It's primary day
Remember, what can help Arizona most is moderates who can improve the state’s standing nationally … and help bring in the federal dollars that pork disdainers like McCain and Shadegg have not.
Accordingly, the people to root for today are the weakest, dumbest and most politically wounded candidates in the various Republican primaries; they will be most vulnerable in the fall, right?
In other words, go Ben Quayle!
McCain — a bad senator, a bad person, and a bad man — seems safe from challenger J.D. Hayworth, who would have been fun to have on the ballot in November.
But there are some interesting Congressional races as well, notably the one for the retiring Shadegg’s seat, which came to national attention after Quayle’s cheesy past as a writer for a skanky web site came to light.
Again, PHXated hopes Quayle wins today, but has generously extended a blogging invitation to Quayle should he be unemployed tomorrow. The search for Scottsdale’s Foxiest Chick has just begun!
Here’s Politico’s analysis of the Gabrielle Giffords race:
The 8th District — a vast expanse that stretches south and east from Tucson, through Sierra Vista and Tombstone, all the way to a corner border with Mexico and New Mexico — provides an ideal test case to understand the degree to which national political forces might sweep aside even a polished incumbent who has steeled herself for the onslaught by paying close attention to state and local matters.
“She’s done everything she needs to do. If she loses, it would be one of those cases where it doesn’t matter how much you spent, it doesn’t matter what you do,” said Rodolfo Espino, a political science professor at Arizona State University.
Here particularly, Giffords' position will be more secure if a nut named Jesse Kelly wins the GOP primary for the seat. Politico:
Conventional political wisdom holds that candidates like him can’t attract enough support in a general election-when the electorate is considerably broader and more diverse-but Kelly seems determined to test the proposition anyway.
In a district in which nearly 17 percent of the population was 65 years old or older at the time of the last census, Kelly wants to phase out Social Security — going a step further than the plan in Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-Wisc.) “Roadmap” that he also endorses.
Here’s 538.com’s analyses of the races:
AZ’s crowded Republican House primaries feature three contests in districts where GOPers think they have a chance of beating incumbent Democrats, and one for an open Republican seat.
The race that’s attracted the most national attention is probably in AZ-08, a Tucson-based district represented by two-term Democrat Gabby Giffords. A classic Establishment-Tea Party matchup involving former state senator Jonathan Paton, the early frontrunner, and Tea Party activist Jesse Kelley, is considered very close. Giffords is a veteran of two close races, and is building up her campaign treasury as Republicans squabble, but her opposition to the new AZ immigration law and votes for key Obama legislation have made her appear vulnerable.
In Phoenix-suburban AZ-03, where Republican John Shadegg is retiring, the early frontrunner was Ben Quayle, son of the former Veep from Indiana, but he is fighting to hold off self-funder Steve Moak. It’s been a battle of self-inflicted wounds, with Quayle hurt by association with an off-color internet site (to which he occasionally made posts under a pseudonym inspired by a porn-star character in Boogie Nights), and Moak battling claims of conflicts of interest between non-profit and for-profit businesses.
In AZ-05, another Phoenix-area district, former Maricopa County Treasurer David Schweikert is so confident of victory that he’s saving money for a general election against Democratic incumbent Harry Mitchell, but businessman Jim Ward remains financially competitive down the stretch.
And in the huge, largely rural AZ-01, dentist Paul Gosar is in a close race with 2008 nominee Sydney Hay for the right to take on freshman Democrat Ann Kirkpatrick. The incumbent beat Hay by a 56-40 margin two years ago.
… and, for variety’s sake, a sample from Greg Patterson’s:
CD 3
Conventional wisdom is that Quayle was the favorite, but self destructed with his handling of the Dirty Scottsdale revelations. That means that Moak is likely to take the race—assuming that Quayle self destructed early enough.
I think the candidate to watch is Waring. He’s represented the district for many years and he walks door to door every weekend. Remember that the race has 10 candidates and at least 7 of them are credible. So you can win with a really low vote count. CD 3 is actually looking like a large scale legislative race. That means that Waring’s shoe leather is likely to offset Moak’s money.
6:30 AM
Drudge salutes McCain
The story is an AP campaign wrap-up, detailing how McCain handled the Hayworth challenge.
8:11 PM
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
What in the hell is happening at the Rodney Glassman campaign?
Rodney, Rodney, Rodney.
You’re a nice Jewish boy from Tucson. You sing at your temple, you’re not unhandsome, and you’re rich to boot.
In the Democratic primary for John McCain’s senate seat, we’re voting for John Dougherty, him being an investigative reporter and all, but on paper you’d seem to be McCain’s sturdiest challenger.
But then we read Stephen Lemon’s Feathered Bastard post about how top advisors are leaving your campaign:
[S]everal confidential sources inform me that Glassman’s staffers left because they were not happy with the behavior of their candidate.
These sources relayed a litany of complaints about the Glassman campaign, from Glassman berating staffers and volunteers in public, even yelling at them, to Glassman’s having his brother Jeremy play a major role in the campaign (doing little or nothing, they say), and the fact that Glassman and his minions gave Democrats reason to believe he would sink millions into his bid for Senate.
The details:
My sources tell me that Glassman was, as one of them put it, “out of control in the worst possible way.” They say he was needlessly rude to staffers and volunteers alike, and described him throwing temper tantrums and yelling at stunned campaign workers.
They depicted Glassman as a spoiled rich kid with a frat boy sense of humor. One described an incident during a fundraiser where he asked if the host’s assistant was an illegal alien.
Worst of all is a story from the Arizona Daily Star, in which a Tucson City Council member says Glassman said to her, “"The toughest thing for me to do will be to sit next to an openly gay councilmember.”
Glassman, shown above, ironically enough, at PHoenix’s Pride Parade this summer, denies having said it.
9:08 AM
A new McCain attack ad against Hayworth
5:59 AM
McCain pulls away from Hayworth
The latest Rasmussen poll sees Dumb increasing his lead over Dumber:
Read down to the other questions asked in the poll, however, and you have to be a little bit concerned about not just the level of the political debate here in Arizona, but the overall ability of residents to process basic information:
Has the new immigration law affected Arizona’s image positively or negatively?
60% Positively
26% Negatively
4% No impact
10% Not sure
or…
Will the new immigration legislation be good or bad for the Arizona economy?
64% Good
17% Bad
9% No impact
10% Not sure
and …
Are economic conditions in the country getting better or worse?
7% Better
72% Worse
18% Staying the same
4% Not sure
7:21 AM
J.D. Hayworth—on the attack!
J.D. Hayworth is capitalizing on the revelation yesterday that one of John McCain’s prominent sheriff supporters called in to a racist radio show in Tennessee.
The Republic:
J.D. Hayworth has called for his GOP primary rival to pull campaign ads featuring Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu in the wake of the lawman’s recent appearance on a “pro-White” radio show.
Babeu, a vocal proponent of Arizona’s new immigration law, has appeared in two of Sen. John McCain’s television ads, the most recent taking airwaves last week.
In a statement released Wednesday, Hayworth said McCain needs to distance himself from the sheriff for his affiliation with “The Political Cesspool Radio Show,” a Tennessee-based talk show that has been named a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center and portrayed as a “White nationalist” program.
Babeu’s press person, Tim Gaffney, says he set the interview up without knowing about the content of the show and that it wasn’t the sheriff’s fault. This may or may not be true; Stepthen Lemons reports that the host of the show in question told a different story:
Interestingly, the show’s primary host James Edwards responded to the controversy on his blog by saying that Babeu is “confused” about what transpired.
“First of all,” he writes, “my co-host, Eddie Miller, had multiple conversations with both Tim Gaffney (Babeu’s press secretary) and the Sheriff himself before Babeu appeared on our live broadcast of July 10, 2010.
“For Sheriff Babeu to change his mind and now regret coming on our show, for whatever reason, is his right. For him to act as though he had no idea of our ideology is a lie.”
Original Arizona Daily Star story here. New Times story here.
7:39 AM
J.D.: "You're a liar!" McCain: "You're a pig!" Tea Party guy: "I want a popsicle!"
(Rewritten and updated, with video embedded.)
The GOP senatorial primary debate in Tucson last night was a sorry spectacle.
PHXated again thought that that bozo J.D. Hayworth came across well. He’s failing at the polls; his ludicrous past as an infomercial pitchman for a skanky company has come back to bite him on the ass; and he looks like … well, he looks like a clown.
Still, each of his answers was coherent (within the confines of the nutty far-right philosophy he was espousing) and energetic, and he came across far stronger, in command and in control of both the physical space and the dialog than McCain.
Here’s the video:
Or you can watch the event on the KUAT web site here.
The moderator, Bill Buckmaster, of the long-running public-affairs show “Arizona Illustrated,” on Tucson’s KUAT, was a caricature of the milquetoasty public broadcasting guy.
He didn’t ask a single tough question.
I mean, I guess I didn’t expect him to ask McCain about the spousal abuse described in the book Game Change, but he could have asked him about some of the terrible decisions he made during that presidential campaign, or even his recent statement that he never considered himself a maverick.
Instead, Buckmaster played entirely to the candidates' own talking points, at one point literally letting the candidates discuss the pressing issue of which was the most conservative.
There were no follow-ups, nothing that asked any of the candidates to deal with political and social realities of the issues facing Arizona.
At the end, completely giving up, he let the candidates each get free time to “set the record straight” about anything else said about them in the debate.
This produced the following exchange:
Hayworth [turning to face McCain]: “John, you wrote the book, Worth the Fighting For. You relayed what happened in South Carolina in 2000….
“You wrote, ‘Given the chance between losing and lying, I chose lying.’ John I’m sorry to say that it appears history is repeating itself here. As you deal with half truths, as you deal with blatant character attacks, as you deal with failing to own up to mistakes you have made that have hurt our nation.
“That’s what I most lament about this campaign.”
McCain [grimacing]: That’s a pretty strong attack there, and I’m tempted to respond.
“But I’m reminded of the advice from my old friend Bob Dole. Never get into a wrestling match with a pig. You both get dirty, and the pig likes it.”
McCain then was given time to yammer on about “doing more for our vets,” though he and Hayworth were both part of the six-year-long Republican reign that produced the pointless war in Iraq, which has had a fairly deleterious affect on quite a few U.S. service people, and the lax oversight of Walter Reed Hospital, which created a big scandal for the Bush administration a few years back.
A minute or two later, the moderator let Jim Deakin, the soi-disant Tea Party candidate, have the last of the final statements. He began:
“It’s been a lot of fun. Next time, popsicles!”
PHXated’s live-blogging of the first Hayworth-McCain debate is here.
6:47 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
The latest blast at Hayworth from John McCain
The new commercial begins with Hayworth looking his clownish best, and then a bunch of supposed former constituents talking about how lame he was as a congressman.
(I haven’t found it online yet.)
A couple of the comments are questionable. For example, one woman says, “He voted for hundreds of billion of dollars of pork-barrel spending.”
First of all, there aren’t hundreds of billions of dollars in pork in the federal budget. That’s about how much discretionary spending there is in total.
They might be trying to total up all of his budget votes over his ten or twelve years in Congress.
But given that these were Republican budgets during a lot of his tenure—and that McCain probably voted for them too—it hardly seems cricket to tag him with voting for them.
But the most arresting claim in the ad is this:
“He voted for the Bridge to Nowhere!”
Sarah Palin tried to rewrite history in her speech at the GOP convention, but it’s well established she was a supporter of the bridge when she was governor.
7:05 PM
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
John McCain in decline, philosophically and physically
That’s the portrait painted in two new looks at the senator.
The big one is a long profile in New York magazine, which among other things suggests he’s taken his challenger in the GOP primary, the knucklehead J.D. Hayworth, far too seriously:
When McCain gets nervous, he speed-dials friends for advice. And that fall, he even called his former top strategist, John Weaver, to ask his opinion.
[…]
Weaver warned McCain that he should ignore Hayworth, that he was training too much attention on a guy who had only 30,000 listeners and appealed to a segment that would never vote for McCain anyway, namely the hard-core anti-immigration wing.
Weaver’s advice was far from unique. Even one of McCain’s oldest and dearest friends, his POW bunkmate at the Hanoi Hilton, Orson Swindle, advised McCain to “just ignore him.”
The other is a scathing piece by Slate’s Jacob Weisberg, “The Saddest Senator: Why John McCain has become so painful to watch”:
To some extent, this is a matter of physical decline. As the inside account of his campaign in [the book] ‘Game Change’ makes clear, fatigue brought out McCain’s cranky side.
With his stiffness from war injuries and scars from cancer surgeries, McCain looks older than a lot of 73-year-olds—and apparently feels older, too.
The other factor may be the reactivation of McCain’s powerful sense of dishonor.
Bear with me here, because what follows is surmise based on long observation rather than hard evidence. But McCain looks to me these days like someone who bears an unacknowledged weight.
If I had to guess, I’d say that weight is his shame over a barely competent presidential campaign and his awful choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate.
6:48 AM
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
National Review endorses McCain, tepidly
The leading doctrinaire conservative magazine can’t muster up enough enthusiasm for Hayworth to overcome its long-standing distrust of McCain.
In the endorsement of the incumbent in the GOP primary, there’s a palpable sense of wistfulness that his challenger wasn’t a little stronger:
Hayworth is, to say the least, not obviously a more exemplary statesman than McCain. On one of the most pressing issues of the day — the need to control federal spending — McCain has had the better record. That Hayworth appeared in infomercials to tell people how to get “free money” from the government underscores the point rather emphatically.
If McCain had a different challenger, we might think differently. But, taken together, these considerations move us to suggest that Arizona Republicans nominate Senator McCain.
Hayworth is a buffoon, of course, but McCain has done dozens of worse things than Hayworth’s infomercial.
The endorsement is already drawing fire from right-0wingers.
9:16 PM
Arizona squirrel scandal!
An intrepid reporter at ABC news his set his sights on a highway administration grant in the state designed to protect an endangered squirrel species.
Here’s the lede of the story, with its uneasy familiarity with English sentence construction intact:
Arizona is spending $1.25 million to build bridges for endangered squirrels over a mountain road so they don’t become roadkill and then monitor their health.
Mount Graham is in the Coronado National Forest in the southeast corner of the state. In other words, the federal government is spending money to protect wildlife in a national forest.
Heavens!
The story goes on for three pages. Turns out John McCain is agin it!
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who has repeatedly criticized what he deems wasteful government spending, was asked about the squirrel bridge meeting in the town of Clifton.
“He expressed opposition to the Mount Graham red squirrel preservation effort, saying it puts unreasonable limits on forest resources that could be used to help the community’s economy,” McCain spokeswoman Brooke Buchanan told ABCNews.com.
The last part of the story reads like this:
Squirrel Bridge Takes Precedence Over Regular Roads
Graham County Supervisor Mark Herrington thinks that the money could be better spent elsewhere.
“I don’t think it’s the smartest allocation of resources,” he said. “With all the problems were facing today, with the economy the way it is…that’s a huge expense and how do you guarantee that the squirrels are going to cross the bridge?”
Herrington said he was not consulted about the project. Instead, the Department of Transportation sent him a letter announcing the start of the project a few weeks ago.
“We could have used this money to improve roads for our citizens,” Herrington said. “There are 600 miles of bad roads in Graham County that need to be improved for the people that live here.”
The people of Graham County will have to wait for better roads. For now, it’s the squirrels' turn.
Yeah—in America, all these other priorities have taken precedence over building roads!
12:42 PM
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
General Petraeus passes out under McCain questioning!
From Politico:
When Petraeus returned to the room, he said, “It wasn’t Sen. McMcain’s questions. … I just got dehydrated.”
10:18 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
PHXations—Thursday, May 27
Easier said that done:
Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor says Arizona must figure out how to show it appreciates, respects and admires the Hispanics who live there after passing a tough new immigration law.
Read more: O’Connor: Arizona must show it’s not biased – AZCapitol Times.com
Better than I would have thought:
Arizona drivers rank 17th for their knowledge about the rules of the road, according to a study of the nation’s licensed drivers by GMAC Insurance.
The insurance company surveyed licensed American drivers from across the country asking 20 questions taken from Department of Motor Vehicles written exams. Arizona drivers averaged 78.5 percent on the tests with 16.2 percent failing.
More McCain, this time from the Arizona Capitol Times:
Sen. John McCain plans to launch new radio and television ads Thursday that blast his primary opponent for supporting special funding requests known as earmarks, his campaign said…
According to AZ Central’s AZ/DC Blog, Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, one of Sen. John McCain’s toughest rivals in the 2008 Republican presidential primaries and one of his biggest allies in his 2010 re-election bid, returns to Mesa next week to headline a McCain town hall in Mesa.
The joint appearance is scheduled for 11 a.m. Friday, June 4, at the Mesa High School auditorium, 1630 E. Southern Ave., Mesa. For planning purposes, the McCain campaign is requesting RSVPs at www.johnmccain.com/mitt.
Lots of Joe Arpaio news. The county moves ahead on its spending investigation of Arpaio’s office:
Suspecting Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s office has misspent money, the Board of Supervisors imposed significant financial restrictions against the office in two special meetings Wednesday morning.
The five supervisors unanimously decided to force the Sheriff’s Office to justify the need for outside bank accounts, limit employees' use of county credit cards, require staff to re-apply for cards by June 11 or face cancellation. They also asked county officials to develop a policy that would limit all non-emergency travel for sheriff’s employees next fiscal as well as additional general financial and management recommendations.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Labor is ordering Arpaio’s office to cough up $2 million in back pay.
His office was apparently making detention officers attent department briefings before their shift began.
2:55 PM
J.D. Hayworth gets smacked by McCain—and then E.J Montini
We like J.D. Hayworth.
Not personally, but we’d like to see him knock John McCain out of the race in the GOP primary and be easier pickings for a Democrat in November.
Not so much because we favor Democrats as that we think Arizona needs a higher quality of elected representative and we think McCain is a bad person and a bad senator.
Anyway, J.D., who is, let’s face it, a buffoon of the first order, managed to turn himself into a joke recently by declaiming for some reason or another that the U.S. didn’t declare war on Germany during the Second World War.
(We assume it had something to do with arguing that it’s OK that America has been fighting wars for decades now without formally declaring it. This is of course inconsistent with the right-wing mantra that the constitution should be interpreted strictly.)
That made Hayworth a staple of the news shows for a day, and the Mccain campaign capitalized on it immediately, putting together a video mocking Hayworth you can see below.
Anyway, Hayworth smacked back at McCain today with a press release. Unfortunately, they sent it to E.J. Montini, who noticed the release misspelled McCain’s name in the hedline—and had a dropped word besides.
Sigh.
1:26 PM
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
The Washington Post says J.D. Hayworth might be a beneficiary of last night's election results
Writes Chris Cillizza, who does the paper’s blog The Fix:
Ken Buck/J.D. Hayworth/Sharron Angle: Buck, Hayworth and Angle — running in Republican Senate primaries in Colorado, Arizona and Nevada, respectively — are all making a direct pitch to supporters of the tea party movement. Ophthalmologist Rand Paul’s surprisingly strong victory on Tuesday night and his crediting of the tea party for that victory will almost certainly embolden those who see themselves as part of the cause in other parts of the country. The tea party to date has been somewhat haphazard in the primary races it chooses to target — yes to Florida Senate, no to Illinois Senate — and so it’s not likely that all of the trio mentioned above will benefit from the increased intensity. But, now that the tea party movement has the taste of winning in its collective mouth, there will almost certainly be a push to find the next Kentucky Senate race.
Meanwhile, the latest Rasmussen poll gives John McCain a 12-point lead over Hayworth.
Here’s Pollster.com’s trend map on the race:
4:34 PM
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
A new poll: Hayworth closing in on McCain
The new Daily Kos/Research 2000 poll has some interesting numbers.
They show plainly that, six months out, the Democrats' best chance for taking the Senate seat will be if J.D. Hayworth beats McCain in the GOP primary.
According to the poll, McCain beats the likely Democrat, Rodney Glassman, 48 to 35, with 17 percent undecided.
Between Hayworth and Glassman, the race is a real race… 43 for Hayworth, 42 for Glassman.
There’s a four percent margin of error in the poll.
But … can Hayworth actually beat McCain? It would seem a longshot.
McCain is unquestionably a bad senator, a bad person, and has squandered his dishonest-but-effectively-created image as a moderate and maverick by pandering to the vicious Arizona right
(For details, see PHXated’s “The Case Against John McCain,” a comprehensive look back at his career.)
Unfortunately, though, none of these are actually detriments in the Republican primary in a state like Arizona.
But the new polls shows conclusively that his popularity is dropping even there.
48 to 36 is still a good advantage for McCain, but it's four points less than he was polling a month ago.
The survey did a comprehensive look at all Arizona politicians, too.
McCain’s unfavorable numbers statewide are now about 50 percent.
He’s more unpopular than Hayworth, which has to be considered something of an achievement.
Most particularly, he has very high unfavorables among Democrats and independents … 82 percent and 60 percent, respectively.
But of course, he’s be a much more formidable opponent in November than Hayworth, a buffoon who could be made mincemeat of if Glassman—at this point still a political cipher—was up to the task.
Here are the overall numbers for Arizona politicians:
8:11 AM
New Public Policy Poll: McCain over Hayworth by 11 points.
From Pollster.com:
Public Policy Polling (D)
4/23-25/10; 387 likely Republican primary voters, 5% margin of error
Mode: Automated phone
Arizona
2010 Senate: Republican Primary
46% McCain, 35% Hayworth, 7% Deakin
Note that automated phone polling is not ideal.
Meanwhile, the Republic has posted a local poll from Behavior Research Center:
McCain leads Hayworth 54 percent to 28 percent with another 18 percent undecided.
In a potential general election battle against former Tucson Vice Mayor Rodney Glassman, the leading Democratic Senate candidate, McCain is ahead 46 percent to 24 percent with a significant 30 percent “uncommitted,” the poll says.
Hayworth also leads Glassman, who is not very well-known around the state yet, by 37 percent to 30 percent with 33 percent “uncommitted.”
This poll has a 5.7 percent margin of error; the two margins of error combined mean that both could still be quote-unquote correct.
Here’s Pollster.com’s current chart on the race:
11:06 AM
A new poll: Glassman can beat Hayworth
A new poll shows the obvious: That J.D. Hayworth might be easy pickings for the Democrats in November:
2010 Senate
49% McCain ( R ), 33% Glassman ( D )
42% Glassman ( D ), 39% Hayworth ( R )
Note that Hayworth has an incredibly high unfavorable rating:
Favorable / Unfavorable
Rodney Glassman: 7 / 15
J.D. Hayworth: 23 / 50
The source is Public Policy Polling, out of North Carolina. Its release on the poll stresses this:
Raleigh, N.C. – John McCain might still beat Barack Obama handily were there a redo of the 2008 election in McCain’s home state, but the senator’s constituents now view Obama’s job performance more favorably than they do that of their longtime senator. 45% of Arizona voters like the job Obama is doing, to 51% who disapprove. While that may seem bad, only 34% approve of how McCain is handling his job to 55% who do not. Republicans only barely approve, 48-39, with independents down at 28-58.
Emphasis added. Doesn’t this lend support to PHXated’s pet theory, which is that Democrats need to adopt a carom strategy for the fall, helping Hayworth beat McCain, so they’ll have an easier target in November?
Pollster.com account here. One of the commenters says that the company will release numbers on specifically the GOP primary tomorrow.
11:29 AM
1The 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
The case against John McCain
Arizona’s senior senator has a lingering image as an unusual politician—one who will take the hard stance for what’s right, or who will team up with the other side on difficult issues that are in the public’s best interest. The McCain-Feingold campaign-finance reform bill and his moves toward comprehensive immigration reform are two good examples of this.
The trouble with John McCain is that this aspect of his career and personality is a tiny one. It is far outstripped by myriad and crippling personal and political flaws.
As McCain approaches a campaign for his fifth term as a senator, Arizonans have their best chance yet to throw this phony out.
If you’re curious about McCain, PHXated has created this handy guide to his decidedly unbrilliant career.
It’s a portrait of the real McCain, the one that’s been suppurating under the surface of his PR façade.
I. He’s a right-winger.
McCain’s moderate image is a fraud. As noted below, it surfaced only after he got his hand caught in the corruption cookie jar.
But given the chance he will always come back to his real values, which embrace the least-generous impulses in the American psyche; a belligerent, unthinking recklessness abroad; leaving the country’s most defenseless to fend for themselves; and, in general, resisting change any way possible.
He’s an abortion fetishist. (He even mocked the concept of the “health of the mother” during a presidential debate.) He’s a stalwart supporter of the American anti-sex brigade. (While having shown himself as quite the ladies man himself.) He’s against gay marriage and against even letting gays serve openly in the armed forces. (Again, after decades of behaving like a goon himself in the service.) He was doggedly against establishing a holiday for Martin Luther King Jr. He supported the vicious Nicaraguan contras.
He’s voted for tax cuts for the rich just about every chance he got, and he didn’t do anything to stop the anti-regulation brigade from giving a green light to the demolition derby that destroyed the country’s economy. He voted against the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. He voted to ban desecration of the flag, years after the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional; and he voted for the cruel bill that made it harder for people to file bankruptcy. (That was just before the economy his party destroyed drove untold thousands into the poorhouse.)
His incessant blabbering about the surge ignores the facts that a) we shouldn’t have been in Iraq in the first place and b) that the war had been utterly mismanaged to that point. He’s against withdrawing troops from Iraq, now, of course, and has always voted to confirm ideologues— Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas, Alito and Roberts—to the Supreme Court.
II. He’s reckless.
Sarah Palin today is a wildly amusing character, and one who promises to disrupt Republican Party presidential race enjoyably in 2012.
But the idea of her being a 72–year-old man’s heartbeat away from the presidency is less funny.
Has any recent move by any politician of either party has had the potential to endanger America more?
Obama (himself a relatively untested figure) could have crashed and burned during the election. McCain could well be president right now—and be facing health problems.
The rash act was part of a pattern. During the 2008 crisis, as the economy tanked, McCain suddenly ended his campaign, cancelled an appearance on Letterman, made a detour to an interview with Katie Couric, and then rushed to Washington to… read some lines off an index card, as Henry Paulson recounts in his new memoir.
What a bozo, right?
Well, that’s the impression he gives to those of us on the left.
Maybe we’re being unfair.
Let’s hear from people closer to him.
Amazingly, those on the right have an even deeper sense of the man’s flaws. Tim Dickinson in Rolling Stone:
At least three of McCain’s GOP colleagues have gone on record to say that they consider him temperamentally unsuited to be commander in chief. [Bob] Smith, the former senator from New Hampshire, has said that McCain’s “temper would place this country at risk in international affairs, and the world perhaps in danger. In my mind, it should disqualify him.” Sen. Domenici of New Mexico has said he doesn’t “want this guy anywhere near a trigger.” And Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi weighed in that "the thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine. He is erratic. He is hotheaded.
Those are the guys on his side!
III. He’s a jerk to women, and he cheats on his wife.
McCain humiliated his first wife, whose name was Carol. Stories of his running around are legion.
Rolling Stone published “a devastating look back at McCain’s personal and political careers in 2008”: http://www.rollingstone.com/news/coverstory/make_believe_maverick_the_real_john_mccain. The story was called “Make Believe Maverick" and was written by Tim Dickinson.
Here’s what he wrote about McCain’s two marriages:
If heroism is defined by physical suffering, Carol McCain is every bit her ex-husband’s equal. Driving alone on Christmas Eve 1969, she skidded out on a patch of ice and crashed into a telephone pole. She would spend six months in the hospital and undergo 23 surgeries. The former model McCain bragged of to his buddies in the POW camp as his “long tall Sally” was now five inches shorter and walked with crutches.
By any standard, McCain treated her contemptibly. Whatever his dreams of getting laid in Rio, he got plenty of ass during his command post in Jacksonville. According to biographer Robert Timberg, McCain seduced his conquests on off-duty cross-country flights — even though adultery is a court-martial offense. He was also rumored to be romantically involved with a number of his subordinates.
In the spring of 1979, while conducting official business for the Navy, the still-married McCain encountered Cindy Lou Hensley, a willowy former cheerleader for USC. Mutually smitten, the two lied to each other about their ages. The 24-year-old Hensley became 27; the 42-year-old McCain became 38. For nearly a year the two carried on a cross-country romance while McCain was still living with Carol: Court documents filed with their divorce proceeding indicate that they “cohabitated as husband and wife” for the first nine months of the affair.
Although McCain stresses in his memoir that he married Cindy three months after divorcing Carol, he was still legally married to his first wife when he and Cindy were issued a marriage license from the state of Arizona. The divorce was finalized on April 2nd, 1980. McCain’s second marriage — rung in at the Arizona Biltmore with Gary Hart as a groomsman — was consummated only six weeks later, on May 17th. The union gave McCain access to great wealth: Cindy, whose father was the exclusive distributor for Budweiser in the Phoenix area, is now worth an estimated $100 million.
His relationship with second wife Cindy isn’t any more attractive.
Here’s a story, from the Rolling Stone piece, about a campaign nearly twenty years ago:
During his 1992 campaign, at the end of a long day, McCain’s wife, Cindy, mussed his receding hair and needled him playfully that he was “getting a little thin up there.” McCain reportedly blew his top, cutting his wife down with the kind of language that had gotten him hauled into court as a high schooler: “At least I don’t plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt.” Even though the incident was witnessed by three reporters, the McCain campaign denies it took place.
Think he’s mellowed? Here’s a passage from Game Change, the new book 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.”
IV. He’s a crummy senator.
Arizona by most social metrics is a honorary member of the Deep South. It could use a little federal help to evolve its economy and try to join the modern world, the way other backward states do.
McCain, with his twisted view of how politics should work, hasn’t been a help.
Here’s Amy Silverman, New Times’ resident expert on McCain:
(McCain’s e)fforts to stop pork-barreling are sadly cosmetic, as well. First off, the earmarks that groups like Taxpayers for Common Sense rail against account for only 1 percent of the federal budget. One percent.
And it’s not all bridges to nowhere. McCain, who used to fight for projects like a regional airport for metropolitan Phoenix [. . .] now refuses to fund anything for the state. And his sheep, er, colleagues — Arizona congressmen John Shadegg and Jeff Flake — have followed suit. As a result, Arizona ranked dead last in earmark funding in the past fiscal year.
He’s not even good on foreign policy. Winning in Iraq would be “easy,” he said before the war. The U.S. would be greeted as liberators!
V. He’s a hypocrite and a sophist.
He fishes for votes amongst the worst most moralistic Americans, while he’s been a skirt-chaser his whole life. He abuses his wives and has cheated on at least one of them, yet he acts morally superior to gay men and women who tried to build their own lives together.
He will argue whatever side of any issue benefits him at the time.
Here he is recently on Meet the Press, talking about the “reconciliation” option on the recent health care bill:
SEN. McCAIN: 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 […]
I voted for them, but I objected strenuously!
McCain’s never shown any compassion for drug addicts. Tens of thousands of harmless drug offenders rot in the nation’s jails, costing taxpayers a fortune and creating untold further societal costs in ruined lives.
.. well, except for one drug addict: His wife Cindy, who got hooked on pills and stole them from her charity to feed her addiction.
There are people who have done a lot less sitting in Joe Arpaio’s Tent City-–or lying forgotten in other hell holes across the country. (A full Washington Post story on the affair is here.)
VI. He’s also intellectually dishonest, willing to contort himself into rhetorical knots to stick to his atavistic, hateful politics.
Here’s a good example.
Four years ago, when the military’s don’t ask, don’t tell policy was up for review, he 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.”
As you might have read, the leadership of the military did just that in recent weeks; the chairman of the joint chiefs, Admiral Mike Mullen, said “allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly would be the right thing to do.” He was joined by Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a Republican—and a few weeks later, General David Petraeus said the policy should be reconsidered as well.
In response, McCain told the brass: “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.’”
A gentler man, one who’s psyche was consistent with the genial soul who warbled about “God’s children” n the debate over immigration reform, would use the general’s change of heart as a learning moment for his bigoted constituency. Instead, McCain, tacking right to fend off Hayworth’s primary challenge, is playing to their worst instincts.
And in a recent issue of Newsweek, McCain was asked about his maverick image. His reply:
“I never considered myself a maverick.”
VII. He’s a champion flip-flopper
Since McCain has had to contort himself philosophically each time he’s run for national office, he has a record as a flip-flopper the likes of which Washington has very rarely seen. Dickinson in Rolling Stone:
When challenged on The View, McCain again defied those who accuse him of flip-flopping. “What specific area have I quote ‘changed’?” he demanded. “Nobody can name it.”
In fact, his own statements show that he has been on both sides of a host of vital issues: the Bush tax cuts, the estate tax, waterboarding, hunting down terrorists in Pakistan, kicking Russia out of the G-8, a surge of troops into Afghanistan, the GI Bill, storing nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, teaching intelligent design, fully funding No Child Left Behind, offshore drilling, his own immigration policy and withdrawal timelines for Iraq.
VIII. He’s a creep.
Besides the way he treats the women he sleeps with, he’s a jerk to regular folks as well. Amy Silverman, in New Times, has the tale of what happened to Rose Mofford, who ascended to the governor’s office after the impeachment of Evan Mecham, when she went to DC to testify before McCain’s committee. It’s a complicated story, but basically Mofford, who’d been governor for all of eight days, got blindsided by some hostile questions from a senator been fed them by McCain.
Silverman, quoting a friend of McCain’s:
“During lunch, McCain said, almost with mischievous glee, that he had slipped some highly technical questions to [James McClure] to ask Mofford — questions she wouldn’t be prepared to answer or expected to answer.
“Flabbergasted, I asked McCain why would he want to sabotage Mofford’s testimony, when in fact the CAP was the nonpartisan pet of Republicans and Democrats — such as far-left Udall and far-right Goldwater — since its inception.
“His reply, as near as I remember, was, ’I’ll embarrass a Democrat any time I get the chance.’
These tendencies are lifelong ones. Rolling Stone:
McCain was not only a lousy student, he had his father’s taste for drink and a darkly misogynistic streak. The summer after his sophomore year, cruising with a friend near Arlington, McCain tried to pick up a pair of young women. When they laughed at him, he cursed them so vilely that he was hauled into court on a profanity charge.
McCain’s admittance to Annapolis was preordained by his bloodline. But martial discipline did not seem to have much of an impact on his character. By his own account, McCain was a lazy, incurious student; he squeaked by only by prevailing upon his buddies to help him cram for exams. He continued to get sauced and treat girls badly. Before meeting a girlfriend’s parents for the first time, McCain got so shitfaced that he literally crashed through the screen door when he showed up in his white midshipman’s uniform.”
IX. Even his military career has been overhyped.
McCain was shot down over Vietnam and spent years in a Vietnamese prison. He is routinely called a hero for this terrible ordeal. We’re not going to argue that, but it’s also true that his primary status was, like the hundreds of thousands of US serviceman at the time (not to mention millions of Vietnamese) not so much a hero as a victim—indeed, one grievously injured, abused, denied medical attention and left with lifelong physical impairments.
That said, as Tim Dickinson writes, McCain was a crummy serviceman. He crashed two planes while on active duty, and another near the end of his career. Since he was the son of an admiral, he was given a pass for this record, which would have permanently grounded a regular flyer.
Dickinson rounds up all the other tales about what a crappy sailor McCain was.
He repeatedly blew up in the face of his commanding officer. It was the kind of insubordination that would have gotten any other midshipman kicked out of Annapolis. But his classmates soon realized that McCain was untouchable. Midway though his final year, McCain faced expulsion, about to “bilge out” because of excessive demerits. After his mother intervened, however, the academy’s commandant stepped in. Calling McCain “spoiled” to his face, he nonetheless issued a reprieve, scaling back the demerits. McCain dodged expulsion a second time by convincing another midshipman to take the fall after McCain was caught with contraband.
As for his heroism as a POW, that too is a façade. McCain endured a great deal of cruelty and deserves our respect and compassion for that ordeal. But the “name, age and serial number” image isn’t true. Dickinson:
Soon after McCain hit the ground in Hanoi, the code went out the window. “I’ll give you military information if you will take me to the hospital,” he later admitted pleading with his captors. McCain now insists the offer was a bluff, designed to fool the enemy into giving him medical treatment. In fact, his wounds were attended to only after the North Vietnamese discovered that his father was a Navy admiral. What has never been disclosed is the manner in which they found out: McCain told them. According to Dramesi, one of the few POWs who remained silent under years of torture, McCain tried to justify his behavior while they were still prisoners. “I had to tell them,” he insisted to Dramesi, “or I would have died in bed.”
Dramesi says he has no desire to dishonor McCain’s service, but he believes that celebrating the downed pilot’s behavior as heroic — “he wasn’t exceptional one way or the other” — has a corrosive effect on military discipline. “This business of my country before my life?” Dramesi says. “Well, he had that opportunity and failed miserably. If it really were country first, John McCain would probably be walking around without one or two arms or legs — or he’d be dead.”
X. Mr. Ethical only came into existence after Mr. Business as Usual got caught:
After he was sent to Washington, McCain and his family got in tight with Charles Keating, one of the poster kids in the savings and loan scandal.
Rolling Stone:
McCain and his family took at least nine free trips at Keating’s expense, and vacationed nearly every year at the mogul’s estate in the Bahamas. There they would spend the days yachting and snorkeling and attending extravagant parties in a world McCain referred to as “Charlie Keating’s Shangri-La.” Keating also invited Cindy McCain and her father to invest in a real estate venture for which he promised a 26 percent return on investment. They plunked down more than $350,000.
When the feds began closing in on Keating, McCain and four other senators went in to plead the goon’s case.
The senators who participated in the effort would come to be known as the Keating Five.
“Senate historians were unable to find any instance in U.S. history that was comparable, in terms of five U.S. senators meeting with a regulator on behalf of one institution,” says Bill Black, then deputy director of the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation, who attended the second meeting. “And it hasn’t happened since.”
In other words, Mr. Rectitude only got that way after nearly destroying his career by running around with a crook who, with some valuable clutch assists from McCain, cost U.S. taxpayers $3 billion.
Are there really only ten reasons to dump McCain? I’d love to hear your further nominations. And as always, corrections, criticisms and comments are welcome.
10:43 PM
A new poll: Hayworth closing in on McCain
The poll, by Rasmussen, puts Hayworth at 42 and McCain at 47, with a four percent margin of error. McCain has been leading in every poll taken thus far; it seems more likely that the error would be in McCain’s favor.
Here are the poll’s favorable/unfavorable rankings of Tweedlecreep, Tweedlebuffoon and Rodney Glassman, the likely Democratic opponent in November:
Favorable / Unfavorable
John McCain: 52 / 46
Rodney Glassman: 32 / 34
J.D. Hayworth: 43 / 49
Those are apparently the findings for likely voters; note that on the Pollster.com page for the poll, a commenter named “jmartin4s” says:
I looked at the internals of the primary poll and I think the McCain/Hayworth primary could go either way. According to the poll Hayworth has a 58% favorability among R primary voters and McCain has 57%. [This makes sense, given that all voters would have a higher favorable impression of McCain than Hayworth.] In addition, Hayworth represented a part of Maricopa county for a while and has gotten the endorsement of Sheriff Joe Arpaio. The fact that McCain an a four-term incumbent is ahead of Hayworth by only 5 is amazing. In addition, the primary is in September [actually, it’s Aug. 25] so there is a huge amount of time for McCain to continue to bleed votes to Hayworth.
Emphases added.
Talking Point Memo’s piece on the poll contains this comment from one “david46”:
A couple of months ago, I had a long conversation with a long time Arizona Democratic political operative about what was gooing on in AZ. He said that McCain was in trouble and do not pay any attention to the disorganized and chaotic Hayworth campaign. The Hensley family (i.e., Cindy McCain) no longer had the dominent position it once had in the AZ Republican Party.
The party organization hates McCain and was looking to take him out because he was a liberal in their thinking and that he would not take care of their financial interests. (McCain was burned badly in the S&L scandals and pretty much stopped looking after individual, parachial financial interests and AZ is a state with heavy Federal involvement in its economy.) He said that the several very wealthy folks who control the AZ party wanted to get rid of McCain and replace him with someone who would do their bidding. They were prepared to let the seat go Democratic in the event the buffoon Hayworth lost in a general election because they would be able to talk to a Democrat about parochial AZ interests which they cannot with McCain and then hope to put in a Republican in six years.
Terry Goddard at this point looks good to win the Governor’s seat, but he does have a history of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. The Hispanic vote continues to grow. The problem is that there is not a first tier Democratic candidate for the Senate seat because Democrats such as Gifford thought it was too much of a long shot that Hayworth would defeat McCain—and they were probably correct. That said, the Dems do have respectable folks in the race and if Hayworth does win, then expect resources to pour into AZ.
The latest fundraising news
Mike Dan Nowicki in the Arizona Republic has this, which suggests that Hayworth isn’t going to have it easy:
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and his primary challenger J.D. Hayworth released their final fundraising numbers for the first three months of 2010. Hayworth, a former congressman who officially entered the race on Feb. 15, reported raising an impressive $1.07 million, though he only has $681,478 left on hand. McCain, however, collected $2.3 million and still has $4.6 million ready to spend.
(Apologies to Dan Nowicki for getting his name wrong originally in this post.)
7:17 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
John McCain, the self-hating maverick
The imploding senator get nailed by Politico in a Capitol hallway encounter:
When POLITICO asked McCain about the contradiction at the Capitol this week, the Arizona Republican grew visibly irritated and snapped: “I’ve been called a thousand things. It’s absolutely ridiculous.”
He said 48 percent of the homeowners in his state are underwater on their mortgages. He said he’s always “done what’s best for my state and the nation.” Then he said it again, adding, “People can consider me whatever they want.”
And then he darted into the Senate chamber without explaining himself further.
6:46 PM
Jon Stewart on John McCain: "The currency of his soul is utterly worthless"
The Daily Show rips into McCain:
8:15 AM
Glassman running for Senate
Rodney Glassman, a Democrat, is a Tucson city councilman. He is not well known statewide but may become the de facto challenger to either John McCain or J.D. Hayworth in November if better-known Dems like Bruce Babbit or Gabrielle Giffords don’t chance the race.
Glassman slammed McCain for not being responsive to requests for federal help for local projects and accused him of neglecting the state. McCain has a national reputation for fighting earmarks and pork spending.
“Where has he been the past 28 years?” Glassman said. “We have a U.S. senator who’s more interested in visiting Kabul than visiting Casa Grande.”
The Tucson Sentinel:
Glassman’s bid surprised virtually no one. He told TucsonSentinel.com: "I’ll be the first elected official in 20 years to take on John McCain for U.S. Senate. I’ll also be the first candidate endorsed by dozens and dozens of Democratic leaders throughout the state.”
While he’s had an official “exploratory committee” for months, Glassman put off a formal announcement until Tuesday. In February, he explained his delayed decision by saying he wanted to concentrate on helping the city navigate its budget difficulties.
A Daily Kos poll from last Friday showed clearly that J.D. Hayworth was a slightly more vulnerable figure in the general than McCain.
The poll had Bruce Babbitt tied with Hayworth and six points behind McCain. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords was thirteen points behind Hayworth and twenty behind McCain.
In both cases, interestingly, Glassman’s showing was almost identical with Giffords’.
The headline on the Daily Kos poll was that Hayworth is currently running fifteen points behind McCain:
Despite the conventional wisdom that McCain could be vulnerable to an intra-party challenge, we find that McCain has a fairly solid level of favorability among Republicans. His current favorability among GOP voters stands at 76%, with only 19% expressing disapproval.
Hayworth, meanwhile, may well have some upside in the GOP primary, as he is still unknown to about a quarter of the electorate. And it is worth noting that among Republicans, he is well liked (a 61/16 favorability spread).
However, his upside might be limited to a GOP primary. In a general election, he is clearly a greater liability for the GOP. Hayworth is much less popular among both Democratic and Independent voters, and sports an net negative favorability (34/42) among all voters, joining only President Obama (41/55) and incumbent GOP Governor Jan Brewer (39/54) in minus territory.
Full report on the poll here.
7:46 AM
John McCain: Not so mavericky after all
In the new Newsweek, there’s a look at John McCain’s re-election campaign. In it, McCain runs away from himself as fast as he can:
“Maverick” is a mantle McCain no longer claims; in fact, he now denies he ever was one. “I never considered myself a maverick,” he told me. “I consider myself a person who serves the people of Arizona to the best of his abilities.” Yet here was Palin, urging her fans four times in 15 minutes to send McCain the Maverick back to Washington.
Politico talked to J.D. Hayworth after the Newsweek article was published:
“If you’re scoring at home, how many reversals is this?” Hayworth added, running through what he sees as a litany of McCain position changes. “He’s moving away from legislative reversals into branding reversals. It’s the new John McCain, nonmaverick edition, for the Arizona Senate election.”
5:34 PM
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
Will Nan Stockholm Walden challenge McCain in November?
Says Politico:
As Sen. John McCain works to beat back a primary challenge from the right, Arizona businesswoman Nan Stockholm Walden is taking a look at entering the Senate race on the Democratic side, according to Democrats in Arizona and in Washington.
Walden, an executive at Farmers Investment Co. who served as a staffer for former Democratic Sens. Bill Bradley and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, could provide her party with a credible, well financed candidate in the event that McCain loses or is severely wounded in his nomination fight with former Rep. J.D. Hayworth, Democrats said.
“She could be quite formidable. She has a national network. She’s been very plugged in with women donors – particularly, I think, in Senate races,” one Arizona Democrat told POLITICO.
Full story here.
1:28 AM
J.D. zings McCain!
Finally, a little life in the candidacy of the man PHXated has its hopes on to knock John McCain out of the senate and then be a vulnerable GOP nominee in the general so the state has at least a chance to be represented from someone in the reality based community.
It’s an ad labeling John McCain a nominee for “Best Conservative Actor.”
Because, see, he only acts like a conservative. Get it?
McCain’s response, according to Dan Nowicki’s blog:
“Ex-Congressman J.D. Hayworth should immediately apologize and and take down his latest online ad, which is an outrageous offense to John McCain’s lifetime of honorable service to our state and nation, and insulting to Native Americans here in Arizona and across America," said Shiree Verdone, McCain’s campaign manager. "Mr. Hayworth is welcome to debate the challenges facing our state and nation, but this kind of character assassination has no place in the Republican Party, and Mr. Hayworth should ashamed of his campaign for running it.”
Now, if anything the ad would be insulting only to Pandorans, right? For McCain, though, the association would doubly sting, because Pandorans are the ultimate tree-huggers.
Anway, the ad also exposes how difficult it is to support the bozo-er of two bozos, running for the nominee of a group of backward as the Arizona Republican Party.
McCain’s problem isn’t that he’s a fake conservative. He’s a fake maverick, a fake moderate and a fake compromiser. The only reason he started departing from the GOP line was after he got caught in the Keating Five scandal, which is to say, after he got exposed as being a typical moralizing-on-the-outside, corrupt-on-the-inside Republican.
He went “mavericky” to distract attention from his crookedness.
New ad idea for J.D.: “For John Mccain, integrity is the real unobtanium!”
Nowicki also says that the Hayworth camp has fiddled with the ad to make it more Avataresque, here.
4:04 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
Hayworth announcing candidacy today
The former U.S. representative and quondam McCain-bashing radio host will formally start his campaign today, the Republic says:
Former Arizona Congressman J.D. Hayworth will announce his Republican Senate candidacy today, but his record as a fiscal conservative has been under assault by incumbent GOP Sen. John McCain for weeks.
In anticipation of Hayworth’s primary challenge from the right, McCain has been portraying Hayworth as one of the big-spending Republicans who, during President George W. Bush’s two terms, largely squandered the party’s reputation for fiscal discipline.
The Republic doesn’t bother to tell people when or where Hayworth is making the announcement. For that, you have to go to Hayworth’s web site, which says he’ll be officially starting the race five times across the state today and five more tomorrow.
2:37 PM
J.D. Hayworth in the NYT
The anticipated challenger to John McCain’s Republican senatorial renomination this year gets a front-page profile ‘n’ pic in the paper of record today:
PHOENIX — J. D. Hayworth is a large man, and to compensate for his indulgences, he hits the elliptical trainer every morning at 4, zipping along to an incongruous soundtrack of Elvis Costello, Frank Sinatra and old advertising jingles.
The story, while noting McCain has support in the state, sums up his recently philosophical somersaults thusly:
Mr. McCain now finds himself jammed, moving starkly — and often awkwardly — to the right, apparently in an effort to gain favor among the same voters whom Mr. Hayworth, a consistent voice for the far right, could pull toward him like taffy come summer.
Mr. McCain now sharply criticizes the bailout bill he voted for, pivoted from his earlier position that the Guantánamo Bay detention facility should be closed, offered only a muted response to the Supreme Court’s decision undoing campaign finance laws and backed down from statements that gays in the military would be O.K. by him if the military brass were on board.
The story also notes that Hayworth himself is no prize:
Mr. Hayworth, a former sportscaster who rode the 1994 wave of conservatism into Congress, where he then served six terms, has political baggage. He was a very large recipient of both money and largess — like sports skyboxes — from the disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. His loss to Harry E. Mitchell, a Democrat, in his 2006 re-election bid was humiliating, and underscored voter distaste for some of his more boisterous ways.
In interviews with roughly 20 Republican voters in Scottsdale and the conservative city of Gilbert, not a Hayworth supporter could be found.
6:54 PM
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
J.D. Hayworth on 'Hardball'
Hayworth comes off like a genial lunatic under Matthews’ grilling, among other things still trying to make hay about Barack Obama’s birth certificate.
He says he’s he’s “99 and 44 one-hundredths percent certain” he’ll be on the ballot in the August Republican primary. In answer to Matthews’ direct question whether he’s running, Hayworth says, “Oh, yes, we’re moving forward.” Making a reference to Arizona’s awkward election law, he dissembles and then says, “Let me say we’re in the process of filing the documents.”
5:31 PM
J.D. Hayworth to be on 'Hardball' today
The conservative talk-show host has quit his show but not formally announced a challenge against John McCain. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews has been promoting his appearance this afternoon, but it seems a stretch to think Hayworth would use the liberal network as an announcement platform.
Here’s Matthews’ segment on McCain from yesterday:
8:44 PM
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
John and Cindy's very continental relationship
Little noticed in all of the Hillary Clinton-Sarah Palin-Harry Reid hullabaloo surrounding the publication of the book Game Change are some tidbits about John McCain’s home life.
The book is the story of the 2008 presidential campaign, done via a raft of off-the-record interviews by reporters Mark Halperin and John Heilemann. (It lacks notes, too, reviewers say.)
Here’s a passage from the review of the book in today’s NYT that probably has the McCains’ neighbors at 24th and Camelback talking:
Mr. Halperin and Mr. Heilemann write, for instance, that the strategist John Weaver suspected the rumor Cindy McCain had a “long-term boyfriend” in Arizona “was rooted in truth,” and that the McCains “fought in front of others, during small meetings and before large events, to the amazement and discomfort of the staff.” The authors say that Mrs. McCain accused the senator of ruining her life, that she never wanted him to run again for president, and that “when it came time to film campaign videos of the couple, the camera crews had to roll for hours to capture a few minutes of warmth.”
10:57 PM
Janet Napolitano's image is taking hits
So says Politico. Leaving aside the Republican carping after the foiled Christmas Day terrorist attack, others are questioning her oversight:
who closely watch policy developments at DHS say they’re still waiting for real action from the new leader.“The agency seems to be on autopilot, pretty much following the ideas of the previous team (to the extent they had any). Even simple steps, like getting rid of the idiotic color code or ending DHS’s silly double clearance for new hires have eluded the new secretary,” said James Lewis, senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who said he dismisses the partisan attacks on Napolitano.
“It’s no secret that DHS has problems. There needs to be visible progress towards fixing them, and we haven’t seen any,” he said. “The lack of fresh thinking worries me. She needs to reset the agency, not just accept the inheritance and make it work smoothly.”
As for the Republicans, the lowest hit of all came from John Kyl and John McCain:
Republican critics, who already had Napolitano in their sights, spared no words in criticizing her — and show no inclination to stop.
One of them was her home-state senator, Republican Jon Kyl, who told reporters in Arizona that he no longer feels “totally safe” with his former governor at the helm of the Department of Homeland Security. Kyl was flanked at the Phoenix news conference by fellow Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain.
On the other hand she gets a sympathetic portrait from Maureen Dowd in the NYT this a.m.:
Janet Napolitano and I hadn’t planned to spend New Year’s Eve together.
But there we were on this soggy Thursday, sitting in her office on the outskirts of the city, beside a big, black leather saddle that was a gift from the governor of Sonora, Mexico, when Napolitano was governor of Arizona.
I was working on the last night of the decennium horribile dictu, so I had tried to think of who else might also be burning the midnight oil instead of clinking the midnight bubbly.
The answer was obvious.
7:00 AM
The McCain push poll
A push poll is essentially a survey conducted by a pollster trying to get a fore-ordained conclusion. You do it by including disparaging information about one candidate in the questions. The process works for you in two ways: You can good poll numbers to crow about, and you’ve spread negative information about your opponent.
Last month, you’ll recall, a poll from Rasmussen, an established pollster, had John McCain and J.D. Hayworth running within a few points of each other in a potential matchup for the Republican senatorial primary next year.
The McCain organization, horrified at those numbers hanging over him, no doubt commissioned a more friendly poll, from a right-wing group called Tarrance, to combat it.
In the Republic the other day, Dan Nowicki did a story about it. Unsurprisingly, it showed McCain with a 20-point lede over a potential Hayworth challenge.
While Nowicki made it clear at the top it was a Republican poll, the hedline didn’t (in the print edition), and you had to read to the end of the article before you found out that the poll did smear Heyworth in the questions.
The pollster’s line is that McCain was winning before the questioners started disparaging Hayworth.
Still, I think the story should have led with the fact that it was a push poll. And Nowicki should have asked the pollster who specifically paid for it.
That said, he also didn’t report what to me was a big difference between the two polls. The Rasmussen one was a “robo poll” that questioned about 600 Arizonans via automated calling. The Tarrance one asked the same number by a live person over the phone. The latter is the superior process.
7:00 AM
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
McCain dinged for robocalls
PHXated likes Dan Nowicki, the Republic’s political columnist, but thinks a note today on criticism against John McCain was incomplete.
A DC group called Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has filed an ethics carge against him for doing some recorded telephone campaigning against the health care bill. Wrote Nowicki:
CREW argues that the robocalls, paid for by the National Republican Senatorial Committee, violate a Senate rule.
McCain dismissed CREW as “a far-left group” and said the complaint is meritless.
“They might have a beef if I paid for it with Senate money or official money, but that was a political issue paid for with political contributions,” McCain said. “It isn’t any more complicated than that.”
a) “Violated a Senate rule” explains nothing. More on that in a minute. b) CREW isn’t a far-left group. It’s nonpartisan and fairly fearless. It’s a typical cheap shot from McCain that should have been put into context. c) McCain’s next comment—"they might have a beef if I paid for it with Senate money"—is exactly backward, which is why the bland description of CREW’s complaint didn’t help.
The issue is that it was outside money. Under Senate rules, he’s not supposed to be using lobbying money to, essentially, do his job, which is be a politician. That’s what the CREW complaint is about, which you can read here.
I don’t care one way or the other about the complaint itself; but the Republic should have explained the matter more fully.
7:00 AM
538.com on John McCain's 2010 senate race
Nate Silver’s clear-thinking analysis of the possibility of party flips in next year’s senate races sees things as pretty balanced right now: Eight Republicans and seven Dems in the fifteen races most likely to see a party switch.
The possible re-election of Arizona’s senior senator comes far down on his list, number 23 out of 38 races. (There’s more than 33 or 34 because of vacancies.) Here’s what Silver says about the race; the down red arrow means the chance of a party flip has decreased in the past month:
23.
Arizona (R-McCain) — Finally some polling numbers out; PPP shows him with somewhat tepid approval numbers, but doesn’t show any of the potential Democratic candidates coming particularly close — certainly not close enough to get anyone like Gabby Giffords interested in a kamikaze mission. Still, McCain has been very quiet, and it might be wise to hedge some against the possibility of a last-minute retirement.
12:47 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