Sen. John McCain was someone who I always respected, despite our ideological differences. He seemed like the kind of man who shared my goals for the country, but with a alternate game plan.
That ship has long sailed.
His quest for power and relevance, since he became the Republican Party's 2008 presidential nominee, has been embarrassing to watch.
In 2008, John "Country First" McCain panicked, and in an effort to win the presidency chose Alaska governor Sarah Palin, an unqualified, born-again fundamentalist, right-wing zealot as his running mate. Then his campaign hired Tucker Eskew, the South Carolina GOP strategist, to coach Palin. This is the same Tucker Eskew who John McCain once said had "a special place in hell" for his role in the 2000 race-baiting smear that had the Arizona senator fathering an illegitimate black child and eventually lost him the party's nomination to George W. Bush. A smear campaign which was, btw, engineered by Karl Rove, who McCain brought on as a campaign advisor in '08.
He then proceeded, as The New York Times stated in their endorsement of Barack Obama for president, to run "a campaign on partisan division, class warfare and even hints of racism. His policies and worldview are mired in the past. His choice of a running mate so evidently unfit for the office was a final act of opportunism and bad judgment that eclipsed the accomplishments of 26 years in Congress."
The man who for years prided himself on being bipartisan--earning the wrath of the hard right, who deemed him not conservative enough--has now, with a Tea Bagger hot on his trail looking to out seat him, once again begun pandering to the very folks who never believed in him in the first place. Add to that his hollow and unbecoming grandstanding, promising no further congressional Republican cooperation in the wake of the health care reform bill's passage, and the Grandpa Simpson stereotype starts to ring painfully true.
Sad and pitiful, indeed.
