#JOHN MCCAIN SONGBIRD FREE#
#JOHN MCCAIN SONGBIRD MAC#

In Phoenix for a wedding last weekend, I made a pilgrimage north, past the turnoff for Prescott and on to McCain's beloved Sedona. Again invoking Udall and Goldwater, McCain retold Udall's joke about Arizona being 'the only state where mothers don't tell their children they can grow up to be president.' I was with McCain when he returned to Prescott for his last stop of that campaign. Formally launching his 2008 campaign in Prescott, Arizona, where both men had roots, McCain invoked the friendship of these ideological opposites, who 'taught me to believe that we are Americans first and partisans second.' McCain has, in achievement, equaled or surpassed his mentors and models, Barry Goldwater and Mo Udall. He's a decent family man, citizen, that I just happen to have disagreements with.' In his forthcoming book, he labels 'unpatriotic' the 'half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems.' His single bravest moment may have been earlier, though, when he angered supporters in 2008 by taking the microphone from a woman at a campaign rally who had called Barack Obama an 'Arab.' Said he: 'No, ma'am.

#JOHN MCCAIN SONGBIRD MAC#

There have been many such moments of disagreement and disappointment: when he put Sarah Palin on his ticket in 2008 when he took a hard-right turn in 2010 to fight off a primary challenge and when another tough primary in 2016 led him to go easy on Trump.īut the Mac always came back, and never more forcefully than over the past 16 months. Pulitzer.' I took pride in 2009, when McCain read aloud a column of mine on the Senate floor and called me 'one of my favorite columnists.' He regretted that a few months later, when I took him to task for momentarily shedding his 'maverick' ways, and he tried to disavow me. When I saw him later in the Senate, I'd greet him as 'Mr. On my Bush-Gore election ballot, I wrote in McCain. Eugene McCarthyinspired his 'Clean for Gene ' followers, McCain inspired me.

#JOHN MCCAIN SONGBIRD FREE#

I believed, perhaps naively, that in the free marketplace of ideas, uncorrupted by special interests, we would usually arrive at a sensible consensus. That's why so many liked him even if they disagreed on the issues: With McCain, everything was going to be on the level. I remember flying with him and Cindy McCain to Phoenix during the 2000 campaign, talking about sports, music, a war buddy - and the issue that defined him: removing the corrupting influence of money from politics. I've had a closer relationship with McCain than with other politicians. 11, 2001, I know he would have done great things with the national unity Bush ultimately squandered.

Bush (he surely would have defeated Al Gore), and had he been president on Sept. I first got to know him in early 1999, when there were just a few of us driving around New Hampshire with him in an SUV, before the 'Straight Talk Express' rolled. Only once during the nearly quarter of a century I've been covering politics did I think I could work for a politician, and that politician was McCain.

John mccain songbird