Maine July 21)