The Daily Show totally reams John McCain--again
The subject of course is Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, the issue over which the characterless and hateful senator’s political contortions have been most marked, which is saying something.
Jon Stewart spanks McCain up one side of the issue and then back down the other, and ends the segment with a fake PSA whose hilarity can’t cover up the bleakness of its message.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c |
| It Gets Worse PSA | |
8:10 AM
Politico looks at the "heavy cost" of McCain's re-election
Or re-nomination, at least:
[I]t’s been a costly road to a 5th term for the 2008 GOP presidential nominee, and the experience is likely to leave a lasting and unsightly stain on his legacy.
It’s not just the $20 million he’s spent already this election or the scorched earth campaign that he’s run. Rather, it’s the choices he’s made and the positions he’s embraced—-and what it reveals about him—-that could make for a complicated final chapter in his political biography.
[…]
A former McCain aide, who asked not to be identified, said it’s an open question which shade of McCain the Senate would see upon his return and acknowledged the repositioning might affect how he’s remembered.
“This could be a definition for his legacy,” he said. “From 1997 to 2006, that’s a different legacy.”
PHXated’s “The Case Against John McCain” is here.
6:59 AM
A new McCain attack ad against Hayworth
5:59 AM
How did the first McCain-Hayworth debate play?
In the Republic, Dan Nowicki wrote:
McCain, the four-term incumbent who first won the Senate seat in 1986, reminded viewers that Hayworth, a former 12-year Arizona congressman, was rejected by his constituents in his final re-election bid in 2006. McCain said that was at least partly because Hayworth was a congressional big spender. And echoing the television attack ads that he has used to pound Hayworth, McCain raised the issue of a questionable 2007 infomercial that Hayworth appeared in for National Grants Conferences, a company that came under fire from consumer advocates after purporting to teach people how to exploit “free” government money programs.
“After he was voted out by his constituents, he became a lobbyist, and after that a talk-show host, and then after that, an infomercial and late-night star,” McCain said of Hayworth. “So he’s certainly had an interesting career.”
For his part, Hayworth, who is trailing McCain in the polls, came well-prepared with multiple anti-McCain one liners and zingers. He repeatedly attacked McCain as a flip-flopper on President George W. Bush’s signature tax cuts, which McCain voted against in 2001 and 2003 but now supports extending. He also blasted McCain as a supporter of “amnesty,” the term Hayworth and other critics use to describe comprehensive immigration reform, and for voting for the 2008 financial bailout.
Hayworth called McCain a “convenient conservative” and a “political shape-shifter” who has “perfected the six-year switch” to fool voters in thinking that he is a conservative while up for re-election.
Howard Fischer writes similar things in the EVT.
Neither analyzed the debate’s quality of the candidates' performance.
To PHXated, Hayworth did a lot better than McCain, from his physical positioning to his voluble answers. McCain seems uncomfortable and mumbling, and recycled platitudes from previous debates. (“Facts are stubborn things,” “There you go again,” etc.)
There’s a very long recap of the debate on the Tucson Citizen site, here.
The writer is Jim Kelley, who seems to be obsessed with the third candidate, whom he calls “Jim.” It’s kinda weird:
The closing statement was the single most important moment for Jim Deakin to hook the voter and close the deal. McCain had absolutely nothing to lose. He was short and to the point delivering what every Arizonan already knows about him and heard for the last 3 years both in the Presidential race and his non-JD bashing radio ads. JD also played it safe and delivered what everyone already knows about him, his very smooth and practiced delivery, born of true oratory experience was non-threatening and inviting. Jim choked. There is no other way to put it. The only spin to put out there is that it was a rookie mistake. He did not practice his delivery or indelibly mark into his memory the message that he and his team crafted together over the last week. He didn’t know whether to try it or just fall back to his standard close. His lack of trust in the team’s crafted message made him hesitate.
NYT take on it here.
10:56 AM
Gay politicians—the Arizona angle
Just got done watching Outrage, documentarian Kirby Dick’s look at politicians—most of them, unsurprisingly, Republican and male—who promulgate hate and legal discrimination against gays even as they, well, fuck other men.
A couple of Arizonas appear in the film; one is Neil Giuliano, the openly gay Republican former mayor of Tempe, a voice of reason who serves as a talking head throughout.
More interesting is Outrage’s case study on Jim Kolbe, the former Arizona congressman who in 1996 outed himself just as the Advocate was about to do it for him, in the wake of his pro vote on an anti-gay bill.
Kolbe remained in Congress for almost a decade before retiring before the 2006 election. (His seat is now held by Gabrielle Giffords.)
In the film, he discusses how easy it became to tell his friends and colleagues about his sexuality—that something he dreaded turned out not to be such a big deal.
“Probably the most uplifting experience I ever had. I felt literally 40 years lifting of my shoulders,” Kolbe says at one point.
He goes out of his way to mention John McCain: “I remember John McCain, who when I started to say, ‘John, there’s something I really need to talk to you about …’, he just put up his hand and said, ‘Oh, never mind, Jim, I know. It doesn’t make any difference, you’re a good legislator, you’ve always been, and you’re always gonna be my friend.’”
Outrage doesn’t go into what Kolbe thinks about McCain’s virulently anti-gay voting record, or the hypocrisy of McCain’s feeling that it’s okay for gays to serve as GOP congressmen but not, say, in the military.
Here’s the film’s trailer:
11:16 PM
Mary Hayworth comes to J.D.'s defense!
The Hayworth campaign’s new commercial:
To some, the ad show’s J.D. on the defense—when it’s McCain who’s supposed to be in that position.
Ben Smith in Politico:
Former Rep. J.D. Hayworth’s first ad tells you everything you need to know about the contours of the Arizona GOP Senate primary.
To recap: Hayworth is the conservative challenger and Sen. John McCain the incumbent. McCain is also a deeply unpopular figure among the sort of Arizona Republicans who show up to vote in August primaries.
Yet it’s Hayworth who is on defense in his TV debut, a low-budget number apparently airing only on Fox News in Tucson.
Why is a challenger deploying his wife with the soft-lens, my-husband-is-not-perfect line as his first commercial out of the shoot?
Smith’s answer is that McCain has been watching Charlie Crist get crucified in Nevada by challenger Marco Rubio … and has been careful to inoculate himself against the same sorts of attacks.
7:00 AM
J.D. Hayworth apologizes for that sleazy informercial he did
A few days ago, J.D. was standing by the patently skanky commercial:
“I always say about any product or service, one of the staples I learned growing up is caveat emptor, ‘buyer beware.’ I think that is a given in any commercial endeavor – I would certainly hope in this one. But yeah, I’m a broadcaster, and yeah, I appeared in this, and yes, it was a job. And that’s that.”
(You can see it below.)
Today, he’s running for the hills:
“I should not have made the ad. It was a mistake. I believed, as did former Congressman J.C.Watts, this to be a reputable firm, but I did not completely check out the organization. I hope voters will look past a video presentation made three years ago and instead look at the issues confronting us in 2010.”
Here’s the best parts of the infomercial in question:
10:22 AM
The Sonoran Alliance goes on the attack—against McCain
The right-wing blog supports J.D. Hayworth in the GOP senate primary.
Yesterday it posted this left-wing attack piece on McCain’s friendliness with lobbyists, the ones he talks about being so stridently opposed to:
… all to the tune of the “Friends” theme. The maker of the video is Robert Greenwald, who has done a series of contentious documentaries on Fox News, Wal-Mart, and Iraq war profiteers.
7:34 AM
Politico trashes John McCain's campaign
The McCain-Hayworth primary race makes the site’s list of the year’s worst campaigns, emphases added:
Thanks to a baggage-laden opponent, Sen. John McCain’s campaign may not be a flop electorally: he leads in every poll against former Rep. J.D. Hayworth ahead of this summer’s primary.
But in his desperate bid to hang onto his Senate seat, McCain has already lost something — his well-cultivated image as a different kind of politician who dared to take on his party and speak difficult truths.
Racing to get to the right, he has unapologetically discarded any stance which may be unhelpful in a conservative-dominated primary, most notably his leadership on immigration reform and climate change. In the not-too-distant past he spoke passionately about both issues as matters of conscience, to hell with the political consequences.
But it’s not just the issues, per se, it’s the lengths McCain is going to shed his former political skin that have some of his former advisers shaking their heads about what he’s doing to get six more years in Washington. With no hint of the irony he was once known for, and apparent amnesia about the White House campaign he waged two years ago, he said he never actually considered himself “a maverick.” And after openly mocking conservatives who were obsessed with simply building more fences on the border — “I think the fence is least effective. But I’ll build the goddamned fence if they want it” — he’s now airing an ad in which he’s seen walking along said fence and promising to “complete the danged fence.”
It may be enough to fend off Hayworth, but by seeming to do anything to win re-election McCain has torched one of the most famous brands in modern American politics.
10:54 AM
John McCain continues to be an absolute jerk on the repeal of "Don't ask, don't tell"
The House and a Senate committee have both moved forward on defense appropriation bills that includes a path to the end of the policy that discriminates against gays in the military.
Most political analysts see the policy ending after an armed services review due at the end of the year.
But Arizona’s hateful senior senator continues to fight a rearguard action against the changes.
In other words, John McCain is fighting affirmatively for prejudice, unequal rights, bigotry, and a policy that has driven qualified and in some cases essential personnel from the military.
From the New York Times this a.m.:
[The] chiefs of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines have objected. In letters solicited by Senator John McCain of Arizona, the senior Republican on the Armed Services Committee, they urged Congress to delay voting on the issue until after the Defense Department completed its report.
After the committee vote, Mr. McCain said he would continue to fight a repeal when the bill reached the Senate floor. “I think it’s really going to be really harmful to the morale and battle effectiveness of our military,” he said.
Several years ago, you will recall, McCain said he’d support the repeal of “Don’t ask, don’t tell” when “the leadership of the military comes to [him] and says, ‘Senator, we ought to change this policy.’”
That’s what happened; the secretary of defense and the chairman of the joint chiefs came to Congress to tell them they ought to change it.
McCain immediately denounced the pair and, as the Times story indicates, is now drumming up opposition in whatever atavistic corner of the military he can find them.
p.s. There;s also talk on this Newsweek blog that McCain is saying he would support, if not initiate, a filibuster of the measure.
7:39 AM
All of a sudden John McCain is into pork!
I think there’s a new McCain for Senate ad out—I saw it on Letterman last night, but I can’t find it on his web site or on You Tube.
Anyway, it’s bragging how John McCain brings military-spending dollars to Arizona.
One hundred thousand jobs [the voice-over intone]. Nine billion dollars a year. Our military bases are vital for the economy of Arizona. And so is Senator John McCain.
As senior Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, McCain’s on the front lines of protecting Arizona’s military bases.
John McCain keeps us and Arizona strong.
Meanwhile, his web site is touting a new attack ad on J.D. Hayworth … for voting for too many earmarks.
9:16 AM
John McCain, at the epicenter of a crisis: "Uh, I'll just listen"
You’ll remember the day in 2008 the financial system collapsed and John McCain suspended his presidential campaign and ran back to DC to take charge.
As PHXated has noted previously, then Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s account of the day showed that McCain’s effect on the meetings was essentially that of a large pile of potato sacks.
Now a new book on the first year of the Obama administration by Jonathan Alter tells a similar tale. Here’s an account of it in today’s New York Times:
> Barack Obama demonstrated his economic prowess at an extraordinary White House meeting several weeks before he was even elected president. As Jonathan Alter tells it in “The Promise: President Obama, Year One” (Simon & Schuster), this breakout performance occurred at a Sept. 25, 2008, confab requested by the Republican presidential candidate, John McCain.
The meeting was a calculated gambit by Mr. McCain to prove his leadership abilities after the collapse of Lehman Brothers. But the book says that when Mr. Obama asked, “What do you think, John?” Mr. McCain feebly joked his way out of an answer, saying, “I’ll just listen.”
Later, Mr. Alter says, Mr. McCain acknowledged that he had not yet read a three-page outline of the controversial $700 billion bailout plan by Henry M. Paulson Jr., then the Treasury secretary.
President George W. Bush was “poorly informed and detached,” the book says. But Mr. Obama, who had read Mr. Paulson’s plan and copious amounts of related material, stepped into the breach. He gave a cogent overview of the crisis and declared that the Democrats were close to agreement with Mr. Paulson on a deal to approve the bailout.
When he was done, Mr. Alter reports, “a Republican sitting some distance down the long table whispered to a pair of Democratic senators, ‘Everyone here is ready to vote for Obama, including the Republicans.’ ”
See also PHXated’s “The case against John McCain.”
11:02 AM
The jihadist hiding in the McCain campaign sign
Can you see it?
His beady red eyes and menacing turban?
He’s even wrapping himself in our flag to disguise his foul intentions.
Here’s a close-up:
(h/t: PHXated reader D.W.)
12:26 PM
The immigration bill—now it's a federal issue
If state Sen. Russell Pearce and Co. wanted to further spread Arizona’s image as an intolerant backwater, SB 1070 sure has done it.
Politico reports that Hispanic lawmakers in D.C. are asking the Obama administration to reassert federal authority over immigration law if Gov. Brewer signs the bill:
“The governor of Arizona should veto the bill and if she doesn’t the president of the United States Barack Obama should assert the federal government’s preeminent role in regulating and enforcing our nation’s immigration law,” Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.), said Tuesday.
A senior White House official said the administration is studying the Arizona law.
Meanwhile, Steven Lemons reports that LA Cardinal Roger Mahony went after the law on his blog Sunday:
Arizonans now reverting to German Nazi and Russian Communist techniques whereby people are required to turn one another in to the authorities on any suspicion of documentation.
Are children supposed to call 911 because one parent does not have proper papers? Are family members and neighbors now supposed to spy on one another, create total distrust across neighborhoods and communities, and report people because of suspicions based upon appearance?
And finally, Sen. McCain is running away from another part of his maverick past. He endorsed Pearce’s bill over the weekend.
And the Huffington Post has a story today with video of the senator saying that illegal immigrants …
…. are intentionally causing accidents on the freeway.
The claim comes in the last seconds of this clip:
1:03 PM
John McCain is still dodging Politico
The other day John McCain ran away from a Politico reporter who tried to ask him why the famously mavericky senator is now denying he ever was such a thing.
Currently in D.C., per this Politico piece, there’s apparently speculation that McCain may break with the GOP in its efforts to stop the Obama administration from reforming the financial industries.
There’s no real evidence in the story Mccain might actually do that, but in any case he’s still skulks away whenever he’s asked something:
Many lobbyists say they are watching Obama’s former presidential rival — perhaps the most unusual of the unusual suspects — because he’s engaged in a heated Arizona Republican primary with former Rep. J. D. Hayworth. Financial observers have concluded that McCain’s vote will depend entirely on his analysis of how it plays among Arizona primary voters.
“If McCain decides that doing this will help him beat J.D. Hayworth, he’ll do it,” says one.
McCain formed an unlikely alliance with Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) to propose reinstating the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act, which separated commercial banking from investment banking. That law was repealed in the late 1990s, and many critics say it allowed for the growth of mammoth and risky investment banks. Fully reinstating the law would be further than the Obama administration has proposed.
But for now, Wall Street can breathe easy. Asked if he or other Republicans might vote for the bill, McCain offered a terse “no” and stepped quickly into an elevator.
5:45 PM
Jon Stewart on John McCain: "The currency of his soul is utterly worthless"
The Daily Show rips into McCain:
8:15 AM
John McCain, pouting
John McCain after the weekend’s health care vote:
“There will be no cooperation for the rest of the year. They have poisoned the well in what they’ve done and how they’ve done it.”
McCain used to be the guy who said he’d put the country first. Now he pouts when he doesn’t get his way.
At the White House press briefing today, Robert Gibbs said McCain was acting like a six-year-old:
“The notion that you don’t get what you want, [so] you’re not going to cooperate on anything else is not a whole lot different than I might hear from a 6-year-old,” [Gibbs] said during a White House press briefing today. “It doesn’t work well for my six-year-old…I doubt it works well in the United States Senate.”
4:50 PM
John McCain, goofball
Here is Mr. Maverick questioned by David Gregory on Meet the Press this a.m.:
MR. GREGORY: And, and that’s called budget reconciliation where they could pass it with a simple majority. How would you react if, indeed, that’s what will happen?
SEN. McCAIN: Throughout history, recent history anyway, the majority has always been frustrated by the 40-vote or the 60-vote threshold in the United States Senate. And when Republicans are in the majority, they’re frustrated by the Democrats and vice versa. I did object strongly when, during the Bush administration, when we couldn’t get any judges confirmed that there was the advocacy of the “nuclear option.” I objected to that because I believed, as Robert Byrd does, that, that we should not be addressing these issues through 51 votes.
MR. GREGORY: But, Senator, you have voted for bills through reconciliation nine times since 1989.
SEN. McCAIN: Yes. Yes, I have voted for them, but I objected strenuously […]
Emphasis added; video below.
A few weeks ago, McCain blustered at the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Mike Mullen,for having the temerity to tell Congress “don’t ask don’t tell” could be repealed. Four years ago, he’d said, “The day that the leadership of the military comes to me and says, ‘Senator, we ought to change the policy,’ then I think we ought to consider seriously changing it.” Details here.
McCain’s intellectual contortions are getting goofier by the week.
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
7:44 PM
McCain: The big money boys snookered me!
Dan Nowicki in the Republic, reporting on an editorial board meeting at the paper with Senator John McCain:
Under growing pressure from conservatives and “tea party” activists, Sen. John McCain of Arizona is having to defend his record of supporting the government’s massive bailout of the financial system.
In response to criticism from opponents seeking to defeat him in the Aug. 24 Republican primary, the four-term senator says he was misled by then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. McCain said the pair assured him that the $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program would focus on what was seen as the cause of the financial crisis, the housing meltdown.
“Obviously, that didn’t happen,” McCain said in a meeting Thursday with The Republic’s Editorial Board, recounting his decision-making during the critical initial days of the fiscal crisis. “They decided to stabilize the Wall Street institutions, bail out (insurance giant) AIG, bail out Chrysler, bail out General Motors. . . . What they figured was that if they stabilized Wall Street—I guess it was trickle-down economics—that therefore Main Street would be fine.”
Today, meanwhile, McCain voted against the $15 billion jobs bill that passed the senate today. Five Republicans supported it, including Scott Brown, the recently elected Massachusetts senator.
1:30 AM
What really happened the day John McCain suspended his campaign
Henry Paulson, George Bush’s treasury secretary, has a new book out, describing his role in the government’s attempt to control the financial meltdown last year. The Wall Street Journal today prints an excerpt.
It’s about the day John McCain, Underdog-like, brought his presidential campaign to a halt and returned to Washington to save the day.
McCain himself has said economics isn’t his strong suit; the tale as Paulson tells is correspondingly comedic. He first describes his worry that the abrupt arrival of McCain would unravel the work the administration had done to get both sides to agree on the steps he felt the country needed to make to avert a complete disaster.
It reminds us again that Bush, his advisers and congress were already working to cope with the mess; they didn’t exactly need a political peacock with no economics background to help.
And remember that Paulson is a Republican.
Anyway, here’s his account of what happened at the summit McCain called for:
Obama and the Democrats were skillfully setting up the story line that McCain’s intervention had polarized the situation and that Republicans were walking away from an agreement. It was brilliant political theater that was about to degenerate into farce. Skipping protocol, the president turned to McCain to offer him a chance to respond: “I think it’s fair that I give you the chance to speak next.”
But McCain demurred. “I’ll wait my turn,” he said. It was an incredible moment, in every sense. This was supposed to be McCain’s meeting—he’d called it, not the president, who had simply accommodated the Republican candidate’s wishes. Now it looked as if McCain had no plan at all — his idea had been to suspend his campaign and summon us all to this meeting. It was not a strategy, it was a political gambit, and the Democrats had matched it with one of their own.
[…]
Decorum started to evaporate as the meeting broke into multiple side conversations with people talking over each other. […]
Finally, raising his voice over the din, Obama said loudly, “I’d like to hear what Senator McCain has to say, since we haven’t heard from him yet.”
The room went silent and all eyes shifted to McCain, who sat quietly in his chair, holding a single note card. He glanced at it quickly and proceeded to make a few general points. He said that many members had legitimate concerns and that I had begun to head in the right direction on executive pay and oversight. He mentioned that Boehner was trying to move his caucus the best he could and that we ought to give him the space to do that. He added he had confidence the consensus could be reached quickly.
As he spoke, I could see Obama chuckling. McCain’s comments were anticlimactic, to say the least. His return to Washington was impulsive and risky, and I don’t think he had a plan in mind.
6:49 PM
John McCain hits a new low
Facing a likely re-election challenge from J.D. Hayworth, John McCain — bad pilot, bad husband, bad senator, bad presidential candidate, and noted maverick-when-convenient — continues to struggle to regain some of his right-wing bona-fides.
WSJ story today on McCain’s problems here.
He’s already come out opposing the current push to end “don’t ask don’t tell” in the military. John Stewart last night dug up a clip that shows the strenuousness of the contortions the moves are putting McCain through.
Video clip at the end of this post. The clip from four years ago shows McCain deflecting an inquiry about his position on the matter then by saying, “The day that the leadership of the military comes to me and says, ‘Senator, we ought to change the policy,’ then I think we ought to consider seriously changing it.”
Of course, at the historic hearing the other day, the leadership of the military came to the senate to tell them they should consider changing it.
McCain yesterday: “I’m extremely disappointed in your statement…. At this moment of immense hardship for our armed services, we should not be seeking to overturn the ’don’t ask don’t tell’ policy. I’m happy to say we still have a Congress of the United States that would still have to pass a law to repeal ’don’t ask don’t tell.’”
(By the way, as we move toward the 2010 elections, I think it’s interesting how the Obama administration is deliberately highlighting issues like this. So even though there is evidence of an anti-Democratic momentum in the air, however knuckle-headed it might be, the media spent the last two days talking about historic moves by the Dems to right what most rational people think is a long-overdue wrong — and re-running clips of drawling good old boys opposing it for the usual laughable reasons. It looked to me like evidence the administration was going to be using some of these wedge issues against the right in the coming months.)
The Daily Show:
9:12 PM
McCain still supports "Don't ask, don't tell"
Barack Obama in his State of the Union address last night said he would “work toward” ending the military’s “don’t ask don’t tell” policy. John McCain immediately said he still supported it:
“This successful policy has been in effect for over 15 years, and it is well understood and predominantly supported by our military at all levels,” said Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, in a news release. “At a time when our Armed Forces are fighting and sacrificing on the battlefield, now is not the time to abandon the policy.”
McCain didn’t mention the thousands of gays, both men and women, in the military “fighting and sacrificing on the battlefield” the policy threatens every day. McCain’s wife, Cindy, recently appeared in magazine ads decrying the recent California anti-gay marriage constitutional amendment.
1:07 AM
Cindy McCain—gay marriage supporter
The wife of John McCain appears in ads opposing Proposition 8, the California initiative passed last year outlawing gay marriage. (This came out a couple of days ago, but PHXated is just getting to it after a couple of days working on a redesign of the site.)
The views of the senator are exactly the opposite — he even supported the ludicrous Arizona constitutional amendment last year.
McCain’s views are presumably those of the Mormons and Catholics who support anti-gay marriage measures — that gay marriage is somehow a threat to the sanctity of traditional marriage.
McCain’s respect for that sanctity is well known, including a decade or so of neglect of (and sleeping around on) his first wife after she had a disabling car accident.
Here’s some more recent evidence of his idea of what traditional marriage is, from the new book Game Change, on the 2008 presidential campaign:
“FUCK YOU! FUCK, FUCK, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!!”
McCain let out the stream of sharp epithets, both middle fingers raised and extended, barking in his wife’s face. He was angry; she had interrupted him. Cindy burst into tears, but, really, she should have been used to it by now.
4:51 PM
World Net Daily attacks McCain
A column on the popular right-wing site by Craig R. Smith, a gold broker, is an example of why McCain has been so shrill of late as he shores up his right flank. Says Smith:
I’m done supporting candidates from either party who are more concerned about being liked and accepted by the opposing party and the media than they are about representing my interests in D.C. It made me sick to my stomach to watch McCain ignore the American people on issues like immigration and TARP.
In the essay, Smith calls Harry Reid and Barbara Boxer racists. It’s unclear what exactly he’s referring to.
Smith says right-thinking Americans have somewhere to turn in McCain’s re-election race next year:
McCain is in a battle for his political life as he faces re-election in November 2010. His anticipated competition, a former congressman turned radio talk-show host, J.D. Hayworth, is a mere two points behind McCain in a head-to-head Rasmussen poll for the upcoming primary. It is a statistical dead heat.
7:00 AM
Politico profiles the New John McCain
It’s about how he’s evolved from being a soi-disant straight-shooter to leading the charge against Barack Obama on both domestic and foreign-policy fronts:
For years, McCain relished being an outsider and a maverick, a style that often led to battles with his own party’s leadership. Today, for reasons that friends and McCain observers say could range from unresolved anger to concern for his right flank as he seeks re-election to genuine dismay about Obama’s agenda, he is helping lead a fiery crusade of GOP loyalists against Democratic priorities—and irked some of his Democratic colleagues in the process.
Now, of the reason’s cited, “concern for his right flank” is the telling one. McCain’s sanctimony has always been a device to further his ambition; and his much bruited-about acts of supposedly nonpartisanship concealed his dreary right-wing positions on many issues.
This New John McCain is just the most recent example of how those pretenses evaporate when it’s not politically convenient for him; his positions now—not supporting Sonia Sotomayor, attacking the AARP when it tries to help with health-case reform, sniping at the president’s decision-making process about what do to with the unholy mess the Republicans left him with in Afghanistan—are just more indications of his grimy and unattractive partisanship and self-interest.
For an in-depth and pretty unforgettable look at how this move isn’t much out of keeping with the real John McCain, see Tim Dickinson’s brutal look back at his personal history in Rolling Stone. The piece is funny, too:
In its broad strokes, McCain’s life story is oddly similar to that of the current occupant of the White House. John Sidney McCain III and George Walker Bush both represent the third generation of American dynasties. Both were born into positions of privilege against which they rebelled into mediocrity. Both developed an uncanny social intelligence that allowed them to skate by with a minimum of mental exertion. Both struggled with booze and loutish behavior. At each step, with the aid of their fathers’ powerful friends, both failed upward. And both shed their skins as Episcopalian members of the Washington elite to build political careers as self-styled, ranch-inhabiting Westerners who pray to Jesus in their wives’ evangelical churches.
In one vital respect, however, the comparison is deeply unfair to the current president: George W. Bush was a much better pilot.
2:19 PM