The image of the old Senator John McCain has now left the building. Granted, the Senate race between Democratic Senator Barbara Boxer and Republican Carly Fiorina has been fierce, with Fiorina steadily gaining in the polls with victory within her reach. But at an event here in San Diego McCain injected a new level of poison into it – a toxicity suggestiong that now that the Republicans will be in control in Congress again he has decided to let ‘er rip:
Former Republican presidential contender John McCain reunited with his onetime adviser Carly Fiorina on the campaign trail Saturday in San Diego, offering a blistering indictment of Barbara Boxer’s record on military issues and calling her the “most bitterly partisan, most anti-defense senator in the United States Senate today” — an assessment he said he’d made while having “the unpleasant experience” of serving with her.
“When you hear her say that she supports the men and women in the military, my friends, she does not,” said McCain, a former Navy pilot who was held as a prisoner of war in Vietnam for five and half years after his plane was shot down in 1967. “Because she has never supported the mission; she has never supported victory whether it be in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or anywhere else in the world. Barbara Boxer wants to wave the white flag of surrender and endanger this nation’s national security. It’s time she went back to San Francisco with [House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi.”
Boxer has, in fact, been one of the most reliably, predictably anti-war Senators (she has also often run races against opponents who were not the strongest). But that is different from both the tone of this attack and saying she wants to wave the flag of surrender or endanger the nation’s security. Two things may be at play here: (1)McCain does believe it and his positions conflict with her, and, (2) being in the center, or appearing moderate doesn’t have much benefit this year with the general electorate ready to usher in many Tea Party candidates and conservatives. So it sounds like he’s figuring there’s no need to mince his words one bit.
The quote signifies that the John McCain of the primary season wasn’t a mere adjustment. This is the tone we’ll see. THIS is the new McCain.
On the other hand, anger and rage now fuel politics and McCain was a kind of pioneer in that with his anger documentable in quotations from colleges and even in a shocking CSPAN video. GO HERE to Booman to read the quotes and see the video.
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.