John mccain songbird series#
John mccain songbird free#

You were not to be president, but you are my hero. As I write this, there are tears on my cheeks. Driving and walking among its red-rock hills, I reflected for hours on the man who had so often spoken of that beautiful place, and who so often had been my antidote to cynicism. 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.”

John McCain (R-Ariz.) by regurgitating an.

John mccain songbird series#

McCain has, in achievement, equaled or surpassed his mentors and models, Barry Goldwater and Mo Udall. Beginning in August 2017 and well into the fall, a series of pro-Trump fake news web sites took aim at the reputation of Trump administration critic Sen. 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. 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 McCarthy, D-Minn., inspired 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.

Veteran Dispatch had an article in June of 1996 entitled 'POW Songbird McCain Wrongly Described As A Hero.' It recounted numerous instances where John McCain violated the Military Coda of Conduct, which specifically. What is the real story behind his days as a POW The U.S. 11, 2001, I know he would have done great things with the national unity Bush ultimately squandered. John McCain is, and as such, his character can and should be examined. 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.