John McCain is now facing a tough primary challenge from a hard Right conservative, and in a desperate attempt to keep his senate seat he has chosen to abandon his signature slogan from his 2008 campaign, now he’s making the incredible claim that he never considered himself to be a maverick!
McCain must think Arizona voters are awfully stupid. If I were interviewing him, I’d ask him the classic question that Jack McCoy of Law and Order once asked to a witness: Were you lying then, or are you lying now?
He’s lying now, because now he’s the Mavericky Washington Outsider that Arizona needs. Back then he was just another politician trying to fight the system from the inside. He fell from grace because blah blah blah POW!
It say something - though I’m not sure what - about politics in the U.S. these days when a sitting Senator who was his party’s Presidential candidate only two years before is fighting for his political life. Or maybe it just says something about Arizona.
Hell, McGovern got reelected only two years after he was crushed.
McCain was the default candidate. There was almost no chance of the pubs getting anything but hammered, so those who still had a chance in '12 and beyond didn’t want to be the ones to take the beating.
He was the default candidate and ran a pathetic campaign. Nobody actually WANTED him, they all just settled for him.
And now he’s a loser. Worse, he’s a loser who has amply (and poorly) demonstrated that he will say and do anything to move up - or in the case stay steady. People have a shitty attention span, but even casual political followers are starting to wonder how the old man has managed to avoid whiplash.
As Tina Brown said: “It’s like the Hanoi Hilton in reverse: He held out under physical torture, but under political torture it seems he’ll say and do just about anything.”
McCain was a throw away candidate that despite himself still ran a somewhat close race. Unfortunately, he had spurned too many on the right to recover any kind of party excitement. He experimented by adding Palin to the ticket, which despite all her faults did add a little spark to his candidacy, but he was doomed from the start.
He’s a washed up has been - good riddance…I just wish I lived in AZ so I could vote against him.
For all the bad things that can be said about simplly lying, at least it promotes a world view that is consistent with itself. When you can’t even keep your own story straight, you’ve sunken to a new low.
Anyway since the politics of this are obvious, the inevitable question is whether he ever specifically called himself a maverick. Wikipedia says he often referred to himself that way but none of the cites show him using the word to describe himself, instead they mention how often it was used to describe him.
