JOHN MCCAIN’S FIRST MAJOR foreign policy speech as the presumed Republican nominee for president, delivered last week in Los Angeles, was widely viewed as an effort to distance himself from President George W. Bush. The Washington Post said his agenda “contrasts sharply” with the “go-it-alone approach” of the Bush administration. London’s Telegraph discerned a “more practical, less ideological approach” to the war on terror. Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh accused McCain of rejecting America’s superpower status and “pandering to the hate-America crowd.” New York Times columnist David Brooks claimed that unlike Bush, McCain wants to “protect the fabric of the international system.”
Read more here.
By MICHAEL LUO and GRIFF PALMER
Published: March 31, 2008
With attention focused on the Democrats’ infighting for the presidential nomination, Senator John McCain is pressing ahead to the general election but has yet to sign up one critical constituency: the big-money people who powered the Bush fund-raising machine.
Read the rest at NYTimes.com
When Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi talked about John McCain in January, he didn’t merely violate the GOP’s 11th commandment; he spat on it. Cochran, rejecting Ronald Reagan’s counsel not to speak ill of a fellow Republican, told the Boston Globe the idea of McCain as president “sends a cold chill down my spine. He is erratic. He is hotheaded. He loses his temper, and he worries me.” Cochran has clashed famously with McCain over appropriations. But infighting is not new for the man waiting to be crowned the GOP presidential nominee. For reasons of substance and style, during his 25 years in Congress, McCain has amassed a slew of enemies, but now, many are coming around—or lying low.
Read more here.
Summary: During an interview with Sen. Chuck Hagel, Charlie Rose falsely asserted that Sen. John McCain “early on call[ed] for the firing of Secretary Rumsfeld.” In fact, while McCain expressed “no confidence” in Rumsfeld in 2004, he did not call for him to be fired; he said the decision about whether Rumsfeld should leave was the president’s.
Read the commentary here.
I don’t see how anybody could deny that John McCain is a straight-talker. The country is terrified of economic collapse and he’s been sounding like Mr. Potter, the banker in “It’s a Wonderful Life.” You can’t get more forthright than that.
Read the rest of this opinion article here at NYT.
Sen. John McCain launched his first television ad of the general election yesterday — a 60-second commercial that links the candidate’s heroism during the Vietnam War with his call for Americans to “stay strong” and “never surrender” in Iraq, though the ad does not mention that war directly.
Read the rest at WashingtonPost.com
It remains to be seen whether John McCain will put ex-rival Mitt Romney’s financial know-how to use by picking him as his running mate. But yesterday, McCain did the most to milk another of Romney’s primary attributes — his access to deep pockets in Rocky Mountain country.
Read the full story at the WashingtonPost.com
