I applied to do a fellowship in Congress and I was accepted to be a legislative fellow, so I go to work on the personal staff of a senator. I got very lucky and got to work in the office of Senator John McCain, and it was a yearlong program.
Every time I nostalgically try to regain my liking of John McCain, he reaches into his sleaze bag and pulls out something malodorous.
You’re never going to hear me say, ‘Well, I’ve been critical of Obama five times, so now I need to be critical of McCain five times.’ That is a false equivalence, and that’s what I think is wrong with journalism.
I am certain that the United States next year, under a new president – regardless whether it’s Obama or McCain – will present an ambitious program promoting renewable energies and energy efficiency. Europe could quickly fall behind.
John McCain knows as well as anyone that Sarah Palin has no business being anywhere near the Oval Office. I’m sorry, it’s got nothing to do with the fact that she wears skirts – she’s grossly unqualified.
The John McCain tactic of praising Obama as a great American and great senator ‘with whom I disagree’ is a loser. You’ve got to call him out as what he is – a fraud and a disaster.
Donald Trump called for the closing of borders to Muslims; John McCain said, in response to the President’s address on the San Bernardino shooting, that ‘this is the war of our time.’ As that shooting shows, we react to terrorism with far more intensity than we do to an ordinary crime.
If there was one senator who could truly empathize with being tortured in prison, it was John McCain.
One of the last books I read was ‘Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime’ by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin. It gives a really good behind-the-scenes look at the campaigns. I didn’t ask the president how accurate it was. I wouldn’t ask him that.
Nobody was going to beat Barack Obama in 2008. That’s a fact. It was his moment. It wasn’t that John McCain ran a bad campaign, or picked the wrong VP. It was just that it didn’t matter, it was over when it started.
There’s a lot of surplus rage from the ’60s that was never really worked through publicly. I think a lot of that rage still exists, and I think you see that when John McCain runs a commercial that beats up on Hillary Clinton’s earmark for a Woodstock museum.
I’m very disappointed with the McCain campaign. In my opinion, it was inept.
John McCain was one of the senators who voted against George Herbert Walker Bush’s disastrous break of his no new taxes pledge when he raised taxes in 1990. That’s really important. He’s a supply-sider. And he’s got supply siders like Phil Graham and Jack Kemp to vouch for that.
Experience is a legitimate issue when John McCain raises it about Obama, and it’s also legitimate for us to raise it about Palin.
The math of durability in McCain’s life is extraordinary.
John Sidney McCain III was as complex as they come.
In ’08, Barrack Obama was famously elected president. Even though I’d supported McCain and dreaded what I feared Barrack might do, I felt a surge of elation when the networks announced he’d won. I really hadn’t thought the U.S. would go for an African-American for a decade or so.
When I was sworn in, we had Republican-sponsored climate-change bills all over the place. You had John McCain running for President in 2008 on a strong climate platform. You could see American democracy actually starting to work at solving a difficult problem.
When the news broke that John McCain had been diagnosed with brain cancer, the outpouring of well wishes all hailed his toughness.
I so respect Sen. McCain’s service to this country, and no one certainly knows more about torture than he does, and so I recognize that.
I read ‘Game Change.’ If you want to relive the campaign, that book is unbelievable. It’s great. It’s the book of that campaign. It brought all the memories back of everything with Clinton and Obama, and Sarah Palin and McCain, and choosing her, and John Edwards. It was an interesting book.
It always seemed to me ironic that the McCain campaign kept referring sneeringly to Obama’s meager resume – ‘a mere community organizer!’ – before he entered electoral politics. It was Obama’s experience as a community organizer that proved such a killer app when he applied that skill to the Internet.
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