John McCain

Presumptive Republican presidential candidate John McCain's hand-picked choice for convention manager, Doug Goodyear, resigned after Newsweek ran a story about his lobbying work and involvement in 527 groups in 2004 that were fined for improprieties.

McCain has denounced 527 groups as recently as this past February.

Goodyear, CEO of the DCI group, a consulting firm that lobbies for ExxonMobil, General Motors and the military junta that runs that great democracy Burma, said in a brief statement, "Today I offered the convention my resignation so as not to become a distraction in this campaign. I continue to strongly support John McCain for president, and wish him the best of luck in this campaign".

Astonishingly, the McCain campaign's first choice, Paul Manafort, was nixed due to HIS lobbying efforts for foreign heads of state that included Ferdinand Marcos and personal relationship with Russia's Vladmir Putin. The campaign was concerned about the appearance of McCain being to closely tied to Washington lobbyists.

Does John McCain NOT have anyone close to him that ISN'T a lobbyist? Does his staff need introductory courses on how to vet people? I'm sure they'll run and take my advice, but they might just want to expand their circle of influence before he starts getting called on this stuff in earnest.

Carly Fiorina, whose term as CEO of HP was an absolute disaster, is now speaking up for John McCain. GOPers must be hoping that she doesn't apply any of her management magic to her stump for McCain routine. But hope fails, and Carly starts by emphasizing that McCain is not Bush, by emphasizing that McCain is not a conservative!

Kyle Kutuchief's comments from the Point:

As this campaign plays out, it is going to be difficult for John McCain to energize a Republican base while trying to be the maverick moderate. ABC's This Week had McCain surrogate Carly Fiorina as the guest this morning. She began the interview by saying, "I've heard a lot that John McCain is a third Bush term. Nothing could be further from the truth. It was John McCain after all who spoke loudly for four long years saying that Don Rumsfeld was the worst Secretary of Defense in history, that the prosecution of the War in Iraq was going badly, and we are now executing a new strategy because of John McCain. John McCain has differed with George Bush on global warming, climate change, on how we should deal with high fuel prices right now saying that we should stop the fill of the strategic oil reserve for example."

It is remarkable to see the Republican nominee for president already sending surrogates out to trash the Bush Administration record on the Sunday morning shows. Carly Fiorina was armed with talking points to distance Senator McCain from our unpopular president. President Bush's approval ratings have been around 30% for a long time. That 30% wants President Bush to have a third term. How is that 30% going to respond to Senator John McCain constantly bad mouthing President Bush's record? At some point, McCain is going to have do something for that 30% because he needs that support. Changing his position on abortion appears to be his first overture to the base.

The Wall Street Journal's Real Time Economics blog reports today on economists who responded to the question: "Which of the three remaining presidential candidates offers the most responsible fiscal policy proposals in your view?"

The question was part of the Journal's latest economic forecasting survey. About half of the survey participants elected not to answer with a candidate preference. Of those who answered, 75% selected John McCain. The depressing reasoning? "His [policies] are the least horrible," according to James F. Smith of Western Carolina University.

Arianna Huffington has been vindicated. Last week on her site, she recounted how--at a Hollywood dinner party at the home of Candice Bergen--John McCain and his wife Cindy boasted that they hadn't voted for George W. Bush back in 2000.

McCain denied Arianna's account via a spokesperson, who said, "consider the source." Well, The New York Times and The Washington Post went out and found a couple of sources of their own--People who were also sitting near the McCains, and heard the remarks.

From the Post:

In separate phone interviews, Bradley Whitford and Richard Schiff--both of whom starred in the television political drama "The West Wing"--said the senator made the remarks after he spoke at length about his reservations about Bush becoming president.

Now that is rich. The McCains rubbing elbows with the Hollywood elite, and holding forth on their dislike of Bush. There's a little "red-meat" for conservatives to chew on.

I guess we should all consider the source whenever McCain fires up the Straight-Talk Express.

Humor break, of sorts.



That's just a about the strangest political ad I've ever seen. The '50's "Leave it to Beaver" soundtrack. The weird editing, the 27 bottles of scotch. It's an instant classic, no?

While yet divided in its Democratic loyalties, organized labor has turned its attention away from Democratic endorsements and begun to focus on GOP opposition. The AFL-CIO is sending 6,000+ agents to 22 states over the next two weekends, hoping to inform 200,000 unionists of the evils of McCain. The Service Employees International Union is running ads critical of McCain's health care plan.

This shift in focus coincides with increased pressure from the Labor Department for greater transparency in union finances. On Monday, Labor will publish proposed changes to union disclosure forms in the Federal Register. Such measures reflect an effort to force labor unions to reveal more details of their internal finances.

It seems that McCain's honesty in Youngstown, Ohio will go unrewarded by the Unionists whose greed has largely impoverished that area. Their eyes hazed with fanatical obsession, union leaders will once again prostrate themselves in delusional frenzy before Democratic promises to reanimate the corpse of American steel. Far from speaking truth to power, the lecherous Democratic-unionist cabal forecasts only continued blight in the downtrodden urban centers in which it will most likely gain its most fervent - if misguided - support.

Jon Stewart has a suggestion for McCain for the VP pick:

In North Carolina, John McCain blasted federal judges who "pronounce and rule on matters that were never intended to be heard in courts." He touched on eminent domain but for the most part the speech was pretty vague. Of course, conservative Christians are listening for the subtext, which came through loud and clear. While the words "abortion," "Roe," 'versus" and "Wade" never crossed McCain's lips, that's exactly what he was talking about. McCain is reaching out to the religious right, a group that regards him with suspicion but which is likely key to his election in November. And with a speech like this one, outlining what kinds of judges he will appoint as president, he's speaking their language:

"My nominees will understand that there are clear limits to the scope of judicial power, and clear limits to the scope of federal power," McCain said Tuesday in a speech at Wake Forest University.

McCain, the Republican presidential nominee-in-waiting, promised to appoint judges who, in the mold of Chief Justice John Roberts and Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, he says would interpret the law strictly to curb the scope of their rulings.

Translation: my nominees will work to limit Roe v. Wade. For the most part, McCain has a record on abortion that is pleasing to Christian conservatives. It's one of the few issues where that's the case so it'll be interesting to see how often we hear him use the loaded term "activist judges" going forward.

Who did John and Cindy McCain vote for in 2000? Arianna Huffington says it wasn't George Bush:

Original Post: At a dinner party in Los Angeles not long after the 2000 election, I was talking to a man and his wife, both prominent Republicans. The conversation soon turned to the new president. "I didn't vote for George Bush" the man confessed. "I didn't either," his wife added. Their names: John and Cindy McCain (Cindy told me she had cast a write-in vote for her husband).

The fact that this man was so angry at what George Bush had done to him, and at what Bush represented for their party, that he did not even vote for him in 2000 shows just how far he has fallen since then in his hunger for the presidency. By abandoning his core principles and embracing Bush -- both literally and metaphorically -- he has morphed into an older and crankier version of the man he couldn't stomach voting for in 2000.

As you might expect, this prompted some, er, reaction from the McCain campaign:

Asked why Huffington would make up her story about McCain not voting for Bush, longtime McCain aide Mark Salter - who has previously tangled with the Huffington Post - ripped into her. "Why would she make something up? Because she's a flake, and a poser, and an attention seeking diva. And that's on the record."

Mark Steyn at NR reminds us that McCain was the keynote speaker at Arianna's 2000 shadow convention. It seems they are not as friendly as they once were.

About the vote, yeah it's probably true. Passive aggressive voting is entirely in line with what we know about John McCains character and temper.

The following definitions come to us from the Oxford English Dictionary:

pander v.
1. trans. To act as a pander to: to minister to the gratification of (another's lust).
2. To lay the pander, to sub-serve or minister to base passions, tendencies, or designs.

For another dimension of just what it means to "pander," we might also consult a thesaurus and look up the word "politics." Yes, political campaigns are, by definition, all about ministering to the gratification of another's lusts. Paid political consultants are hired to locate our basest desires, so that each candidate can exploit them. It sometimes seems as though the electorate is just one big focus group; A mountain of statistical clay from which each candidate will interpret and repackage so as to formulate his or her road-map leading to higher office. We are sliced and diced. Weighed and measured. Used and often discarded. Yes, we know perfectly well what pandering is.

This year's presidential candidates were not the first to pander, nor will they be the last. But there have been some classic moments in Pander-Fest '08. Here, then, a brief round-up.

John McCain, like other GOP hopefuls, executed a dizzying display of pandering to the Religious Right at the start of the campaign. Knowing that he couldn't win the nomination without the support of at least a portion of those he once termed "agents of intolerance" he set about courting the votes of the likes of Jerry Falwell, Pat Roberston and John Hagee. These ministers three have all, as Frank Rich detailed in Sunday's NY Times, each repeatedly made remarks glaringly similar to those of Jeremiah Wright. If it is conspiratorial to say that the US prompted 9/11 with what Wright sees as our own "terrorist" foreign policy, then surely it is equally dubious to claim that God was punishing New York on 9/11 and New Orleans with Hurricane Katrina for those two cities' permissiveness toward homosexuality. McCain has refused to renounce the support offered him by Hagee, recently saying he was proud to have Hagee's endorsement.