Using the political calculus of today, Sen. John McCain should be facing the political fight of his life.
Instead, the four-term incumbent holds a significant lead over his main opponent and appears to be breezing toward a big win in Arizona's Aug. 24 Republican primary. (Rasmussen poll released yeserday shows McCain up 54% to 34%)
The Arizona Republic newspaper recently summed up the trend, headlining that McCain held a “devastating” lead over his challenger, former GOP Rep. J.D. Hayworth. A July Rocky Mountain poll by the Phoenix-based Behavior Research Center showed McCain with a whopping 64 percent of the vote, compared with 19 percent for Hayworth.
At first, pundits thought the war hero and Arizona Republican would face a tough challenge from Hayworth, who became a Phoenix radio talk show host after losing his congressional seat in November 2006.
But McCain is one of the few Washington Republicans riding high on the tea party wave, and he probably will not suffer the fate of Utah Sen. Bob Bennett, who was ousted by grass-roots conservatives at the state's GOP convention in May.
According to McCain's supporters, he was a “tea partyer” long before the term became fashionable, having acted as a fiscal and deficit hawk in the Capitol for decades. For example, McCain is one of a mere handful of senators who has eschewed political-pork earmarks.
He also earned praise for being one of President Barack Obama’s fiercest critics from the earliest days of the new administration."I am proud of the leadership position I have taken fighting this administration," McCain said during a recent debate in Phoenix.
During his more than two decades in the Senate, McCain has not been a hard-line partisan. So his criticisms of Obama’s uncompromising ways are striking a nerve.
In a July New York magazine article, McCain expressed his frustration with Obama, saying: “This administration has decided to govern from the far left without any consultations or negotiations or any compromises to be made with the other party! You know how many times I’ve been asked to go over to the White House to negotiate on any issue? Zero. Zero."
During his first debate with Hayworth on July 16, McCain went on to recite a litany of ways he's fought to defeat the "change" agenda that carried Obama to victory two years ago. Hayworth had a sharp response."John, if you had told the truth about Barack Obama the way you're spreading falsehoods about me," he quipped, "you might be president of the United States right now."
But Hayworth’s invective against McCain hasn’t been gaining traction with Republican voters.
Hayworth has tried to present himself as the tea party candidate. But he experienced a serious setback in March, when Arizona's four largest grass-roots organizations — the Tucson Tea Party, the Greater Phoenix Tea Party, the Flagstaff Tea Party, and the Mohave County Tea Party — issued a joint statement that they would not be making any endorsement.
Meanwhile, Sarah Palin, one of the tea party’s de facto leaders, strongly endorsed McCain. In a joint campaign event in March, Palin declared the tea party phenomenon "a beautiful grass-roots movement that is putting government back on the side of the people . . . Everybody here today supporting John McCain, we're all part of that tea party movement."
1 comment:
The time has finally come where most voters are informed of JD's shady and less then conservative past. This information has led to a shift it a majority of votes and McCain is finally receiving the numbers he deserves. I am so tired of hearing the big blowhard JD speak, he is so ego hungry and has never acted as a respectable politician. Leave the job to the guys with a brain, politics is no place for a guy like JD.
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