Arizona Sen. John McCain’s blunt spoken daughter Meghan McCain gives us our political Quote of the Day in her response to the Tea Party convention — particularly former Rep Tom Tancredo’s remarks that a lot of the voters who voted for Barack Obama couldn’t spell the word “vote” or say it in English…and that it would have been worse if John McCain had won the election.
On Monday, Meghan McCain fired back.
“People were saying that this is the new movement in the Republican Party,” McCain said during an appearance on ‘The View.’ “I did not want to go [to last week’s convention]. I have (a) very much different, ideological differences with them.”
And she described Tancredo’s comments as “innate racism.”
“And I think it’s why young people are turned off by this movement. And I’m sorry [but] revolutions start with young people. Not with 65-year-old people talking about literacy tests and people who can’t say the word ‘vote’ in English. It’s ridiculous.”
Meghan McCain also decried the divisiveness and partisanship in American politics and the growing populist rage that has powered the Tea Party movement.
“Maya Angelou says we have more in common than we do apart,” she said. “We need to use this message in politics more.”
Meghan McCain added, “This rhetoric will continue to turn off young voters and anybody that says different is smoking something. Period.”
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.