Why Did McCain Sell Out?

Today you can easily find John McCain out working on behalf of the George W. Bush reelection campaign. What few remember, however, are the dirty tricks Bush used to beat McCain for the presidential nomination in 2000 - and how mad McCain was about it all. So why did he sell out to support Bush now?

Ed Brayton writes:

Karl Rove, Bush's campaign manager and political adviser, is famous in political circles as the master of "push polling". Push polling is a tactic for getting false and negative information out to potential voters without actually saying that the information is true. Here's how it worked against John McCain. After McCain's surprising defeat of Bush in the New Hampshire primary in 2000, the Bush campaign targeted South Carolina, the next big primary, and began calling voters, particularly elderly voters, to ostensibly take a poll. But rather than asking how they felt about an issue, they asked this question: "Would you be more or less likely to vote for John McCain if you knew that he had fathered a bi-racial child?". Now, they didn't actually say that he DID father a bi-racial child. But at campaign stops, you could see McCain and his wife Cindy with their dark-skinned daughter, Bridget. They adopted Bridget from an orphanage in Bangladesh. This is how you play dirty politics, folks. You plant seeds that push buttons, all with plausible deniability. But it's vile as hell.

It didn't stop there. They also put out "anonymous" pamphlets all over South Carolina telling people that McCain's wife had a history of drug addiction (she apparently was addicted to prescription pain killers at one point). Again, plausible deniability while spreading vicious rumors to kill one's political opponents. For a full report on the smear campaign, go here. Even worse is Bush's association with Ted Sampley, the absolutely loathsome former green beret and POW/MIA pimp who has claimed that John McCain is a traitor and even a communist spy that the Soviets had turned into a "Manchurian candidate". He's the same guy behind the attacks on John Kerry now, by the way.

Ed speculates the McCain might have sold out in the expectation of getting a position in Bush’s second administration — a post that would allow him to do some good and mitigate Bush’s rampant incompetence. If so, it’s fool‘s gamble. I mean, it’s not as though Colin Powell has managed to achieve much, is it? Then again, perhaps he has — which would mean that the Bush administration is even worse than people imagine.

McCain is a staunch conservative, but he’s a principles conservative — he’s a conservative who can readily work with those he disagrees with. He doesn’t label such people traitors or evil. He does, however, show a willingness to work with such unprincipled conservatives.

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• 2004 Elections
• Election Polls
• George W. Bush
• John Kerry
• War on Terrorism