WASHINGTON, Feb. 2 — Senator John McCain, intent on succeeding where his freewheeling presidential campaign of 2000 failed, is assembling a team of political bruisers for 2008. And it includes advisers who once sought to skewer him and whose work he has criticized as stepping over the line in the past.
In 2000, Mr. McCain, Republican of Arizona, said the advertisements run against him by George W. Bush, then the governor of Texas, distorted his record. But he has hired three members of the team that made those commercials — Mark McKinnon, Russell Schriefer and Stuart Stevens — to work on his presidential campaign.
In 2004, Mr. McCain said the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth advertisement asserting that Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts had not properly earned his medals from the Vietnam War was “dishonest and dishonorable.” Nonetheless, he has hired the firm that made the spots, Stevens Reed Curcio & Potholm, which worked on his 2000 campaign, to work for him again this year.
In October, Mr. McCain’s top adviser expressed public displeasure with an advertisement against former Representative Harold E. Ford Jr., Democrat of Tennessee, that some saw as having racist overtones for suggesting a flirtation between Mr. Ford, who is black, and a young, bare-shouldered white woman, played by a blond actress.
The Republican committee that sponsored the spot had as its leader Terry Nelson, a former Bush campaign strategist whom Mr. McCain hired as an adviser last spring. In December, just weeks after the Ford controversy broke, Mr. McCain elevated Mr. Nelson to the position of national campaign manager.
Taken together, the moves provide the strongest indication yet that Mr. McCain intends to run a far tougher campaign than the one he ran in the 2000 primary. And they come as he transitions from being a onetime maverick to a candidate seeking to gather his party around him and create an air of inevitability about his prospects for winning nomination.
This is just incredible--even coming from McCain. McCain's personal ambitions at becoming president have destroyed whatever morals could be left in that withering body of his. He has not only taken a page from the Bush campaign playbook on negative campaigning, but has elevated it to its most extreme form by hiring those same negative campaign advisors that he himself has criticized in his failed 2000 campaign. In other words, McCain is creating a monopoly of tapping the top GOP negative campaign advisors to work for him. In doing so, accomplishes two goals. First is that these GOP campaign advisors will not be tapped to the other GOP presidential candidates, who could then use their talents to attack the McCain campaign. The second accomplishment for the McCain campaign is that if McCain does win the Republican nomination, he will certainly use their talents for creating a host of extreme negative campaign ads against the Democratic candidate.
But at what cost? McCain's personal ambitions to becoming president have consumed any sense of morals or honesty within him. He is tapping the top GOP negative campaigners to his campaign, even though he has previously criticized those same campaigners in the past. He has followed President Bush in supporting the troop surge in Iraq, courted the Religious Right, and has pretty much deferred to the administration's agenda. McCain is trying to maneuver himself as the self-appointed heir to King George The Deciderer, and claim the White House as his own.
Then again, what do you expect from a politician as crass and overly ambitious as John McCain?
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