John McCain

Double standards are endemic in American journalism. But Cindy McCain, wife of the Republican presidential candidate, displayed poor taste in flaunting her family’s special immunity from press scrutiny. Declaring on NBC’s Today that she would “never” release her income tax returns even if she becomes first lady, the Arizona beer heiress showed no concern that she and her husband will have to meet the same tests as other would-be White House occupants—ever.

Unfortunately, the arrogance of Mrs. McCain is probably well founded.  read more »

John McCain is having a major fund-raiser at New York's Sheraton hotel tonight with Rudy Giuliani that is expected to raise around $7 million or the candidate, a figure one of tonight's attendees and a major fund-raiser to the candidate admitted amounted to peanuts compared to what Barack Obama is capable of raising.

"How do you deal with that?" said the nationally influential fund-raiser.  read more »

With John McCain as their candidate, Republicans are making the best of a bad political situation. But even with his considerable personal appeal and maverick image, there are fresh signs that the country’s fatigue with the G.O.P. label will be too much even for Mr.  read more »

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the pandering Presidential politics of Clinton, McCain and Obama. McCain pandered on the gas tax and Hillary and Barack pandered on trade.  read more »

INDIANAPOLIS—Indiana’s Republican Party has its headquarters across the street from the office building where Obama held his press conference this morning, and where Obama supporters and campaign staff are still meeting and looking at charts of poll data.

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INDIANAPOLIS—In a question-and-answer session following his remarks about the gas tax holiday supported by Hillary Clinton and John McCain, Barack Obama acknowledged that the last week has been a bad one for his campaign, filled with what he said was “an awful lot of noise.”

When asked how upset he’d be if he lost in Indiana because of the controversy created by his former reverend, Jeremiah Wright, who he said he has not spoken with since the pastor’s poorly received media tour, he smiled and said, “I’m always mad when I lose.”

He seemed resigned to the damage done by the Wright story.

“We’ve had a rough couple of weeks, I won’t deny that,” Obama said when asked about how the controversy had hurt his chances in Indiana. He added, “I don’t think what happened with Reverend Wright was helpful,” that voters in the two states were “legitimately upset by it,” and that he didn’t doubt the controversy would be “factoring into the mix” of concerns weighed by voters.

“I have no doubt that these are going to be tight races—they have been tight throughout,” he added.  read more »

SOUTH BEND, Ind.—Barack Obama is doing his own listening tour in Indiana.

“What I want to do is spend more time listening than talking,” said Obama at a small event at the fairgrounds here, where he discussed farming policies, subsidies and crop-dumping with a few dozen voters sitting around on bales of hay. Obama reminded them that he could also draw a crowd, listing his major events over the last few days, before saying, “It’s wonderful to see these big crowds but the problem is you don’t really learn a lot when you are listening to yourself talk. “  read more »

In a poll just released by Quinnipiac University, Hillary Clinton is running ahead of John McCain in Pennsylvania, Florida and Ohio—three swing states that, according to electoral lore, are necessary to win the presidency.

The poll also shows McCain would beat Barack Obama in both Florida and Ohio:  read more »

A reader sent along a link to this newly launched site urging Barack Obama supporters to vote for John McCain if the superdelegates throw the Democratic nomination to Hillary Clinton.  read more »

Stop it! Stop asking me about Hillary’s pantsuits, or any other aspect of her personal style! If you persist, I swear to God I will stuff Mrs. Clinton into a Balenciaga bubble dress with matching gladiator spike-heeled boots, and then you’ll be sorry.

Every 20 minutes I get a jangling call from an earnest hack looking for quips about the fashion choices of the presidential candidates. These content generators are hell-bent on viewing the current political jousting match through the lens of la mode: What do I think of Hillary’s pink blouses?  read more »

While the Democratic contenders are locked in battle, John McCain is roaming the countryside.

First was the Bio Tour—a sort of “this is your life” venture revisiting his personal highlights. Then came the “It’s Time for Action” tour, which wended through places his campaign describes as “communities that have been forgotten and left behind.”

This has spawned a certain amount of head-scratching in Republican circles. Why the soft sell during a period when the Democrats are making it so hard to get attention? And why go to places that never vote Republican anyway?  read more »

PHILADELPHIA—Barack Obama’s final push through Pennsylvania has shown the combative, angry side of a candidate and campaign that had once been defined by its good cheer and condemnation of negative tactics.  read more »

John McCain has just released his tax returns from 2006 and 2007, years in which he declared considerably less income than his two Democratic opponents. A combination of senate salary, royalties from his books, social security and pension payments gave him $215,304 in 2006 and $258,800 in 2007. All of the royalties from McCain's books have gone to charity, totaling more than $1,800,000 since 1998.

Here's the release and links to his returns from the McCain campaign:  read more »

A Quinnipiac poll released this morning affirms, not particularly shockingly, that identity politics is alive and well in New York.

The survey of hypothetical general election match ups in the state found:  read more »

I don’t know why it still surprises me, but the political pandering of presidential politics continues to reach new and even lower levels. With bridges falling down, potholes unfilled and mass transit never mentioned, John McCain wants to suspend the 18.4-cent-a-gallon federal gas tax from Memorial Day until Labor Day this summer.

McCain’s idea of an economic stimulus is that we all get in our cars and take a ride. Why worry about global warming and collapsing infrastructure? Let’s all hit the road!

It may be painful to hear, but America’s gasoline tax is too low. It should pay for all the costs of road construction and maintenance and it doesn’t even come close to covering our needs.  read more »

John McCain clearly sees his foreign policy experience and his personal biography as his strong suits in a potential match-up against Barack Obama. But he should get a debriefing from Hillary Clinton before he makes these the centerpiece of his campaign.

She, after all, has been spectacularly unsuccessful in convincing voters that “experience” trumps “change.” What makes McCain think he can do any better?

Yes, McCain might be tempted to bet that he can make a more compelling case about experience than Clinton has. That unlike Clinton, he really has been at the center of national security issues for a generation.  read more »

THE REAL MCCAIN: WHY CONSERVATIVES DON'T TRUST HIM AND WHY INDEPENDENTS SHOULDN'T
By Cliff Schecter
PoliPoint Press, 187 pages, $14.95

FREE RIDE: JOHN MCCAIN AND THE MEDIA
By David Brock and Paul Waldman
Anchor, 240 pages, $14.95

The photograph on the cover of The Real McCain shows John McCain locked in an awkward embrace with George W. Bush at a campaign rally in 2004. It became, at one point, an icon for left- and very-left-of-center media outlets and blogs, a visual reminder of Mr. McCain’s literal embrace of a more neoconservative stance.

It has become since then a symbol of simplistic criticism leveled against the Republican presidential candidate.  read more »

It is hard to blame John McCain for mocking Barack Obama as an “elitist” following that silly remark about bitter folks who cling to guns and religion. Rarely does the Arizona senator—one of the wealthiest members of Washington’s most exclusive club—encounter such a tempting chance to masquerade as a populist.

Making the most of that opportunity, Mr. McCain, the elder statesman, delivered a brief history lecture to the young upstart from Illinois. “During the Great Depression,” he said in a statement released by his campaign, “with many millions of Americans out of work and the country suffering the worst economic crisis in our history, there rose from small towns, rural communities, inner cities, a generation of Americans who fought to save the world from despotism and mass murder, and came home to build the wealthiest, strongest and most generous nation on earth.  read more »

This year, Republicans have chosen to nominate for president a war hero and longtime senator with one losing White House bid under his belt. In 1996, the party put up a 73-year-old war hero and longtime senator who already had two failed White House campaigns to this name.

On this basis, it has become fashionable to compare John McCain to Bob Dole, the septuagenarian whose listless ’96 effort established the low-water mark for Republicans in the post-Goldwater era—159 electoral votes and 41 percent of the national popular vote.

Reflecting on Mr. McCain’s recent biography-themed campaign swing and a new ad, The Atlantic’s Ross Douthat wrote that the G.O.P. standard-bearer “pushes all my Dole-redux buttons.”  read more »

Michael Bloomberg, introducing John McCain before a speech in Bay Ridge on the economy, just said, "I got elected because of you."

John Turnbull, the owner of Windows We Are, Inc. in Bay Ridge, where John McCain is set to deliver a speech with an introduction by Michael Bloomberg, just told me he's a Democrat and voted for Al Gore in 2004 2000.

But being a Democrat in Bay Ridge is sort of like being a Republican on the Upper West Side.

When I asked if he thought Bloomberg would make a good vice presidential candidate, he smiled politely and said he didn't know.  read more »

In politics, what is accurate is not always fair and what is fair is not always accurate.

So it is that a deliberate distortion of a quotation from John McCain about Iraq—his supposed promise of a “100-year” war—may well sink his campaign in a way that the simple facts of his record and position should, but otherwise wouldn’t.  read more »

Niall Stanage sends this dispatch from the Irish American Presidential Forum in midtown, where Hillary Clinton is in attendance:

Hillary Clinton just reacted to the announcement from London that British prime minister Gordon Brown will not attend the opening of the Beijing Olympics. She said she "congratulated" Brown on what she termed "an important decision" and called on Barack Obama and John McCain to join her in urging President Bush to also boycott the ceremony.

WASHINGTON -- General David Petraeus, who is testifying in front of the Senate today, has read his remarks to the members of the Senate Armed Services Committee and Ambassador Ryan Crocker is addressing the senators. “Sustaining that progress will require continuing U.S. resolve and commitment,” he said, talking about progress he thinks the surge has provided in Iraq. He talked about the work that he says needs to be done in stabilizing Basra. He honored the troops.

Hillary Clinton, seated to the left of Petraeus and Crocker, has her black-rimmed 3 a.m.  read more »

Sort of like the idle Colin Powell rumors that swirled before the 1996 and 2000 Republican conventions, we’ve been forced this campaign cycle to endure months of sporadic chatter about Condoleezza Rice’s supposed candidacy for the number two spot on the G.O.P. ticket.

Except that the speculation may have just taken a twist that the Powell talk never did: There’s suddenly reason to believe there might be something to it.  read more »

Here's John McCain talking to the press on his campaign plane about why he voted against a national holiday in honor of Martin Luther King Jr.  read more »

John McCain may be a victim of his own success. His early, unwavering support of the military surge in Iraq ended up helping him win the nomination. And as the situation has become more stable over there, it has removed the war from the front pages here, diminishing what was suppose to be McCain's big liability.

As a result, though, voters now overwhelmingly see other issues, specifically the economy, as higher priorities for the presidential contenders. And that creates several real challenges for McCain.  read more »

 

In a conference call happening now, Mark Penn introduced what he called "the second in what has become known as the '3 a.m. call' advertisements."  read more »

Colorado-born Heidi Montag of MTV’s The Hills has made her long- awaited official endorsement in the 2008 presidential election. And it’s McCain!  read more »

The McCain campaign has finally figured out that the Arizona senator’s remarks on Iraq in New Hampshire in January--that it would be “fine” with him if America is there for “100 years”--need to be dealt with.  read more »

The most puzzling aspect of John McCain’s political persona is his habitual attraction to George W. Bush’s bad ideas. Their shared enthusiasm for invading Iraq and then escalating the war is why “McSame” will soon become the new shorthand for the Arizona Republican, replacing “maverick”—but that isn’t the only reason. He doesn’t just endorse the disastrous foreign policy initiatives; he loves the failed domestic policy schemes, too.

Specifically Mr.  read more »

 

Early this morning John McCain's campaign sent out a release heralding this T.V. spot as the "first ad of the general election" and announced that it will "run statewide in the important battleground state of New Mexico," although the release does not say when it will begin airing.  read more »

On the McCain campaign conference call this morning, which was almost as long as some of the Clinton calls have been, Doug Holtz-Eakin and Carly Fiorina said that the Democratic candidates “mischaracterize” John McCain’s position on the economy.

“To describe McCain’s position as ‘do-nothing’ and ‘stand back and watch,’” former Hewlett-Packard C.E.O. Fiorina said, “is politics of the worst sort.”  read more »

This just came in from the McCain campaign:

ARLINGTON, VA -- U.S. Senator John McCain's presidential campaign today announced that John McCain and Governor Mitt Romney will hold a media availability in Utah on Thursday, March 27th.

The release goes on to note that the event will be at 2 p.m. at the Million Air F.B.O. in Salt Lake City.

In some ways, Chuck Hagel’s dilemma mirrors the one that independent voters may find themselves confronting this fall.

On the one hand, Hagel harbors an enduring personal fondness for John McCain, his fellow Vietnam veteran and maverick Republican senator. “A good friend of mine—a dear friend, as a matter of fact” is how Hagel described McCain in an ABC News interview over the weekend.  read more »

Senator John McCain on the government's role in the unfolding foreclosure crisis:

"It is not the duty of government to bail out and reward those who act irresponsibly, whether they are big banks or small borrowers... Some Americans bought homes they couldn’t afford, betting that rising prices would make it easier to refinance later at more affordable rates.”

John McCain is in London to meet with Gordon Brown on Iraq (and hold a fund-raiser).  read more »

In theory, Wednesday’s fifth anniversary of the launch of the Iraq war should serve to reinforce the many reasons why the Republicans are doomed to lose the White House in 2008. The war already cost the party both houses of Congress less than 18 months ago, and even though a recent drop in violence has relaxed some of the urgency of their opposition, polls still find voters are against the war by a better than two-to-one margin.

And yet: John McCain is remarkably well positioned to overcome the war and just about every other liability that has so poisoned the Republican brand.  read more »

Barack Obama delivered yet another lengthy speech today, this one on Iraq and national security, this morning in Fayetteville, North Carolina. Here are his remarks--titled "The World Beyond Iraq"--as prepared for delivery:

Just before America’s entry into World War I, President Woodrow Wilson addressed Congress: “It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war,” he said. “...But the right is more precious than peace.” Wilson’s words captured two awesome responsibilities that test any Commander-in-Chief – to never hesitate to defend America, but to never go to war unless you must. War is sometimes necessary, but it has grave consequences, and the judgment to go to war can never be undone.  read more »

Even though he's in the Middle East, John McCain issued a statement on the case that the Supreme Court is debating today, District of Columbia v. Heller.  read more »

After beating the odds and capturing the Republican nomination, John McCain faces many challenges—raising money, staying in the headlines, calming the conservative base. But none is more daunting than the first major test of his executive skills: selecting a running mate.

In choosing a vice-presidential candidate, he’ll have to say “no thanks” to many well-meaning (but potentially disastrous) suggestions while staving off a new opportunity for mischief-making from his conservative foes.  read more »

Hillary Clinton criticized both John McCain and Barack Obama this morning in a speech to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the beginning of the war in Iraq.  read more »

 

This is kind of amazing.

 

Today is apparently the 35th anniversary of the day John McCain was released from a Vietnam P.O.W. camp, and his campaign has released this Web video in honor of the occasion.

Notably, he hints at the role of a manifest destiny in his ambitions, with the spot's last line echoing language used by the current president to describe his path to the White House.  read more »

 

Perhaps part of his new plan to "stay visible," John McCain's campaign just released this new Web ad, which combines vintage footage of Winston Churchill and Theodore Roosevelt with images of space, set to twinkly new-age music.

Facing attacks from a group of local veterans over his campaign's ties to Gloria Steinem, Democratic congressional candidate Steve Harrison is choosing to stand by the famed women's rights activist.

Steinem has endorsed and actively supported Harrison in his campaign to win a congressional seat representing parts of Brooklyn and Staten Island.

She was widely criticized last week for implying that John McCain’s experience as a prisoner of war is overrated. Steinem made the comments as she campaigned for Hillary Clinton, who she is also actively supporting. The Clinton campaign denounced her remarks.

In a letter dated March 5, a group of local veterans demand that Harrison not only denounce Steinem, but return the money he took in at a fund-raiser where she was on the host committee.

In response, Harrison released a public statement last night that that reads in part:

“I do not read her comments as disparaging Senator McCain or his military service. She only states that his service alone is not enough for him to lead the nation.

[skip]

I will not cast Ms. Steinem aside for exercising that right concerning Senator McCain's candidacy. After all, had Ms. Steinem not wielded free speech so deftly on behalf of women during the past four decades, it is likely that American woman would still be cast in the role of second class citizens. None of us should want that."

The veteran's letter and Harrison's full response after the jump.  read more »

In a conference call that ended moments ago, the Obama campaign explicitly went after Hillary Clinton for her claims of experience in crisis situations.

Susan Rice, a foreign policy adviser to Obama, mocked Clinton for her claim of having made a corkscrew landing into Bosnia under the threat of sniper fire, when, as Rice pointed out, she made the trip with Chelsea, Sheryl Crow and Sinbad.  read more »

After Barack Obama's foreign policy adviser Susan Rice said this morning that neither Democratic candidate was ready to answer a "3 a.m. call," it was only a matter of time before McCain's campaign responded.

But while Hillary Clinton recently complimented McCain's experience while denigrating Obama's, a statement by McCain communications director Jill Hazelbaker did not return the favor, saying "We agree wholeheartedly that neither Senator Clinton nor Senator Obama have the experience or judgment necessary to lead the United States."  read more »

From her Senate office comes Hillary Clinton's response to this morning's blast near the Times Square military recruiting office:

“I am deeply concerned by the detonation of a small bomb at the military recruiting office in Times Square.  read more »

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