This is embarrassing.....at a time, when this poor excuse for a senator should be retiring, he is spending $20+ million on his campaign while selling his soul. Its time for age limits on Congress.
McCain pays heavy price for reelection
By DAVID CATANESE | 8/22/10 7:11 AM EDT
John McCain holds a comfortable lead in the contentious Arizona Republican Senate primary, according to the most recent public polling, making him the strong favorite against former Rep. J.D. Hayworth on Tuesday.
But it’s been a costly road to a fifth 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.
Once the sponsor of comprehensive immigration reform with the late Sen. Ted Kennedy — a stance that hurt him with conservatives — McCain moved in a different direction this year. He switched his emphasis this summer to border security, embraced Arizona’s controversial hard-line immigration law and, in an ad, called on the federal government to “complete the danged fence” — three years after dismissing the notion of a border fence in a Vanity Fair article titled “Prisoner of Conscience.”
Four years ago, McCain also told students he supported repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that bans gays from serving openly in the military. But in May, the former war hero and Navy prisoner of war promised to filibuster any bill including that change that landed on the Senate floor.
He sidestepped the climate change debate this year despite once being a Senate leader on the issue and he’s even distanced himself from the term that once seemed central to his political brand — his “maverick” trademark.
Hayworth, the primary election opponent McCain has spent a small fortune pummeling as inept, corrupt and even stupid, has seized on the apparent contradictions.
“Mr. campaign finance reform ... the guy who used to lecture us about the evils of money ... thinks he’s going to buy off Arizona,” Hayworth told POLITICO. “Maybe it’ll work. Hey, they spent $20 million.”
Former advisers to McCain, who declined an interview for this story through a spokesman, were wary of publicly offering their thoughts on how this smashmouth primary campaign — potentially the last for the 73-year–old senator — has changed the former captain of the "Straight Talk Express.”
Read more:
politico.com |
