FarmerJohn
Has No Life - Lives on TB
By JAMES CARNEY 7/16/08
It was in Portsmouth, Ohio, the other day when a supporter neatly summed up the obstacle lying between John McCain and the White House. "When," the young man implored, "are you going to go out and say, 'Read my lips. I am not the third term of Bush'?"
In a business of bitter rivalries and awkward alliances, few political relationships have been more bitter, awkward or downright tortured than John McCain's eight-year entanglement with George W. Bush. After their nasty 2000 battle for the G.O.P. nomination, McCain's differences with Bush were so numerous and so deep that in 2001 he discussed with top Democratic leaders quitting the Republican Party. Three years later, McCain remained so estranged from the White House that John Kerry begged him to run with him on the Democratic ticket against Bush. Even though their rapprochement in 2004 drained some of the bile from their relationship, the two men have never been friends. At best, theirs is a partnership sustained by the benefits each has conferred on the other and a grudging admiration each has for the other's toughness.
McCain's embrace of Bush helped him emerge as the G.O.P. nominee this year from a crowded field of flawed candidates. But it came with a steep price, for his ties to the President now act like leg weights in his race against Barack Obama. They make it possible for Democrats to argue that a vote for McCain is a vote for more of what the country has endured over the past eight years.
This, despite the fact that on campaign finance, tax cuts, health care, judicial nominations, the environment, the use of torture, the fate of Guantánamo Bay and other issues, McCain stood apart — and sometimes alone — from both his President and his party. For all that, he cannot escape Bush's shadow — in part because no Republican nominee could but also because McCain cannot afford to try, given how suspiciously he is regarded by conservatives. And so he answers questions like that one in Ohio with a fatalistic admission that he and the President are linked, for better and probably for worse. "Bush could beat him twice," says a friend who knows McCain well. "Imagine how bitter he feels."
The Crucible
John S. McCain and George W. Bush grew up in tandem, both favored, third-generation sons of prominent Washington families, accustomed to power and influence. Both were poor students and merry pranksters, and both had reputations as drinkers as young men. But the Vietnam War marked a critical divergence: McCain entered Annapolis and wound up spending five years in a Hanoi prison camp, and Bush avoided the war by landing a coveted spot in the Texas Air National Guard. McCain was launched into politics by his heroism, Bush by his gold-star political name. Partly because of their age difference (Bush is a decade younger), and partly because Bush got a late start in the game, their paths had rarely crossed before they ran against each other for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000.
After he upset an overconfident Bush by 19 points in New Hampshire, it appeared that McCain might take South Carolina too, ending Bush's bid. In a Greenville, S.C., hotel room the day after his New Hampshire loss, Bush's high command agreed to attack McCain as a double-talking Washington insider and closet liberal. They also discussed the help they could expect from outside groups not legally permitted to coordinate with the campaign. Said a Bush adviser: "We gotta hit him hard."
They did. While the campaign itself launched a fusillade of negative attacks, a network of murky anti-McCain groups ran push polls spreading lies about McCain's record. They papered the state with leaflets claiming, among other things, that Cindy McCain was a drug addict and John had fathered a black child out of wedlock, complete with a family photograph. The dark-skinned girl in the photo was, in fact, the McCains' daughter Bridget, whom they adopted as an infant after Cindy met her on a charity mission at Mother Teresa's orphanage in Bangladesh. It was, even by G.O.P. standards, unusually foul stuff.
Up to that point in the campaign, McCain had been more or less ambivalent about Bush personally. "He thought Bush was a lightweight but a nice enough guy," says a close McCain associate. That ended in South Carolina. During a commercial break in a debate there, Bush put his hand on McCain's arm and swore he had nothing to do with the slander being thrown at his opponent. "Don't give me that shit," McCain growled. "And take your hands off me."
McCain lost South Carolina and, eventually, the nomination. He endorsed his opponent — but mocked the ritual, robotically telling reporters, "I endorse George Bush, I endorse George Bush, I endorse George Bush." And months would pass before he would campaign for him against Al Gore. "The tension was palpable," recalls Scott McClellan, the Bush aide who went on to become White House press secretary. "The two were cordial, but McCain would get that forced smile on his face whenever they were together."
A Maverick in Full
The U.S. Senate was split down the middle between Democrats and Republicans when Bush took office in January 2001. The Democratic leader, Tom Daschle, knew that all he needed to take control of the chamber was the defection of one Republican. Daschle had three targets, all of whom were finding themselves increasingly alienated from and isolated within the G.O.P.: Jim Jeffords of Vermont, Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island and John McCain of Arizona.
Jeffords and Chafee were members of a dying breed — the liberal New England Republican. McCain, on the other hand, was a Western conservative from Arizona who had gone to Congress as a Reagan Republican. But after the searing experience of getting entangled in the Keating Five scandal in the 1980s, McCain had grown increasingly independent, pursuing campaign-finance reform and other causes that made his fellow Republicans doubt his ideological convictions.
But it was his bid for the White House in 2000 that broadened McCain's appeal — and opened his eyes to his own potential clout. He ran as the candidate of reform — the anti-Establishment maverick — and while he lost, in the process he became the most popular politician in America. "That campaign changed him," says John Weaver, who was McCain's chief political adviser for a decade, until last summer when he left in a staff shake-up. "He became a rock star. On the trail he discovered all these new issues. How could he go back to the Senate and not talk about the need for a patients' bill of rights or stand up and say Bush's tax cuts were unfair?"
During Bush's first eight months in office, virtually every high-profile position McCain took seemed designed to antagonize the new President. "John did what he thought was right," says a close McCain associate. "If it happened to be something that ticked off Bush, so much the better." The antipathy was mutual. According to several veterans of the Bush White House, there was an unofficial policy in effect to block people who had worked on McCain's campaign from getting any of the thousands of jobs the new Administration was doling out.
Daschle and other Democrats involved in the quiet efforts to woo McCain recall that he was willing to listen to their pitch that he quit the G.O.P. in the spring of 2001 and become an independent. Most McCain loyalists insist now that he never seriously considered it. But they do concede that Ted Kennedy discussed the idea with McCain on more than one occasion. Mark Salter, McCain's closest aide, joined the Senator on that first visit to Kennedy's office and waited outside. "Teddy was just talking to me about switching parties," McCain told Salter when it was over. "What'd you tell him?" Salter asked. "No," replied McCain. "But he wants to talk to me again."
In another sign of unhappiness with the Bush regime, McCain's political advisers were exploring whether he could run for President, and win, as a third-party candidate against Bush in 2004. The assumption was that McCain was too old to wait until 2008 (he'll turn 72 in August) and too toxic within the party to run as a Republican again. "Not only was 2008 seen as too late, but we couldn't get our heads around the idea that he would be acceptable [to the G.O.P.]," says one of those advisers. But running as an independent was deemed futile. "We looked at it, and it just wasn't feasible," the adviser says. "Third-party candidates don't win."
After Jeffords left the G.O.P., throwing the Senate to the Democrats, the White House grew briefly interested in McCain. Out of the blue, John and Cindy were invited to a private dinner in the residence with George and Laura. It lasted all of an hour. When Congress passed the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance-reform bill in early 2002, the legislation and its chief sponsor were so popular that Bush chose to swallow hard and sign it. According to a former White House official who was involved in the discussion, the President rejected the idea of holding a public signing ceremony. "He didn't want to give McCain the satisfaction," says the former official. McCain was informed in a telephone call from a midlevel White House aide that the bill had finally become law.
Despite his public support for Bush after 9/11, McCain had deep misgivings about him as Commander in Chief. In March 2002, he and two other Senators were at the White House, briefing Condoleezza Rice, the National Security Adviser, about their recent meetings with European allies when Bush unexpectedly stuck his head in the door. "Are you all talking about Iraq?" the President asked, his voice tinged with schoolyard bravado. Before McCain and the others in the room could do more than nod, Bush waved his hand dismissively. "F___ Saddam," he said. "We're taking him out." And then he left.
McCain was appalled. He was a Republican, and a hawk, and exactly one year later he would enthusiastically support the decision to topple the Iraqi regime by force. But to McCain, his encounter with Bush that day was more evidence of the shallow intellect and dangerous self-regard possessed by the man to whom he had lost an acrimonious contest two years earlier. Later, McCain would retell the story and shake his head incredulously. "Can you believe this guy?" he asked. "He's the President!" He didn't say it, but the continuation of the thought hung in the air: Can you believe this guy is President — instead of me?
An Uneasy Truce
In the spring of 2004, John Kerry secretly urged his fellow Vietnam vet to join him on a unity ticket. It was, to put it mildly, a full-court press: Kerry offered to make McCain both Vice President and Secretary of Defense and to give him control of foreign policy. Kerry lobbied McCain's wife Cindy and even enlisted the help of Warren Beatty, with whom McCain had become friendly. McCain turned Kerry down. Aides say he sincerely believed that Bush had been and would be a better President than Kerry.
By then it was dawning on McCain's circle of advisers that with no Vice President or other heir apparent to Bush in the mix, their man could run again in 2008 — but he'd have to improve his standing within the G.O.P. In May 2004, without telling McCain, John Weaver asked Mark McKinnon, Bush's ad man, to set up a meeting between him and Karl Rove. Onetime allies in Texas, Weaver and Rove had been feuding since 1988. "This was historic. This was like the Hatfields sitting down with the McCoys," says McKinnon. Rove agreed to the meeting but wanted McKinnon there as a witness. At a Caribou coffee shop not far from the White House, McKinnon observed as Weaver and Rove buried the hatchet. Weaver suggested McCain was willing to campaign for the President's reelection. Rove seemed surprised. "We didn't know he would help," Rove said. "Nobody asked," replied Weaver.
It wasn't long before McCain was embracing Bush — literally. A photo of him awkwardly hugging the President has become the iconic image of their rapprochement, one that Democrats are already using against him. McCain, at least, took the embrace to heart: nobody campaigned harder for Bush's reelection than he did. The very fact that he'd fought so many times with the President only enhanced the value of his endorsement. "[McCain] was our most important surrogate," says Terry Nelson, who was political director of Bush's reelection campaign and, for a time, campaign manager for McCain's 2008 bid. But the two men remained situational allies, not friends. In the minutes before Bush's final debate with Kerry, McCain was full of kinetic energy as he delivered a pep talk to the President in a holding room. "This is the most important moment of your life!" he barked at Bush. "You're gonna be great!" Later, Bush told aides that he found McCain's intensity off-putting. "McCain was wound up tight all the time on the campaign trail," says a Bush aide. "That's just not how the President is. He thought it was over the top."
Balancing Act
Compared with what went before, says Weaver, relations between McCain and Bush in Bush's second term have been something like the Era of Good Feeling. True, McCain was among the first lawmakers of any party to take on Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld directly — and did so with such force and frequency that "it began to really annoy the President," says a former top aide to Bush. And for a brief moment in the fall of 2006, it seemed that McCain's truce with Bush would fall apart over the President's support for interrogation techniques that McCain, who is something of an expert on the subject, considered torture. But through all that, says a McCain associate, "it never got to DEFCON 1." In April 2007, at an early gathering of G.O.P. candidates before the party faithful in Des Moines, Iowa, McCain ladled praise on Bush. "I support him," he gushed, "and I believe in him."
But always, there were limits. The White House quietly pushed two other Republicans for the G.O.P. nomination in 2005 — first Bill Frist and then George Allen, both of whom flamed out. Even as some of his own top campaign advisers, including McKinnon, Nelson and Steve Schmidt, went to work for McCain, Bush doubted McCain's chances of winning the G.O.P. nomination. "The President was never one to count McCain out," says a former senior Bush aide, "but he felt like [Mitt] Romney was the best positioned." Though his campaign has been coordinating with the White House through regular conference calls ever since he became the presumptive nominee, McCain has kept as much physical distance from Bush as possible. But there have been awkward moments. The President did McCain no favors, for example, when he stepped on the candidate's message last month by calling on Congress to authorize offshore oil drilling the day after McCain had done the same thing. "If that was orchestrated," says Ken Duberstein, a veteran G.O.P. power broker, "both staffs should be shot."
While the two leaders agree on Iraq and McCain now claims to share Bush's commitment to tax cuts, a McCain presidency would in other ways bear only scant resemblance to the Bush years. On the environment, spending, government reform and other issues, McCain remains at odds with Bush. And the corporate ethos of this Administration would be replaced by something dramatically, and perhaps chaotically, less programmed. And yet most voters aren't going to forget their feelings about the current President when they cast their ballots in November. After McCain secured his party's nomination in March, he visited the White House to receive a Rose Garden endorsement from the President. "Dutiful" did not begin to describe the event. But McCain needed Bush's blessing to help him shore up support among conservatives.
He still does. He also knows, though, that the President is a liability with the moderates and swing voters who decide close elections. He laughed when asked whether he wanted Bush to campaign for him, suggesting the President's "busy schedule" might prevent it. For his part, Bush said he'd help in whatever way he could but that "it's not about me." McCain can only wish that were true.
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1823695-1,00.html
It was in Portsmouth, Ohio, the other day when a supporter neatly summed up the obstacle lying between John McCain and the White House. "When," the young man implored, "are you going to go out and say, 'Read my lips. I am not the third term of Bush'?"
In a business of bitter rivalries and awkward alliances, few political relationships have been more bitter, awkward or downright tortured than John McCain's eight-year entanglement with George W. Bush. After their nasty 2000 battle for the G.O.P. nomination, McCain's differences with Bush were so numerous and so deep that in 2001 he discussed with top Democratic leaders quitting the Republican Party. Three years later, McCain remained so estranged from the White House that John Kerry begged him to run with him on the Democratic ticket against Bush. Even though their rapprochement in 2004 drained some of the bile from their relationship, the two men have never been friends. At best, theirs is a partnership sustained by the benefits each has conferred on the other and a grudging admiration each has for the other's toughness.
McCain's embrace of Bush helped him emerge as the G.O.P. nominee this year from a crowded field of flawed candidates. But it came with a steep price, for his ties to the President now act like leg weights in his race against Barack Obama. They make it possible for Democrats to argue that a vote for McCain is a vote for more of what the country has endured over the past eight years.
This, despite the fact that on campaign finance, tax cuts, health care, judicial nominations, the environment, the use of torture, the fate of Guantánamo Bay and other issues, McCain stood apart — and sometimes alone — from both his President and his party. For all that, he cannot escape Bush's shadow — in part because no Republican nominee could but also because McCain cannot afford to try, given how suspiciously he is regarded by conservatives. And so he answers questions like that one in Ohio with a fatalistic admission that he and the President are linked, for better and probably for worse. "Bush could beat him twice," says a friend who knows McCain well. "Imagine how bitter he feels."
The Crucible
John S. McCain and George W. Bush grew up in tandem, both favored, third-generation sons of prominent Washington families, accustomed to power and influence. Both were poor students and merry pranksters, and both had reputations as drinkers as young men. But the Vietnam War marked a critical divergence: McCain entered Annapolis and wound up spending five years in a Hanoi prison camp, and Bush avoided the war by landing a coveted spot in the Texas Air National Guard. McCain was launched into politics by his heroism, Bush by his gold-star political name. Partly because of their age difference (Bush is a decade younger), and partly because Bush got a late start in the game, their paths had rarely crossed before they ran against each other for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000.
After he upset an overconfident Bush by 19 points in New Hampshire, it appeared that McCain might take South Carolina too, ending Bush's bid. In a Greenville, S.C., hotel room the day after his New Hampshire loss, Bush's high command agreed to attack McCain as a double-talking Washington insider and closet liberal. They also discussed the help they could expect from outside groups not legally permitted to coordinate with the campaign. Said a Bush adviser: "We gotta hit him hard."
They did. While the campaign itself launched a fusillade of negative attacks, a network of murky anti-McCain groups ran push polls spreading lies about McCain's record. They papered the state with leaflets claiming, among other things, that Cindy McCain was a drug addict and John had fathered a black child out of wedlock, complete with a family photograph. The dark-skinned girl in the photo was, in fact, the McCains' daughter Bridget, whom they adopted as an infant after Cindy met her on a charity mission at Mother Teresa's orphanage in Bangladesh. It was, even by G.O.P. standards, unusually foul stuff.
Up to that point in the campaign, McCain had been more or less ambivalent about Bush personally. "He thought Bush was a lightweight but a nice enough guy," says a close McCain associate. That ended in South Carolina. During a commercial break in a debate there, Bush put his hand on McCain's arm and swore he had nothing to do with the slander being thrown at his opponent. "Don't give me that shit," McCain growled. "And take your hands off me."
McCain lost South Carolina and, eventually, the nomination. He endorsed his opponent — but mocked the ritual, robotically telling reporters, "I endorse George Bush, I endorse George Bush, I endorse George Bush." And months would pass before he would campaign for him against Al Gore. "The tension was palpable," recalls Scott McClellan, the Bush aide who went on to become White House press secretary. "The two were cordial, but McCain would get that forced smile on his face whenever they were together."
A Maverick in Full
The U.S. Senate was split down the middle between Democrats and Republicans when Bush took office in January 2001. The Democratic leader, Tom Daschle, knew that all he needed to take control of the chamber was the defection of one Republican. Daschle had three targets, all of whom were finding themselves increasingly alienated from and isolated within the G.O.P.: Jim Jeffords of Vermont, Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island and John McCain of Arizona.
Jeffords and Chafee were members of a dying breed — the liberal New England Republican. McCain, on the other hand, was a Western conservative from Arizona who had gone to Congress as a Reagan Republican. But after the searing experience of getting entangled in the Keating Five scandal in the 1980s, McCain had grown increasingly independent, pursuing campaign-finance reform and other causes that made his fellow Republicans doubt his ideological convictions.
But it was his bid for the White House in 2000 that broadened McCain's appeal — and opened his eyes to his own potential clout. He ran as the candidate of reform — the anti-Establishment maverick — and while he lost, in the process he became the most popular politician in America. "That campaign changed him," says John Weaver, who was McCain's chief political adviser for a decade, until last summer when he left in a staff shake-up. "He became a rock star. On the trail he discovered all these new issues. How could he go back to the Senate and not talk about the need for a patients' bill of rights or stand up and say Bush's tax cuts were unfair?"
During Bush's first eight months in office, virtually every high-profile position McCain took seemed designed to antagonize the new President. "John did what he thought was right," says a close McCain associate. "If it happened to be something that ticked off Bush, so much the better." The antipathy was mutual. According to several veterans of the Bush White House, there was an unofficial policy in effect to block people who had worked on McCain's campaign from getting any of the thousands of jobs the new Administration was doling out.
Daschle and other Democrats involved in the quiet efforts to woo McCain recall that he was willing to listen to their pitch that he quit the G.O.P. in the spring of 2001 and become an independent. Most McCain loyalists insist now that he never seriously considered it. But they do concede that Ted Kennedy discussed the idea with McCain on more than one occasion. Mark Salter, McCain's closest aide, joined the Senator on that first visit to Kennedy's office and waited outside. "Teddy was just talking to me about switching parties," McCain told Salter when it was over. "What'd you tell him?" Salter asked. "No," replied McCain. "But he wants to talk to me again."
In another sign of unhappiness with the Bush regime, McCain's political advisers were exploring whether he could run for President, and win, as a third-party candidate against Bush in 2004. The assumption was that McCain was too old to wait until 2008 (he'll turn 72 in August) and too toxic within the party to run as a Republican again. "Not only was 2008 seen as too late, but we couldn't get our heads around the idea that he would be acceptable [to the G.O.P.]," says one of those advisers. But running as an independent was deemed futile. "We looked at it, and it just wasn't feasible," the adviser says. "Third-party candidates don't win."
After Jeffords left the G.O.P., throwing the Senate to the Democrats, the White House grew briefly interested in McCain. Out of the blue, John and Cindy were invited to a private dinner in the residence with George and Laura. It lasted all of an hour. When Congress passed the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance-reform bill in early 2002, the legislation and its chief sponsor were so popular that Bush chose to swallow hard and sign it. According to a former White House official who was involved in the discussion, the President rejected the idea of holding a public signing ceremony. "He didn't want to give McCain the satisfaction," says the former official. McCain was informed in a telephone call from a midlevel White House aide that the bill had finally become law.
Despite his public support for Bush after 9/11, McCain had deep misgivings about him as Commander in Chief. In March 2002, he and two other Senators were at the White House, briefing Condoleezza Rice, the National Security Adviser, about their recent meetings with European allies when Bush unexpectedly stuck his head in the door. "Are you all talking about Iraq?" the President asked, his voice tinged with schoolyard bravado. Before McCain and the others in the room could do more than nod, Bush waved his hand dismissively. "F___ Saddam," he said. "We're taking him out." And then he left.
McCain was appalled. He was a Republican, and a hawk, and exactly one year later he would enthusiastically support the decision to topple the Iraqi regime by force. But to McCain, his encounter with Bush that day was more evidence of the shallow intellect and dangerous self-regard possessed by the man to whom he had lost an acrimonious contest two years earlier. Later, McCain would retell the story and shake his head incredulously. "Can you believe this guy?" he asked. "He's the President!" He didn't say it, but the continuation of the thought hung in the air: Can you believe this guy is President — instead of me?
An Uneasy Truce
In the spring of 2004, John Kerry secretly urged his fellow Vietnam vet to join him on a unity ticket. It was, to put it mildly, a full-court press: Kerry offered to make McCain both Vice President and Secretary of Defense and to give him control of foreign policy. Kerry lobbied McCain's wife Cindy and even enlisted the help of Warren Beatty, with whom McCain had become friendly. McCain turned Kerry down. Aides say he sincerely believed that Bush had been and would be a better President than Kerry.
By then it was dawning on McCain's circle of advisers that with no Vice President or other heir apparent to Bush in the mix, their man could run again in 2008 — but he'd have to improve his standing within the G.O.P. In May 2004, without telling McCain, John Weaver asked Mark McKinnon, Bush's ad man, to set up a meeting between him and Karl Rove. Onetime allies in Texas, Weaver and Rove had been feuding since 1988. "This was historic. This was like the Hatfields sitting down with the McCoys," says McKinnon. Rove agreed to the meeting but wanted McKinnon there as a witness. At a Caribou coffee shop not far from the White House, McKinnon observed as Weaver and Rove buried the hatchet. Weaver suggested McCain was willing to campaign for the President's reelection. Rove seemed surprised. "We didn't know he would help," Rove said. "Nobody asked," replied Weaver.
It wasn't long before McCain was embracing Bush — literally. A photo of him awkwardly hugging the President has become the iconic image of their rapprochement, one that Democrats are already using against him. McCain, at least, took the embrace to heart: nobody campaigned harder for Bush's reelection than he did. The very fact that he'd fought so many times with the President only enhanced the value of his endorsement. "[McCain] was our most important surrogate," says Terry Nelson, who was political director of Bush's reelection campaign and, for a time, campaign manager for McCain's 2008 bid. But the two men remained situational allies, not friends. In the minutes before Bush's final debate with Kerry, McCain was full of kinetic energy as he delivered a pep talk to the President in a holding room. "This is the most important moment of your life!" he barked at Bush. "You're gonna be great!" Later, Bush told aides that he found McCain's intensity off-putting. "McCain was wound up tight all the time on the campaign trail," says a Bush aide. "That's just not how the President is. He thought it was over the top."
Balancing Act
Compared with what went before, says Weaver, relations between McCain and Bush in Bush's second term have been something like the Era of Good Feeling. True, McCain was among the first lawmakers of any party to take on Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld directly — and did so with such force and frequency that "it began to really annoy the President," says a former top aide to Bush. And for a brief moment in the fall of 2006, it seemed that McCain's truce with Bush would fall apart over the President's support for interrogation techniques that McCain, who is something of an expert on the subject, considered torture. But through all that, says a McCain associate, "it never got to DEFCON 1." In April 2007, at an early gathering of G.O.P. candidates before the party faithful in Des Moines, Iowa, McCain ladled praise on Bush. "I support him," he gushed, "and I believe in him."
But always, there were limits. The White House quietly pushed two other Republicans for the G.O.P. nomination in 2005 — first Bill Frist and then George Allen, both of whom flamed out. Even as some of his own top campaign advisers, including McKinnon, Nelson and Steve Schmidt, went to work for McCain, Bush doubted McCain's chances of winning the G.O.P. nomination. "The President was never one to count McCain out," says a former senior Bush aide, "but he felt like [Mitt] Romney was the best positioned." Though his campaign has been coordinating with the White House through regular conference calls ever since he became the presumptive nominee, McCain has kept as much physical distance from Bush as possible. But there have been awkward moments. The President did McCain no favors, for example, when he stepped on the candidate's message last month by calling on Congress to authorize offshore oil drilling the day after McCain had done the same thing. "If that was orchestrated," says Ken Duberstein, a veteran G.O.P. power broker, "both staffs should be shot."
While the two leaders agree on Iraq and McCain now claims to share Bush's commitment to tax cuts, a McCain presidency would in other ways bear only scant resemblance to the Bush years. On the environment, spending, government reform and other issues, McCain remains at odds with Bush. And the corporate ethos of this Administration would be replaced by something dramatically, and perhaps chaotically, less programmed. And yet most voters aren't going to forget their feelings about the current President when they cast their ballots in November. After McCain secured his party's nomination in March, he visited the White House to receive a Rose Garden endorsement from the President. "Dutiful" did not begin to describe the event. But McCain needed Bush's blessing to help him shore up support among conservatives.
He still does. He also knows, though, that the President is a liability with the moderates and swing voters who decide close elections. He laughed when asked whether he wanted Bush to campaign for him, suggesting the President's "busy schedule" might prevent it. For his part, Bush said he'd help in whatever way he could but that "it's not about me." McCain can only wish that were true.
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1823695-1,00.html