Romney surrogate, John McCain, is getting all mavericky again.
Senator and Romney presidential campaign surrogate John McCain (R-AZ) said Thursday that casino magnate Sheldon Adelson is indirectly injecting millions of dollar in Chinese “foreign money” into Mitt Romney‘s presidential election effort.
“Much of Mr. Adelson’s casino profits that go to him come from his casino in Macau, which says that obviously, maybe in a roundabout way foreign money is coming into an American political campaign,” McCain said in an interview on PBS’s News Hour.
“That is a great deal of money, and we need a level playing field and we need to go back to the realization… that we have to have a limit on the flow of money and corporations are not people,” he said.
Adelson has said he may pump up to 100 million dollars into the Romney campaign. Now if Romney is elected he’s going to want something for that money and since Adelson is a real Israel first guy we can make an educated guess as to what that will be – more and bigger Middle East wars. That would be just fine with Romney’s neo-con foreign policy advisors.
McCain also took on Citizens United and the SCOTUS.
McCain’s comments came in the context of a rant against the unfettered private donations that are now flowing into the political arena due to the 2010 Supreme Court decision in the case Citizens United vs. the Federal Election Commission, which opened the doors to unlimited political spending by corporations and invalidated parts of the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform law.
McCain called the decision “the most misguided, naïve, uninformed, egregious decision of the United States Supreme Court in the 21st Century,” and money would be playing a dominant role in American politics for the foreseeable future.
“There will be scandals, there’s just too much money washing around Washington today… I’m afraid we’re for a very bleak period in American politics,” he said. “To somehow view money as not having a corrupting effect on elections flies in the face of reality.”
McCain is becoming Romney’s Bill Clinton. I do think he’s a bit off base with the foreign money claim however.