McCain boosts McGavick campaign
SEATTLE – Sen. John McCain, a potential Republican contender for the White House, came to town to stump for Senate challenger Mike McGavick on Tuesday night, and they sounded like political twins.
McGavick pledged to be an independent maverick in McCain’s style, willing to cross the Republican Party and the White House on occasion to represent a state that is currently represented by a heavily Democratic congressional delegation.
“He is exactly my role model for what a United States senator should be,” McGavick said.
McCain and McGavick used almost identical appeals to bipartisan civility, complaining only obliquely about incumbent Sen. Maria Cantwell. The Republicans also emphasized their support for a new effort to combat the staggering federal budget deficit that has built up during their party’s tenure in power.
“Our Republican base is concerned with fiscal sanity and fiscal discipline and has become very alienated because of our failure to control spending,” McCain said in an interview.
McCain said Congress must wrestle with deep Social Security and Medicare problems, and that “disgraceful, out-of-control deficits” must be reined in if Washington, D.C., is to expect citizens to accept the difficult choices and sacrifices that will be needed to reform and protect the core services for the elderly.
McCain defended President Bush’s handling of the Iraq war, although complaining about intelligence failures during the run-up to the war and a lack of candor about how long the ordeal might last. “We are there and we cannot fail,” he said. “It’s slow, it’s hard, it’s tough.”
If the effort fails, the hope of democracy in the Middle East fades and radical extremists will mow through the region “and then they’re coming for us,” McCain said. “This is a titanic struggle.”
He also defended the administration’s backing of a now-defunct plan for a Dubai-owned company to take over some port operations in the United States. He rejected the congressional blowback from both parties as “hysterical” and xenophobic.
The Dubai government is the very kind of moderate ally the United States wants, he said. Seattle and other American cities already prosper under foreign operation of some of their container terminals, he said.
McCain’s Seattle visit raised an estimated $300,000 for McGavick’s uphill campaign against Cantwell. The Democrat defeated McGavick’s old boss, Slade Gorton, by 2,229 votes six years ago.
McGavick, 48, said McCain’s reputation as a straight-talking reformer aligns perfectly with his own campaign themes.
“Senator McCain is the very role model of an independent voice who is willing to speak out against the partisan nonsense that happens in the nation’s capital,” McGavick said in an interview.
State Democratic Chairman Dwight Pelz scoffed at the notion of McGavick being a maverick in the McCain mold. McCain has worked with Cantwell on some battles, but his “nakedly partisan visit” to Seattle was an effort to bail out a flagging McGavick campaign, Pelz said.