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":http://www.cnn.com/2010/POLITICS/01/28/obama.dadt.react/?hpt=Sbin:
“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