It’s no secret that over the past several months, John McCain’s Straight Talk Express has become the Zig Zag Local. After a career as a maverick, McCain suddenly decided to embrace the conservative establishment in hopes of building something like the money and grass-roots machine that powered President Bush to victory.

The weird thing about this newly obedient McCain, however, is that he’s drawing close to the Bush establishment at the very moment when it and its policies are widely blamed for America’s deepening malaise. At a time when the rest of the country is experiencing a Bush hangover, McCain is just popping the champagne. He’s gone from being a maverick who defies the establishment to a kind of gonzo maverick who defies the people — and that’s a very dangerous thing for a presidential candidate.

When, for instance, President Bush pushed his tax cuts for the ultra-rich during the early years of his administration, McCain opposed them, even though the tax cuts enjoyed relatively strong public support. Now, when Bush and his economic policies have fallen into disrepute, McCain is campaigning to make them permanent.

When denying the reality of the climate crisis was de rigueur in the Republican Caucus, McCain fashioned himself as a Grand Old Party green and repeatedly defied the oil companies and his colleagues in the fight for clean energy. Now, with America in a rage about high gas prices and concerned about the fate of the planet, McCain has shied from standing up to the oil barons he used to delight in tweaking.

Instead of boosting fuel efficiency standards for cars and trucks, releasing oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, strengthening the dollar, or reducing biofuel mandates to bring down gas prices and cut oil use, McCain instead managed to come up with the two options most favored by Big Oil: a gas tax holiday and a free ticket to drill on America’s fragile coasts, even though economists doubt either of those steps will have a significant impact.

McCain has also twice refused to show up to vote to move taxpayer money from oil subsidies toward the clean energy technologies that could drastically bring down fuel costs (on the most recent occasion, McCain actually refused to get off his plane at Washington’s Dulles airport to go to the Senate, and the legislation fell one vote short).

McCain’s great shift has even extended to torture, once the former POW and torture victim’s signature issue. After Sept. 11, 2001, when Americans broadly supported “enhanced interrogation techniques,” McCain was one of the few senators to brave the furor and argue that torture was both wrong and dangerous to American soldiers. But more recently, McCain actually voted with the Bush administration to allow waterboarding, a practice that America has in the past prosecuted as a war crime.

And when most Republicans dared not criticize then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, McCain didn’t hide his contempt for the Bush administration’s failed strategy in Iraq. Now he vigorously defends Bush’s open-ended troop commitment. This one, at least, seems to be based on his true beliefs. But with the Iraq war dragging on at considerable expense with no end in sight, it still damages McCain politically because it provides just another example of his embrace of the unpopular Bush legacy.

What makes these kinds of wild shifts even more dangerous for McCain is that Barack Obama is by and large avoiding the quadrennial Potomac Pivot: the Democrats’ tendency to try to reshape their rhetoric and policy positions toward the middle for general election voters.

It has been a major flaw in Democratic strategy in the past that Republicans have successfully exploited. While most voters are unaware of or don’t care that much about policy positions, Republicans are merciless about exploiting transparent flip-flopping as evidence of a lack of strong leadership and integrity, two qualities that polling shows voters really do care about.

So while McCain embraces Bush’s policies while rhetorically thrashing him, Obama has avoided any big, obvious, substantive or rhetorical shifts or capitulations, with the possible exception of campaign finance.

During the primaries, he stood firm on his health care and immigration plans, even though they came under withering attack from his Democratic opponents and the right wing, respectively. More recently, he’s remained constant even as opponents Hillary Rodham Clinton and McCain ganged up to blast his opposition to the gas tax holiday and his willingness to talk to unpopular foreign leaders.

Voters have rewarded Obama for his tough stances, even when they disagree with them. Americans consistently said they trusted Obama more than Clinton, one of the key factors that helped him clinch the nomination, and voters have given him a big majority over McCain on the question of “who better represents your personal values.” Obama is even with McCain on the question of who is a strong leader, despite McCain’s military background.

Of course, this new Gonzo McCain still hasn’t gotten much airtime yet: The media and the electorate have, until recently, had their attention squarely fixed on the Clinton-Obama psychodrama. But when they do take notice, the parties’ strategy flip is likely to produce a corresponding flip in the results, as Democrats ride their newfound steadfastness to victory.

Glenn Hurowitz is the author of the book “Fear and Courage in the Democratic Party” and runs the website www.DemocraticCourage.com.